Technology is for creative types

In most technology companies, services like facilities or physical-plant management are provided to support the creative force behind the company.

Creative? Yup!

Despite all the press from the art community that would indicate they have the lock on the world’s creative output, technology professionals are creative people. We create the products, services, and technologies that will shape how we meet, greet, and interact with one another and with our environment in the future. I have found that creative people do not respond well to “management.”

Management creates boxes and moves people and tasks around within them. Boxes do not lead to innovation and creation. They don’t create the kinds of environments in which a single lightning bolt of an idea can shape an entire industry.

A small part of the creative environment can be nurtured by the physical workplace itself. This is why the hip, happening companies continue to provide free soda and snacks, pool tables and video games, and other premium services to their employees long after the bubble burst.

But the biggest part is the intellectual and emotional environment that leaders create. This is why hugely innovative new companies can still innovate on TV trays in Mom’s garage, and why brilliant new approaches to fundamental problems sometimes rocket out of the sometimes depressingly under-funded facilities of major university and government labs.

Lead to create, manage to quell

In large measure, creativity in technology professionals is stimulated by the degree to which they are led. I believe also that creativity is actually stifled in proportion to the degree to which these professionals are managed.

Technology professionals want to have a direction, with broad outlines of a plan, and then be let loose to create the best solution to get to the goal. They want to contribute, be recognized, and feel they made a difference.

This is absolutely not easy. I’ve worked with and for a lot of managers, but only a few leaders. All of the managers had different personalities, and different personality traits. But in general managers who aren’t also leaders are dictators. Some of my managers were benevolent dictators, content not to micromanage my every action so long as I didn’t ask too many questions and stayed in line. Some of them were the kind of people you often see running small South American countries after a violent coup. They ruled by intimidation and fear.

Both management styles control information as an effective means of controlling their teams and their management’s perception of how well they are doing their jobs. They create an information black hole: a lot goes in, but very little ever comes out.

In my case, these dictators appeared effective by most direct organizational measurements. Their projects were usually delivered on time, and few personnel problems ever percolated up to senior management. This is partly because of the rigid control of the flow of information which these dictatorial mangers maintained.

This kind of management actually pushes away the top performers, leaving you with only the “margin people” clocking time and doing the minimum to stay afloat. And this, as they say, is no way to run a railroad.

This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.