8 Creativity Is Not Enough

The WICS Model of Leadership

Robert J. Sternberg

Introduction

On January 30, 1933, Adolph Hitler became the new chancellor of Germany. Some people dreaded the thought of such a man in charge of one of the most powerful countries in the world; other people welcomed the fresh ideas he would bring to leadership. In terms of the standard definition of creativity (Runco & Jaeger, 2012), they saw Hitler as both an original and effective thinker. Some people—not just Germans—became disillusioned. Others, however, continued to believe that Hitler was both original (certainly no one had planned a mass genocide on such a scale before) and effective (he carried out the genocide with astonishing effectiveness), despite his total moral disengagement (Bandura, 2015). I will argue in this chapter that leaders such as Hitler can be charismatic—they can even be creative—but they never display creativity mediated by wisdom as well as intelligence.

Today, scholars of creativity recognize that creativity has a dark side (Cropley et al., 2010; Runco, 2017; Sternberg, 2010). What matters with creativity is not only whether it is used but also how it is used. Creativity was represented then, and is represented today, by demagogic leaders on every continent of the world. One might think that these leaders are ones who take power through the means of a coup d’état or otherwise by force. On the contrary, most of them originally are elected (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). But if people are willing to elect demagogic, darkly creative individuals as leaders, perhaps creativity, in and of itself, is not as good as it is cracked up to be. Or rather, perhaps it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an individual to be a great leader. What characteristics, in addition to creativity, are needed to protect against dangerous leaders? That discussion is the focus of this chapter.

The goal of this chapter is to argue that leadership that is both good and effective is, in large part, a function of creativity in generating ideas, but also of analytical intelligence in evaluating the quality of these ideas, practical intelligence in implementing the ideas and convincing others to value and follow the ideas, and wisdom to ensure that the decisions and their implementation help to achieve a common good for all stakeholders. The model is referred to as WICS—wisdom, intelligence, creativity, synthesized (Sternberg, 2003a, 2003b, 2012; Sternberg & Vroom, 2002). It applies to any leadership at all, but especially to leadership where the stakes are high—where good leadership makes a big positive difference and where bad leadership is potentially very harmful.

Leadership involves both skills—how well people do things—and attitudes—their views on what they and others do. The attitudes are at least as important to leadership as are the underlying skills. One needs creative skills and attitudes to generate fresh and good ideas for leadership (Sternberg & Davidson, 1982); one needs analytical intellectual skills and attitudes to decide whether they are good ideas as well as practical-intellectual skills and attitudes to implement the ideas and convince others of the value of the ideas, and one needs wisdom-related skills and attitudes to assess the long-as well as short-term impacts of these ideas on other individuals and institutions as well as on oneself. One also needs basic critical literacy—some leaders today appear not to read, either through lack of skill or desire (see Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 1994; Sternberg, 1985c).

The chapter considers the elements of creativity, intelligence, and wisdom, in that order, because it represents the order in which the elements often are initially used, although as leadership decisions evolve, the elements become interactive, and so order becomes less relevant.

Creativity

Creativity in this chapter refers to the skills and attitudes needed for generating ideas and products that are (a) relatively novel, (b) high in quality, and (c) appropriate to the task at hand (Niu & Sternberg, 2003; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). Creativity is important for leadership because it is the component of leadership whereby one generates the ideas that others will follow. A leader who lacks creativity may get along with others and get others to go along with the leader’s plans—but he or she may get others to go along with inferior, stale, or even harmful ideas.

Leadership as a Confluence of Skills and Attitudes

A confluence model of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995) suggests that creative people show a variety of characteristics. These characteristics represent not only abilities but also decisions (Sternberg, 2000). In other words, to a large extent, people decide to be creative rather than merely being born creative. People who decide for creativity display a creative attitude toward leadership. The decisions reflect the attitudinal component of leadership discussed earlier. There is also an abilities component of leadership which includes, but is not limited to, creative leadership. Deciding to be creative will go a long way toward encouraging and even producing creative thinking. But this decision will not go all the way, because people may or may not have fully developed the abilities component in addition to the attitudinal one. Without the decision to be creative, however, an individual will not be creative, no matter what the abilities, because the individual will not adopt the mindset, discussed next, that is required for creative thinking.

What are the elements of a creative attitude toward leadership? The empirical bases for these aspects of the creative attitude, including the research supporting them, are summarized in Kaufman and Sternberg (in press) and Plucker (2017).

1.  1. Problem redefinition. Creative leaders do not define problems the way everyone else does simply because everyone else defines the problems in that way. They decide on the exact nature of the problems confronting them, using their own judgment. Most importantly, they are willing to defy the crowd in defining problems differently from the ways others do (Sternberg, 2002a; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). But problem redefinition is not enough, because the redefinitions may be inadequate or even wrong.
2.  2. Problem analysis. Creative leaders are willing to analyze whether their solutions to problems are the best ones possible—that is, they not only come up with new ideas but also evaluate the feasibility of those ideas.
3.  3. Selling solutions. Creative leaders realize that creative ideas do not sell themselves; rather, creative leaders have to decide to sell their ideas and then decide to put in the effort to do so. Their effort may or may not succeed. If it does not succeed, they may find themselves out of a job.
4.  4. Recognizing how knowledge can both help and at the same time hinder creative thinking. Creative leaders realize that knowledge can hinder as well as facilitate creative thinking (see also Adelson, 1984; Frensch & Sternberg, 1989; Sternberg, 1985a). Sometimes leaders allow themselves to become entrenched and thus become susceptible to tunnel vision. They let their expertise hinder rather than facilitate their exercise of creative leadership.
5.  5. Willingness to take sensible and worthwhile risks. Creative leaders recognize that they must decide to take sensible and worthwhile risks. These risks can not only lead them to succeed but also lead them, from time to time and more often than they would like, to fail (Lubart & Sternberg, 1995).
6.  6. Willingness to surmount challenging obstacles. Creative leaders are willing to surmount the challenging obstacles that confront anyone who decides to be creative and thus defy the crowd. Such obstacles result when those who accept current ways of doing things confront those who do not (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995).
7.  7. Belief in one’s ability to accomplish the tasks that need to get done. Creative leaders believe in their ability to get the job done, no matter how challenging the tasks are. This belief is sometimes referred to as representing feelings of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1996).
8.  8. Willingness to tolerate periods of ambiguity. Creative leaders recognize that there may be long periods of time in which they feel a great deal of uncertainty. During these periods, they cannot be certain that they are doing the right thing or that what they are doing will have the outcome they hope for.
9.  9. Willingness to discover extrinsic rewards for the things one is intrinsically motivated to accomplish. Creative leaders almost always are intrinsically motivated to do the work they do (Amabile, 1996; Hennessey, in press). Creative leaders look for and ultimately find environments in which they receive extrinsic rewards for the things they like to do anyway, regardless of the extrinsic rewards.
10. 10. Continuing to grow creatively rather than to stagnate. Creative leaders do not get stuck in their old and somtimes outdated patterns of leadership. Their leadership skills and methods evolve as they accumulate experience and expertise. They learn from experience rather than simply letting the lessons of experience pass them by.

Types of Creative Leadership

The creative ideas leaders propose can be of different types (Sternberg, 1999; Sternberg, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2002). Consider each of the types of leadership in turn (Sternberg, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2003). These types were identified as different types of “propulsion” that can occur in a conceptual space.

Conceptual Replication

Conceptual relication as a form of leadership is an attempt to show that a field or organization is in the right place at the right time. The leader therefore attempts to keep it in that place at that time. The leader views the organization as being where it needs to be. The leader’s role is to keep it there and prevent changes that could be harmful to the organization. This type of leadership is only minimally creative. It represents a limiting case of creativity. The creativity in this form of leadership is in dealing with applying a past model to an ever-changing environment.

Replicative leadership is likely to be most successful during time periods of relative stability in an organization. However, in times of flux, the kind of leader that worked before may not work again, and so a replicative leader may cause the organization to lose preeminence because he or she represents the past, not the future.

Redefinition

Redefinition in leadership is the attempt to show that a field or organization is in the right place at the right time, but not precisely for the reason(s) that others, including previous leaders, think it is. The current status of the organization thus is reconceived from a new point of view. Redefiners may end up getting credit for the ideas of other people because they find a better reason to implement the others’ ideas, or at least, they say they do. The creativity in this type of leadership is in realizing how to redefine what the previous leader did.

Forward Incrementation

Forward incrementation in leadership is an attempt to lead a field or an organization forward in the direction that it already is moving. Most leadership in fields and organizations is probably forward incrementation. In such leadership, a leader takes on the helm with the idea of moving forward with the leadership program of the individual one has succeeded. The promise is of progress through continuity with the past. Creativity through forward incrementation is usually the kind that is most easily recognized and appreciated by most people as creative. Because forward incrementation extends existing ideas forward, it is seen as creative. Because it does not threaten the assumptions of such previous ideas, it is not rejected as useless or even threatening or harmful. Forward incrementations tend to be most successful when times are changing in relatively predictable and minor incremental ways. The times thus match the forward-incremental leadership strategy. When times change quickly and unpredictably, leaders may find that this strategy no longer works and even may backfire.

Advance Forward Incrementation

Advance forward incrementation in leadership is the attempt to move an organization or field forward in the direction it is already going, but by moving very quickly and often beyond where others are ready for it to go. The leader moves the organization ahead at a very fast pace. Advance forward incrementations often are not altogether successful at the time they are attempted. The reason is that followers in fields and organizations are not ready to go where the leader wants to lead the followers. Or significant number of followers may not wish to go to the point they are at, in which case followers may form an organized and sometimes successful resistance movement.

Redirection

Redirection in leadership is an attempt to redirect an organization or field from where it has been and is headed toward a new and different direction. The leader decides that the direction in which the organization currently is moving is not adaptive to modern needs and so redirects the organization elsewhere. Redirective leaders need to match to environmental circumstances to succeed (Sternberg & Vroom, 2002). If the leaders do not have the luck to have closely matching environmental conditions, even their best intentions may go awry. Leaders who are creative redirectors often are perceived negatively by followers, as the followers may not be ready for their redirections (see Mueller, Goncalo, & Kamdar, 2011). People often admire, but also fear, and may even rebel against, creative leaders (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015).

Reconstruction/Redirection

Reconstruction/redirection in creative leadership is an attempt to move a field or an organization back to where it was in the past so that it may move forward from that point, but in a direction different from the one it took from that point in the past, onward. Reconstruction/redirection tends to be successful when an organization once had strong, capable leadership, then has gotten a weak leader who has taken the organization in the wrong direction. The new leader then reconstructs and redirects. The reconstruction/redirection becomes an attempt to return to a safe direction.

Reinitiation

Reinitiation in leadership is an attempt to move a field or organization to a different and as yet unreached starting point; the leader then moves forward from that point. Reinitiation is appropriate when an organization must either entirely transform itself, or else die. For example, an organization that at one time made buggy whips probably would have had to reinitiate itself or die in the face of modern modes of transportation.

Synthesis

Synthesis is a type of creative leadership in which the creator integrates two ideas regarding leadership that previously were seen as unrelated or even as opposed. What formerly were viewed as distinct and possibly conflicting ideas now are viewed as related, integrable, and capable of being unified. Synthesis is an important means by which progress is made in the sciences. It represents neither an acceptance of existing paradigms nor a rejection of them, but rather a merger between them.

Implications

Different forms of creative contributions produce different kinds of leadership. Some leaders transform the essence of an organization or other institution; others do not. At a given time, in a given place, transformation may or may not be necessary or even desirable. So transformation is not necessarily needed in or appropriate for every leadership situation. But the leaders who tend to be remembered over the course of time are probably, at least in many cases, those who transform organizations or, more generally, organizational ways of thinking.

The reader can compare the current view regarding types of creative leadership to that of transactional and transformational leadership. Transactional leaders generally emphasize the contractual relationship between leaders and followers. For example, an employee might agree to engage in certain job-related actions in exchange for certain rewards from the leadership of the organization by which he or she is employed (Sashkin, 2004). Transformational leaders emphasize higher needs and a relationship in which followers may become leaders and leaders become moral agents (Burns, 1978; Sashkin, 2004). In the terms of Bass and Avolio (Bass, 2002; Bass, Avolio, & Atwater, 1996), transactional leaders are more likely to pursue options that preserve current paradigms. Transformational leaders, on the other hand, are more likely to pursue any of options that reject current paradigms. They are crowd defiers simply because they are certain to encounter resistance from those followers (and other leaders) who are convinced that the present way of doing things, whatever it is, is the best way, indeed, perhaps the only way. In terms of Kuhn’s (2012) theory of scientific revolutions, which applies to ideas outside the sciences as well, these are the leaders who revolutionize ways of thinking. In other words, transformational leaders typically exhibit a more creative leadership style than do transactional leaders. The transactional leaders rely more on adaptive, practical-intellectual skills in determining what constitutes appropriate kinds and levels of exchange of rewards.

Of course, there are also pseudo-transformational leaders—leaders who emulate or pretend to be transformational leaders. For example, an organization might not need or be ready for change but acquire a leader who wants to transform the organization not because the organization needs change, but because the leader wants to leave his or her mark, even if it is through transformations that are not what the organization needs or wants at a given time (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999).

Just as there are pseudo-transformational leaders, so can there be pseudo-creative leaders—leaders who give the impression of being creative but actually are merely charismatic. Charismatic leaders may seem creative but actually be merely enacting the role of a creative leader.

Our research on creativity (Lubart & Sternberg, 1995; Sternberg, 2018a, 2018b; Sternberg & Lubart, 1995) has led to several conclusions regarding creative leadership. First, creativity often involves defying the crowd, or, as Todd Lubart and I have stated it, buying low and selling high in the world of ideas. Creative leaders are like good investors in that they do what needs to be done. They do not do merely what other people or polls tell them to do. Second, creativity is relatively domain specific, with creative skills varying widely across domains. Third, creativity is only weakly related to traditional intelligence, and certainly is not the exact same thing as academic intelligence.

I have further suggested that creativity and creative leadership involve not only defying the crowd but also defying oneself and the prevailing Zeitgeist (Sternberg, 2018a, 2018b). Creative leaders do not get stuck in their old ways of doing things; they recognize that times change, situations change, even people and their tastes change. Such leaders need to be flexible rather than dogmatic, recognizing that what worked before may not work anymore or in the future (Ambrose & Sternberg, 2012a, 2012b). Creative leaders further recognize the need at times to defy conventional Zeitgeists—ways of doing things that are just taken for granted. Several watch companies, such as E. Howard & Co., went out of business early in the 20th century because they thought the pocket watch was forever. Control Data Corporation went out of business because they bet on the permanency of the mainframe computer (the type that filled a room) and lost. When times change, if leaders do not change, they and their companies, countries, or other entities get left behind.

Intelligence

Intelligence in the conventional sense would seem to be important to leadership, but how important is it really? Indeed, if the conventional intelligence of a leader is too much higher than that of his or her followers, the leader may not connect with those people and thereby become ineffective (Williams & Sternberg, 1988). Intelligence, as conceived of here, is not just intelligence in its conventional narrow sense—some kind of general factor (g) (Sternberg, 1985b; see essays in Sternberg & Kaufman, 2011; Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2002) or as IQ (Willis, Dumont, & Kaufman, 2011) with more specific factors below g in some kind of hierarchy. Rather, it is conceived of in terms of the theory of successful intelligence (Sternberg, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 2002b, 2015). Successful intelligence is defined as the skills and attitudes an individual needs to succeed in life, given that individual’s own conception of success, and within the individual’s sociocultural environment. Two particular aspects of the theory of successful intelligence are particularly relevant: what are sometimes called academic and practical intelligence.

It should be clear how intelligence, however defined, would have aspects of skill. But how would it also have aspects of an attitude? The main way it is attitudinal is through the decision to apply it. Many leaders know to do better than they do, but they do so anyway. Their minds tell them what they should be doing as leaders, but their motives—for power, for fame, for money, for possessions, for sex, or for whatever—lead them away from their proper path. Leaders often fail not through lack of intelligence, but rather through their choice not to use properly the intelligence they have.

Academic Intelligence

Academic intelligence refers to the combination of memory and analytical skills and attitudes that, in combination, largely contribute to the conventional notion of intelligence. These are the intellectual skills and attitudes needed not only to recall and recognize information, but also to analyze, evaluate, and judge that information. There is a long history of research on the relation between these intellectual skills and attitudes, on the one hand, and leadership, on the other. This history harks back at least to the work of Stogdill (1948). But the results of the research are ambiguous. On the one hand, there seems to be a modest correlation between conventionally defined intelligence and leadership effectiveness (Stogdill, 1948; see also essays in Riggio, Murphy, & Pirozzolo, 2002). The correlation is moderated by a number of factors, such as the level of stress experienced by the leader (Fiedler, 2002). These moderator variables apparently even can change the direction, not just the magnitude of the correlation.

These skills and attitudes matter for leadership, because leaders need to be able to retrieve information that is relevant to leadership decisions (memory) and to analyze and evaluate different courses of action, whether proposed by themselves or by others (analysis). But a good analyst does not necessarily make for a good leader.

The long-time heavy emphasis on academic intelligence (IQ) in the literature relating intelligence to leadership has been, in some ways, unfortunate. Indeed, recent theorists of intelligence have emphasized other aspects of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence (e.g., Mayer et al., 2011; Goleman, 1998) or multiple intelligences (Gardner, 2011), in their theories of intelligence. In this chapter, the emphasis is on practical intelligence (Sternberg et al., 2000; Sternberg & Hedlund, 2002; Sternberg & Smith, 1985), which has a distinctly different focus from emotional intelligence. Practical intelligence is only a part of successful intelligence, as described below.

Practical Intelligence

Practical intelligence involves those skills and attitudes used to solve everyday problems. Practical intelligence utilizes knowledge and skills acquired from experience in order purposefully to adapt to, shape, and select real-world environments. Practical intelligence thus involves modifying oneself to fit the environment (adaptation to the environment), modifying the environment to fit oneself (shaping of the environment), or finding a new and different kind of environment within which to function (selection of an environment). One uses these skills to (a) manage oneself, (b) manage others, and (c) manage tasks.

Effectiveness in “transactional leadership” (Avolio, Bass, & Jung, 1999; Bass, 2002; Bass, Avolio, & Atwater, 1996) derives, in large part, although not exclusively, from the adaptive function of practical intelligence—changing oneself to fit the environment. Transactional leaders usually are largely adapters themselves; at the very least, they want their followers to be adapters: they work with their followers toward the mutual fulfillment of what amount to contractual obligations. Transactional leaders typically provide contingent rewards, specifying role and task requirements. Then they reward desired performances. Or transactional leaders may manage by exception. In this case they monitor the meeting of previously set standards and intervene when these standards are not adequately met.

Sternberg and his colleagues (Hedlund et al., 2003; Sternberg et al., 2000) have argued that much of the knowledge associated with successful practical problem solving is tacit. Tacit knowledge is knowledge that typically is not openly expressed or explicitly stated; thus, people can acquire tacit knowledge only through their own personal experiences. Furthermore, although people’s actions may reflect their tacit knowledge, the people may find it difficult to articulate verbally what they know.

Several main findings (reviewed in Sternberg et al., 2000) have emerged from tacit-knowledge research. First, tacit knowledge tends to increase with increasing amounts of experience. Second, levels of tacit knowledge correlate minimally and sometimes not at all with scores on conventional tests of academic intelligence. Third, levels of tacit knowledge do not correlate with personality. Fourth, levels of tacit knowledge significantly predict job performance. Fifth and finally, levels of tacit knowledge provide significant incremental prediction of job performance over and above scores on conventional academic intelligence measures.

Different combinations of intellectual skills tend to lead to different kinds of leadership. Leaders, of course, vary greatly in their memory skills, analytical skills, and practical skills. A leader who is particularly adept in memory skills but not in the other kinds of skills may be highly knowledgeable but be unable to use his or her knowledge effectively. A leader who is particularly adept in analytical skills as well as in memory skills may be able to retrieve information and analyze that information effectively, but may be unable to persuade others that his or her analysis is useful or even correct. A leader who is adept in memory, analytical, and practical skills is most likely to be effective in influencing other people. But, of course, there are leaders who are adept in practical skills but not in memory and analytical skills (Sternberg, 1997a, 1997b; Sternberg et al., 2000). In conventional terms, these leaders are “shrewd” but not “smart.” They may be effective in getting others to go along with them, but they may end up leading these others down garden paths.

Wisdom

A leader can have all the aforementioned skills and attitudes and still lack an additional quality that, arguably, is the most important quality a leader can have, but perhaps, also the rarest. This additional quality is wisdom (see also Baltes & Staudinger, 2000; Sternberg & Glueck, in press). Wisdom is viewed here according to a proposed balance theory of wisdom (Sternberg, 1998, in press), according to which an individual is wise to the extent he or she uses successful intelligence, creativity, and knowledge as moderated by values to (a) seek to reach a common good; (b) by balancing intrapersonal (one’s own), interpersonal (others’), and extrapersonal (organizational/institutional/spiritual) interests; (c) over the short and long terms; and (d) adapt to, shape, and select environments. Wisdom, then, is in large part a decision to use one’s intelligence, creativity, and experience in a balanced way to help achieve a common good.

Wise leaders neither ignore nor focus exclusively on their own interests. Rather, they reflectively and skillfully balance their own interests, the interests of their followers, and the interests of the organization or other grouping for which they are responsible. They further recognize that, to be wise leaders, they must align the interests of their group or organization with the interests of other groups or organizations for the simple reason that no organization or group operates within a vacuum. Wise leaders realize that what may appear to be a prudent and useful course of action over the short term does not necessarily appear to be prudent or even useful over the long term.

Leaders who have been unsuccessful often ignore one or another set of stakeholder interests. For example, some presidents of the United States, including recently, have tried appealing only to their “base” of supporters, ignoring other groups because they know that they will never get the votes of members of these other groups.

Intelligent and creative leaders are not necessarily wise. Indeed, probably very few leaders at any level of leadership are particularly wise. Yet the few leaders who have been notably wise, such as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor Roosevelt, have left and will leave an indelible mark not only on the people they lead but also on the world. Wise leaders often are charismatic, but unfortunately, the reverse is not necessarily true. Charismatic leaders are not necessarily wise, as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and many other charismatic leaders have demonstrated over the course of time.

Unsuccessful leaders often show in their leadership certain stereotyped cognitive fallacies. These fallacies represent not lack of intelligence but rather foolishness. Consider five such fallacies (Sternberg, 2002a, 2002b). The first fallacy, called the unrealistic-optimism fallacy, appears when leaders think they are so smart and so effective that they can do essentially whatever they want. The second fallacy, called the egocentrism fallacy, appears when leaders think that they and perhaps their family and close friends are the only ones who matter, not the followers who rely on them for leadership. The third fallacy, called the omniscience fallacy, is displayed when leaders think that they know everything and lose sight of the limitations and especially the narrowness of their own knowledge. People who commit this fallacy may be experienced, but they do not learn from their experience and they often ignore or actively work against the advice of knowledgeable others. The fourth fallacy, called the omnipotence fallacy, occurs when leaders think they are all-powerful and as a result can do whatever they please. And the fifth fallacy, called the invulnerability fallacy, is displayed when leaders think they can get away with anything. They believe they are too clever to be caught, and even if they are caught, they expect they can figure that how they can get away with much or all of what they have done because of who they imagine themselves to be.

Much of the empirical data regarding wisdom has been collected by the late Paul Baltes and his colleagues. Over time, Baltes and his colleagues (e.g., Baltes, Smith, & Staudinger, 1992) showed the relevance of wisdom for effective performance. For example, Staudinger, Lopez, and Baltes (1997) discovered that measures of intelligence and personality as well as of their interface overlap with, but are non-identical to, measures of wisdom in terms of what the constructs measure. Staudinger, Smith, and Baltes (1992) showed that successful human-services professionals outperformed a control group (nonprofessionals) on wisdom-related tasks. They also demonstrated that older adults performed as well on wisdom-related tasks as did younger adults. However, older adults scored better on such tasks if there was a match between their age and the age of the fictitious characters about whom they made wisdom judgments. In a further set of studies, Staudinger and Baltes (1996) showed that settings that were ecologically relevant to the lives of participants and that provided for actual or “virtual” interaction of people’s minds substantially increased wisdom-related performance.

Synthesis

One of the most admired and successful leaders of the 20th century was Nelson Mandela. Mandela transformed South Africa, at least temporarily, from a repressive Apartheid state into a model of modern democracy. It did not become a country free of problems, and those problems have worsened since Mandela’s stepping down from power. But the alternative model provided by his contemporary, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, was far worse in almost every respect. Economically, politically, and morally, Zimbabwe became a failed state, much as Venezuela is today. It was not until 2017 that Robert Mugabe was ousted from power.

What made Nelson Mandela such a successful leader? For one thing, he had the creativity to envision the transformation of South Africa from a repressive state that deprived the large majority of its citizens of human rights to a state that would embrace human rights for all, even the former oppressors. He had the analytical intelligence to evaluate his plan for transformation and to fine-tune it as the plan was implemented. Mandela had the practical intelligence to implement the plan successfully and to convince a wide range of constituencies that his plan was workable. Such persuasion was no small feat. It largely prevented a massive exodus of white people and convinced many black people that reconciliation rather than retribution was the road to achieving success in a newly democratic state. And Mandela had the wisdom to put behind him the gross abuse of human rights to which he himself had been subjected in prison and to propose a plan that represented the common good of all stakeholders.

Without creativity, leaders cannot truly be successful. Leaders continually confront novel and unexpected tasks and situations. If the leaders lack the creativity to deal with them effectively, they fail as leaders. Mugabe, in place of creating a new and better vision for his country, essentially replicated the leadership model of divisive dictators such as Stalin and Mussonlini, pitting one group against another. He presided over a state that entered into radical decline on all measures of well-being.

Although the elements of WICS discussed in this chapter typically work together, they also can work in tension or even at odds with each other. For example, creativity is not always associated with wisdom. Creative leaders also may have ideas for making changes for which their followers are not ready. Or creative leaders may have ideas that are appropriate for the times but whose values they are unable to demonstrate to their followers. Without wisdom, creativity can be less than helpful and it even can be harmful to an organization and the individuals in it.

Conclusion

An effective leader needs creative skills and attitudes to come up with ideas, academic analytic skills and attitudes to decide whether the ideas are good ideas, practical skills and attitudes to render the ideas effective and to convince other people of the value of the ideas, and wisdom-based skills and attitudes to ensure that the ideas are in the service of the common good of all rather than just the good of the leader and perhaps some family members and cronies. A leader lacking in creativity will be unable and probably unwilling to deal with novel and challenging situations, such as a new and unanticipated source of hostility. A leader lacking in academic analytic intelligence will be unable to decide whether his or her ideas are viable and realistic for their time and place, and a leader lacking in practical intelligence will be unable to implement his or her ideas effectively and in a persusasive manner. An unwise leader may succeed in implementing ideas that are indifferent or even contrary to the best interests of the people he or she leads.

The model presented here is of course related to many other models. It incorporates elements of transformational leadership within the creative domain as well as transactional leadership (Bass & Avolio, 1994; Bass, Avolio, & Atwater, 1996) within the practical-intellectual domain. It includes aspects of emotionally intelligent leadership (Goleman, 1998) in the practical-intellectual and wisdom domains. And it includes visionary leadership (Northouse, 2016; Sashkin, 2004) and charismatic leadership (Conger & Kanugo, 1998) in the creative domain. Thus, the model discussed in this chapter provides a start toward integrating some previous models of leadership and also toward conceptualizing them under one theoretical umbrella.

The world in 2018, when this chapter is being published, is in something of a mess. War with North Korea could break out any day. Income inequality exceeds that of the gilded age and is getting worse. Pollution is killing millions of people worldwide and in many places is getting worse. Climate change is wreaking havoc throughout the entire world and already has almost destroyed entire islands. We need more creative leaders. But we also need leaders with academic analytical intelligence, common sense, and wisdom. We have relatively few of those. If the world does not acquire more of them soon, our future will be compromised or, perhaps worse, eliminated altogther. We can find better leaders. But will we?