By Jean Vigneron and Megan Trice
Leaders are under relentless pressure to perform in an environment of increasing uncertainty and change. Many feel stuck, relying on planning, control, technical expertise, and other familiar strategies. Yet these approaches alone are no longer enough: To wade through complexity, leaders need to bring creativity. They must harness imagination, lateral thinking, and curiosity to unlock new avenues for growth.
Through our leadership advisory work, we’ve seen the power of creativity firsthand: Leaders who master this skill approach challenges in new ways, connect unexpected ideas and engage their people more effectively. They are also more adaptable and likely to generate value in unfamiliar territory. This isn’t just anecdotal. In a 2010 IBM survey of more than 1,500 CEOs globally, creativity was the top-cited factor for future success as a leader. Fifteen years later, the World Economic Forum ranked creative thinking as one of the top five skills required for the future of work.
The challenge is that creativity is often neglected in performance-driven cultures that demand immediate results. It is harder to measure, and less associated with the archetypal “superhero” leadership persona. To overcome this, leaders must intentionally develop this capacity within themselves and their organizations, making it a key element of their culture. Done well, this shift spurs not just episodic innovation but a durable foundation for long-term progress.
Misunderstanding Creativity Is Limiting Leaders
Many assume creativity is a rare gift or an artistic talent. In organizations, it is frequently associated with certain individuals or functions. This view of creativity is both narrow and flawed. Creativity is not about lone visionaries or flashes of inspiration; it is a discipline of thought and behavior.
We’ve found that creativity can be observed, assessed, and developed like any other leadership capacity. We’ve created a model designed specifically to assess creativity that builds on the foundational elements of our leadership assessment approach—looking at how leaders think and behave and what motivates them.
Our work suggests that creativity in leadership arises from the convergence of four forces. Together they help us understand a leader’s capacity for creativity today and most importantly how the leader can grow over time:
• Curiosity—the drive to explore the unknown, to challenge assumptions, and to ask questions others overlook.
• Insight—the ability to synthesize disparate inputs into novel patterns. In fast-moving environments, this capacity distinguishes leaders who can translate noise into direction.
• Engagement—the emotional energy to connect people to each other and to new ideas by aligning vision and values.
• Determination—the resilience to experiment, fail, and try again, even when outcomes are uncertain.
We look at how leaders blend these elements in unique ways. For example, creativity isn’t just about leaders who can connect seemingly unrelated ideas, it’s also how they engage people from across diverse domains to unlock new thinking. Leaders who demonstrate these patterns of behavior consistently are far more likely to discover new pathways when dealing with complexity.
So, what stops organizations from valuing creativity? The persistent belief that leaders must always have the answer. In many organizations, competence has long been equated with decisiveness and correctness. Creativity demands a different kind of presence: the willingness to not know, to sit with ambiguity, and to invite others into shaping the way forward.
Having assessed talent in some of the world’s most esteemed creative brands and innovative companies, we find a few simple questions can help uncover the core behaviors behind creativity:
• Do leaders generate multiple solutions or converge too quickly on one?
• Do they seek input from diverse perspectives?
• How do they respond to ambiguity? Do they learn from failed experiments?
• Are they willing to break patterns, or default to what has worked before?
These questions surface important signals. They reveal whether leaders are cultivating the mindset required to harness creativity or whether they are unintentionally reinforcing habits that hinder it.
Team leaders can also create the conditions for creativity to thrive. Creativity becomes strategic not only when it resides at the top or in certain roles, but when it energizes the whole. As Harvard professor Linda A. Hill highlights in her book Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, innovation emerges from leaders who create environments where others dare to try something new, ask different questions and build pathways where none existed before.
Satya Nadella’s leadership at Microsoft illustrates the point. By shifting the culture from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all,” he grounded the organization in curiosity, collaboration, and continuous growth—moving it from the brink of obsolescence to renewed relevance. His example shows that when leaders model creative behaviors, they also give others permission to follow, cascading this across the organization.
Cultivating Creativity: Four Practices to Start Now
While there are many ways to begin embracing a more creative mindset, leaders can start with a few simple moves that make the four forces of creativity tangible:
1. Nurture Curiosity: Protect time to think expansively.
Most of us spend our days in “warrior mode”—doing, deciding, pushing things forward, crowding out space for open questions and learning. Instead, make it a practice to set aside time for reflection and thinking and actually use it for reflection and thinking!
Even better, spend time in nature, which numerous studies have shown provides a real measurable impact on creativity. Albert Einstein famously loved sailing for this very reason; it gave him the distance to disconnect, which enabled him to open his mind to new possibilities.
2. Ignite Insight: Look beyond your own domain.
Many of the best insights come from seeking inspiration outside your immediate field. Read books, listen to music, learn from other industries.
One executive we worked with routinely took his leadership team on “fish out of water” experiences—helping the team step outside of their day-to-day and find new inspiration. The ability to draw connections across disciplines is a powerful creative tool.
3. Foster Engagement: Invite others into the process.
Some of the most generative breakthroughs come from involving people who see things differently. Whether it’s a colleague from another function or someone completely outside the organization, fresh thinking helps unlock novel solutions you perhaps couldn’t see alone. The upside too is that when folks feel they have a hand in co-creating solutions they become more engaged and committed to bringing them to life.
4. Fuel Determination: Experiment and learn from failures.
Creativity inevitably involves failure, but it is persistence through failure that builds resilience. Leaders can model determination by treating setbacks as learning opportunities, not endpoints. Give permission to yourself and your teams to share your “failures” openly, embrace the lessons, and most importantly celebrate how these experiences will shape your future actions. Over time, this creates a culture where creativity feels less risky and more sustainable.
As these practices become embedded in everyday work, creativity can shift from being an individual asset into a collective force with the power to reshape how organizations evolve. The leaders who will define the next decade will not be the ones with the most linear plans. They will be the ones who experiment, seek out different thinking, and find the “collective genius” within their organization to find a path through constant change.
Philosopher Sophie Chassat calls creativity “an act of reopening the field of the possible.” In times of systemic breakdown, this invitation to listen, to sense, to invent, may be the most valuable capability of all.
Jean Vigneron, based in Paris, is a leadership advisor in Egon Zehnder’s Retail, Apparel and Luxury Good Practice.
Megan Trice, based in Minneapolis, is a leadership advisor in Egon Zehnder’s Consumer Practice.