What Artists Know about Leadership

From HBS Working Knowledge by Sharon Daloz Parks

"The phrase "the art of leadership" is certainly well worn. But consciously recognizing the practice of leadership as artistry has received little attention.1 For now, I simply suggest that art, artist, and artistry be given a more prominent place within the lexicon of leadership theory and practice.

Affirmation and resistance
The image of artist, cast as a metaphor for those who provide acts of leadership, immediately evokes two primary responses — affirmation and resistance. Those who think of themselves as artists in the conventional sense of the word — for example, painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, architects, photographers, and some athletes and gardeners — may pick up the metaphor with ready enthusiasm, recognizing that incorporating their artist-self into their practice of leadership opens into a horizon of powerful possibilities. But those who suffered through their last required art project in school, or who hold the stereotype of an artist as nonrational, asocial, marginal, or soft — may cast a more jaundiced eye upon this metaphor.

It is highly likely, however, that the jaundiced eye belongs to someone who in some aspect of his or her professional or personal life exemplifies the power and qualities of an artist: the ability to work on an edge, in an interdependent relationship with the medium, with a capacity for creative improvisation. (Entrepreneurs and some politicians, physicians, and educators, for example, are akin to artists, seeking to bring into being what has not yet taken form.)

Working on an edge
Within any profession or sector, one of the primary characteristics of the artistry of leadership is the willingness to work on an edge — the edge between the familiar and the emergent. Harvard University professor Robert A. Heifetz honors this edge when he speaks of the capacity to lead with only good questions in hand — and that acts of leadership require the ability to walk the razor's edge without getting your feet too cut up — working that edge place between known problems and unknown solutions, between popularity and anxious hostility. Artistic leadership is able to remain curious and creative in the complexity and chaos of swamp issues, often against the odds. As we have seen, those who practice adaptive leadership must confront, disappoint, and dismantle and at the same time energize, inspire, and empower. The creativity that emerges from working on this paradoxical edge is integral to adaptive work, building out of what has come before, yet stirring into being something new and unprecedented — the character of leadership that is needed at this threshold time in human history."

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