Managing creative professionals isn't about task supervision. It's about syncing with their thinking, understanding their ambitions, and creating feedback loops that draw out their best work. This shift from traditional management to true leadership is essential as intellectual work spreads across organizations.
To manage is to lead, and to lead is to elevate. I find increasingly as we work with knowledge professionals and really intellectual professionals, even the way I would put it, people who we expect not only to be able to execute tasks but to be able to think their way through problems, be able to come up with creative solutions and research new ideas. This is a different form of work than that which would have been around, say, 20, 30, 50 years ago. It used to be a very elite few that were doing that. We might call them executives or researchers or what have you. Now we call them everybody we work with. This means we need to use leadership techniques that like previously only very senior executives had to. And I would look towards that. How do you nurture them? How do you, and perhaps really importantly, get in sync with them so you can understand their thinking, so you can be bringing out their greatness and their ambitions to create a feedback loop between them and the work? This is not an easy thing to do. This is going to be a lot of, you know, new discipline that we're going to learn in the coming years. And I am here for it.
