Traditionally, the best and brightest specialists were promoted to positions of leadership, on the strength of the rationale that their creative success would permeate the team they headed. The legacy of this strategy, however, is knowledge organisations that are often financially and intellectually weakened by these brilliant specialists who were actually incompetent, autocratic leaders. Even today, few technical specialists are schooled in general management and, as a consequence, most learn from experience or need to receive management and leadership training after their appointment.

Recent research is showing that classic directive leadership or traditional autocratic management strategies are not effective in knowledge organisations or teams, and that knowledge workers respond to inspiration rather than supervision. Henry Mintzberg rightly notes that, in knowledge teams, the members are there because they are highly proficient at what they do so they need little coaching at a technical level. What they do need, according to Mintzberg, is inspiration, protection and support, all of which agree with the creativity-enhancing supervisory encouragement and organisational support of Amabile. Mintzberg described the type of leadership required to effectively lead a knowledge team as “covert leadership” because it is leadership that is delivered subtly through everything the leader does.

Leadership is generally accepted to occur at three different levels: the individual level where leaders mentor, coach and motivate; the group level, where leaders build teams and resolve conflicts; and at the organisational level, where leaders build culture. On the individual and team levels, leaders can covertly inspire and energise just by treating team members as “respected members of a cohesive social system”. Mintzberg stipulates that covert leadership establishes the team culture because the leader sets the culture standard through behaviour. Hardy and Schwartz also noted that a leader is only effective if her behaviour matches her directives. Therefore, the behaviour of a leader establishes the culture of the team or organisation, regardless of whether directives accompany the behaviour or not.

–Heather L. Bruce, Leading Creativity: Effective Leadership of Knowledge Teams