A year ago today, Debra and I sat down with Fredrik Härén for Corey-osity Unleashed. Fredrik has spent decades studying creativity in more than 75 countries. We talked about a lot of things. One story from the hour won't leave me alone.
It's about a CEO, a sheet of paper, and the moment he stopped reading it.
The Speech Nobody Wrote for Themselves
Fredrik was in Singapore, booked to speak at a media company's Innovation Day. Before he went on, the CEO walked up to open the event. He had a written speech in his hand, and he read it.
Innovation is important in this company. We encourage creativity.
Fredrik told us the energy in the room dropped as the words came out.
Then the CEO stopped. He looked up from the page, crumpled it, threw it away and asked the room, more or less, what he was doing. This was an innovation day, and here he stood reading a speech he clearly hadn't written himself.
He told the room he'd improvise. He started telling a story about his first job at Changi Airport.
Here's the detail I love. It wasn't staged. Fredrik was sitting next to the man who had written the speech. Nobody in the row saw it coming.
And the room changed. People sat up. The CEO had stopped talking about creativity and started doing something creative, in front of everyone, with no safety net.
When Debra asked Fredrik for his one tip for leaders who want a more creative team, he gave her two words. Role model it.
"So it's not about talking about innovation, it's about doing creative things as a leader. Even small things."
You've Sat Through This Speech
Most of us have. The all-hands where an executive reads "we value experimentation" off slide 14. The quarterly kickoff with a lightbulb icon on the screen. The innovation week announced by email, opened by someone who will leave before the demos.
The words are fine. Nobody argues with them. And nobody believes them, because the person saying them is doing the least creative thing a person in his spot has available. Reading somebody else's sentences out loud.
Your team isn't stupid. They watch what you do. They notice whether you take risks, whether you try new things, whether you say "I don't know, let's find out." Then they copy it. The speech is noise.
There's a Name for This Gap
Tony Simons at Cornell gave it a name back in 2002. He called it behavioral integrity: the perceived alignment between a manager's words and deeds. Do you keep your promises? Do you live the values you talk about, or only talk about them?
Twenty years on, Simons and his colleagues reviewed the research built on the idea. The evidence ties behavioral integrity to trust and commitment, to turnover and performance. It also acts as a moderator of whether leadership initiatives work at all.
Read the last part again. Your innovation programme, your hackathon budget, your shiny new "fail fast" value... all of it rises or falls on whether your people think you mean it. And they decide whether you mean it by watching you.
It Trickles Down
One study makes this sharper. Researchers looked at 1,944 employees across 107 hotels. They found middle managers' view of their senior managers' behavioral integrity trickled down. It shaped how front-line staff rated the middle managers themselves.
So a CEO reading a ghost-written creativity speech doesn't only damage his own credibility. Every manager underneath him inherits the gap. They stand up in their own team meetings and repeat the same lines, with the same lack of conviction, and their teams discount it the same way.
Flip it round. When the top person does the creative thing, the managers below have permission to do it too.
Creativity Spreads by Copying
There's research on the copying, too. A 2021 study of 77 team leaders and 310 employees at two technology companies found humble leader behaviour lifted team creativity. The route was team learning: people watched the leader and picked up the behaviour. The authors describe the leader acting as a role model.
There's a catch in the study worth your attention. The effect weakened when the leader wasn't seen as effective. Humility from someone who doesn't deliver doesn't inspire anyone. Role modelling isn't a performance. You still have to be good at the job.
It fits something else Fredrik said in our conversation. He pushed back on people who blame their company for their lack of creativity. In his words, "99% of your creative development is up to yourself." The same rule holds for leaders. If you want a creative team, start with your own creative practice. Nobody else is going to build it for you.
What Innovation Theatre Looks Like in Tech
I spend a lot of time around engineering organisations. Here are the patterns I see most often, where the words say one thing and the behaviour says another:
- The keynote opener. An exec opens hack week with a prepared statement and leaves before a single demo.
- The judge-only VP. Senior leaders turn up at the hackathon to score teams. They never build anything themselves.
- The untouchable architecture. "We encourage experimentation," says the CTO whose design decisions nobody has questioned in three years.
- The six-signature change. A creativity value on the wall, next to a change-approval process needing six sign-offs to rename a button.
- The polished all-hands. Every leadership update is a finished, rehearsed deck. Nobody ever shows work in progress, so nobody below them dares to either.
None of these leaders are villains. Most of them believe what they're saying. But belief isn't visible. Behaviour is.
What Doing It Looks Like
Fredrik said "even small things." He meant it. You don't need to throw a speech across a stage. You need your team to see you take a creative risk, regularly, in plain sight.
Show Something Unfinished
Bring a rough prototype, a sketch, or a half-formed idea to your next all-hands. Say out loud it isn't finished. Ask for help. You'll do more for psychological safety in five minutes than a year of posters.
Build, Don't Judge
Next hackathon, join a team as a member. Take a ticket. Write some bad code. I wrote about why hackathons are about who works well together, not the ideas themselves. Your team learns a lot about you when they see you stuck on a problem next to them.
Change One Ritual Yourself
Pick a meeting you run and change the format. Different retro. Standing one-to-one on a walk. A planning session opened with a story instead of a status update. Don't announce a programme. Change the thing and let people notice.
Tell Them About the Idea You Killed
Every leader has turned down an idea which turned out to be right. Say so in public. Fredrik's rail clip story makes this point better than I do... I covered it in Norway Rejected the Rail Clip.
Don't Punish the Experiment
If you say "try things" and then hold a post-mortem with a hunt for blame the first time an experiment fails, your team learns the real rule fast. I've written about this before: want innovation? Stop punishing the mistake.
Throw Away the Script
The next time you're asked to open something, put the notes down. Tell a true story from your own working life, the way the CEO in Singapore told his Changi Airport story. It will be messier than the prepared version. People will remember it.
The Test
Here's the check I'd ask you to run this week.
Think about the last time you spoke to your team about innovation, creativity, experimentation, or any of their cousins. Then answer one question honestly.
Were you doing the thing, or reading about it?
If you were reading about it, you already know what to do with the paper.
Fredrik's full conversation with Debra and me is on Corey-osity Unleashed. And if your organisation keeps talking about innovation without seeing any, Step It Up HR works with leadership teams on exactly this gap between words and deeds.
So what's the speech you need to crumple up?