Rama Gheerawo on becoming a creative leader | Forward Thinkers

Creative leadership is for three types of people, says director at The Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art, Rama Gheerawo. It's for established leaders and emerging leaders. But, he says, the biggest group of all is those who were never built to be leaders because “they were too female, too non-binary, too quiet, too black, too brown, too different, too introvert.”

This is why we need to take a radical and immediate relook at leadership today, believes Gheeerawo.

“You change leadership, you change everything,” he says. “This started me on an inquiry of, are there different models, different types of leaders that we could invite in, that we can include in the existing dialogue? So it's not just an alpha personality broadcasting from a podium and often saying one thing and doing another.”

In this video interview Gheerawo explains what creative leadership comprises, how it fits with inclusive design and suggests the first three steps leaders can take to become a creative leader.

About Rama Gheerawo

Rama Gheerawo is director of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, where he uses design to address issues around age, ability, gender and race. He is author of Creative Leadership: Born from Design. Rama won a ‘Hall of Fame’ award for his work at the Design Week Awards in 2019 and was named a 2018 Creative Leader by Creative Review alongside Paul Smith and Björk. Rama sits on a number of advisory boards and committees for awards, universities and organisations such as the UK Design Council, The International Association for Universal Design, the Design Management Institute, The Bhavan Institute for Indian Culture and the RSA Decolonising Design Initiative. He has been a visiting professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Katowice Academy of Fine Art. 

Listen to the full interview Leadership is Broken. Creativity is the Answer on our Work's Not Working... Let's Fix It podcast

Transcript

Very simply put, most of what we are taught about leadership is wrong. Most of leadership today excludes. Creative leadership is actually for three types of people. It's for established leaders, emerging leaders but the biggest group of all is those who were never built to be leaders because they were too female, too non-binary, too quiet, too black, too brown, too different, too introvert. And that is why we need to take a radical and immediate relook at leadership today.

So creative leadership was born from a couple of single moments but one of them was realising that we need more creatives in leadership position. But that was quite self-serving to the discipline that I love - design. And also realise that you just simply need more leaders that are creative. So it's not just creatives in leadership positions, but you need leaders who are creative.

The role of inclusive design

The inclusive design bit came from another single moment where we look at so many instances of exclusion by age, by ability by gender, by race. And it had overwhelmed me. I ended up in the shower in tears because of some of the instances of exclusion that I had seen that day. 

Gender exclusion; we had been working with migrant workers in the Middle East and it overwhelmed me and I thought, is there one ring to rule them all? A little Lord of the Rings reference there, but is there one thing we could change that could help us with these instances of exclusion? And what came resounding back to me was leadership. 

You change leadership, you change everything. So this started me on an inquiry of, are there different models, different types of leaders that we could invite in, that we can include in the existing dialogue? So it's not just an alpha personality broadcasting from a podium and often saying one thing and doing another. And I know we have rife examples in the world around us of that. So this was born from inclusive design. 

What is creative leadership?

I can very simply say that creative leadership is using the people-centred principles and practices of inclusive design and applying them to fix broken models of leadership. It was an experiment 15 years ago. It was a journey, both academic, personal, institutional. And where we've ended up is that it's being seen of value that the inclusive tools speak to equity, diversity, and inclusivity.

They speak to those aims that we have around the globe now to be more human, to see our commonalities rather than our differences.

The three values of creative leadership

So empathy, creativity and clarity sit at the heart of creative leadership. And those three values were developed in practice. They were developed from the gentle power of disbelief and the gentle power of dissatisfaction and dissatisfaction with what was going on around.

There was a point where I started thinking, creativity is needed in leadership, but what are the other values around it? And as a designer, you know that a triangle is one of the strongest repeating structures. You need a tripod; you need three things for stability broadly speaking.

Empathy was a natural bedfellow because that is at the heart of inclusive design. It's empathy with the world around you, with people and planet, and people who are varying in terms of their ages, their abilities, their needs, their perspectives. 

And it took a while to come up with clarity, but it really came to me personally and professionally. So I always jokingly say that creativity came to me as a designer, empathy as a human being, and clarity came to me from a relationship with an ex-girlfriend and we've all had that relationship where you think what happened there? And I was sitting on a plane going to Hong Kong and had just a relationship had ended and I was beating my head. I couldn't sleep because I didn't know what had happened. And then I had a clarity, a moment of clarity where it came to me that you won't ever figure out what happened, because actually neither of you can figure that out. And that moment of clarity that I would get no clarity actually allowed me to relax and put my head down and get some sleep.

And the other was a tough situation when I was in a management position and I was asked to have a stern conversation with someone who was a friend, a personal friend, and at the end of that two hour conversation it was clear that we couldn't work together. But this person also turned around and said, you've given me something I haven't had in seven years. I always thought something wasn't quite right with what I was doing but I never knew what, and you've given that to me. So thank you for the clarity. And we had a hug, had a handshake and that was it. The personal friendship was gone but there was a clarity there. 

And I just started thinking in those two situations, they happened within months of each other, is clarity what people are actually searching for in a situation? They may say something else. They may say respect, acknowledgement, visibility, a pay rise, but is clarity the thing that most often clouds that situation or is missing from it? Is it what's actually needed to cut through the clouds? And I asked for six months, I asked friends and relatives, colleagues and clients, about clarity and it just grew from there. Within six months

I thought that's the third value. That's the triangulation. 

Three steps for starting your creative leadership journey

So I think the first is to start with yourself. Have a look at what barriers might have been put in your leadership journey. And that doesn't mean your leadership journey to a podium. It's just your journey in leading yourself or leading your family or leading the community. So going within, the only way up is in, and so that's number one.

I think number two is to really look at the three values of creative leadership and ask which ones ring true to you because they work well when they are in balance. Absolutely they are in balance. So if you tend to lean to empathy, how might clarity balance that out? If you only have empathy, you could be a pushover. Only clarity, you could be a dictator. And only creativity, you are a bicycle with no chain, peddling hard but getting nowhere. So look at the dynamic play of this within yourself and ask how might you develop? 

And the third one is very, very simple. It's just inject a little joy into your every day. The world around us, the voices sometimes around us and even those inside of us, can just speak to the negative things.

Can call yourself a name for missing a deadline. Can say you didn't manage to do this today. But for every negative thought, put in three positive thoughts. And joy can be anything. It can be a cup of tea, a child falling asleep in your arms, a smile from a stranger, or simply watching a sunset. So inject that little bit of joy in yourself and you will become a light that shines for others, and it doesn't need to be the sun or the moon.

So I'm just going to end with four lines from the poet Tagore. And this is a poem that was written large on my wall when I was 14. And it actually really inspired me that creative leaders aren't necessarily the loudest, tallest, most visible person. They, you, can be anywhere on the planet. You can lead just by the vibration of your presence.

So it's this. "Who will take up my work, ask the setting sun. And throughout the world, no one answered. Alone in the corner, dusty and forgotten, the earthenware lamp said, I will my Lord as best I can." so be an earthenware lamp. You don't need to be the sun or moon. And you will shine all the light that's needed for yourself and those around you because it's always appropriate.