Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership: March 21, 2025

Self-reflection serves as a cornerstone of meaningful and effective leadership, yet as business psychology researchers Kross, Ong, and Ayduk demonstrate, it’s a double-edged sword. While reflection enables leaders to learn from experiences and enhance decision-making, it can easily morph into counterproductive rumination that drain cognitive resources and adversely impact team leadership when focused on negative events – undermining performance, health, and relationships. In response, a practical approach – ‘psychological distancing’ – can create helpful space between oneself and experiences, thereby allowing leaders to analyze situations without becoming emotionally entangled in them. Linguistic techniques like using your name or ‘you’ rather than ‘I’ create psychological distance, as does adopting an observer perspective, while environmental strategies – exposure to green spaces or awe-inspiring experiences – similarly facilitate adaptive reflection. For creative leaders, this research offers a vital insight: self-reflection becomes more valuable when complemented with distancing techniques that improve emotional regulation while preserving analytical and human clarity – skills increasingly essential in our complex, fast-paced organizational environments.

Ethan Kross, Madeline Ong, and Ozlem Ayduk (2023) “Self-Reflection at Work: Why It Matters and How to Harness Its Potential and Avoid Its Pitfalls,” Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organization Behavior, 10: 441-464.

A recent episode of Fast Company’s new pod, Brand New World, offers valuable leadership wisdom from legendary creative technologist Iain Tate and designer Richard Turley (who are founders of the boutique creative shop, Food Arts & Technology): they embrace AI’s capabilities while questioning its purpose. Practically, they propose asking ‘and then what?’ to those pitching (or dismissing) AI. Rather than following polarizing ‘AI good/AI bad’ narratives, they advocate developing “a sense of taste and decency” around implementation. Their work with the dating app Hinge exemplifies this approach. By using AI to help neurodivergent daters have deeper conversations and simulate relationship futures, thereby blending innovation with human-centered outcomes. Filmmaker Jason Zada reinforces this, observing that AI grants unprecedented creative freedom while also requiring seasoned judgment. A key takeaway from these grounded discussions of current efforts to understand and use fast-emerging AI technologies is that today’s leaders must embrace the tools and push technological boundaries while also consistently ensuring that they stay in service to human creativity and maintaining human values.

Fast Company (2025) “The Next Creative Revolution,” Brand New World pod, March 12, 2025.

In our headlong pursuit of the next big leadership idea, model, technology, or behavior, we too often neglect looking backward, even to the recent past. Gallup’s comprehensive analysis of 400,000+ workplace surveys reveals a troubling ‘Great Detachment’ in today’s workforce. Employee engagement has plummeted to a 10-year low, with only 44% of workers knowing what’s expected of them – down from 55% pre-pandemic. The hybrid model (55% of remote-capable employees) offers flexibility but creates ‘mental distance’ from employers. The effects of this distance manifest in alarming ways: workplace respect has declined, and only 28% of employees express pride in their organization’s offerings and only 30% feel connected to their organization’s mission. Meanwhile, managers face competing demands: 69% report additional responsibilities and 55% endure team restructuring, leading to their own burnout and disengagement. For leaders, the data speaks clearly: managers who develop a caring ‘coaching habit’ and provide weekly, meaningful 15-30 minute feedback sessions clarifying priorities, collaboration, recognition, and strengths can rebuild workplace respect and create engagement levels 4x higher than those who don’t. The post-pandemic workplace demands intentional leadership that bridges physical distance with genuine human connection and support.

Jim Harter and Ben Wigert (2025) “The Post-Pandemic Workplace: The Experiment Continues,” gallup.com, March 11, 2025.

Celebrating 50 years since the publication of his groundbreaking article, “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact,” Henry Mintzberg remains a compelling voice in management theory. In this reflective interview, Mintzberg argues against ‘lofty leadership’ in favor of ‘grounded management’. The best managers aren’t just strategizing from the C-Suite – they’re getting under the metaphorical (or literal) machine every day, seeing what’s actually happening, working with others, and solving real problems. His four organizational types – personal, programmed, professional, and project – remind us that management and organizing principles, tools, and models cannot be one-size-fits-all. His emphasis on emergent strategy – that strategy is learned not planned – likewise recommends that the best strategies (and structures) emerge from how people connect and work together. Challenging conventional (and current) wisdom, Mintzberg argues that the best management is neither planning nor controlling but rather fostering and adapting to “calculated chaos and controlled disorder.” He critiques our over-emphasis on leadership, claiming it is very destructive when simplistically prioritized above management. For today’s leaders, Mintzberg’s message is clear: effective management requires getting on the ground, understanding organizational reality, creating conditions for people to thrive, and cultivating structures that emerge from actual practice. 

Adi Ignatius (2025) “‘The Manager’s Job’ – 50 Years Later,” Harvard Business Review, March 19, 2025;

This study by a multinational team of management researchers, of six companies implementing agile methodologies, reveals a counterintuitive truth: bottom-up organizing still requires top-down support, just applied selectively. The research focused on three implementation approaches – organic, enabled, and steered – each with distinct executive involvement levels. The findings reveal critical tensions in structure, process, and culture that emerge during the piloting and scaling phases of agile implementation. The authors emphasize that successful implementation requires executives to anticipate potential problems and make targeted interventions, steering implementations that need less top-down control during scale-up, while working with organic implementations that benefit from more executive guidance. They need to find this balance by recognizing when to provide direction and when to create space for employee ownership, addressing tensions proactively rather than rushing toward scaling without proper assessment. A more general lesson for leaders is to approach agile implementation as a continuous, reflective process rather than a linear one, recognizing that tensions between empowerment and productivity require continuous readjustment.

Patricia Klarner, Tina Ambos, and Julian Birkinshaw (2025) “How to Implement Bottom-up Organizing,”California Management Review, published online, Jan 27, 2025.