Hello, Prima Donna

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to attend the CEB (Creative Economy and Beyond) conference in Helsinki - a great place to mingle and to pick up ideas.

Among the people I had met was Roosevelt Finlayson from the Bahamas who spoke about Festivals as a model for building creative communities, and for establishing commitment and self-esteem.
His presentation was the last one that first conference day, so in the conversation afterwards we not only moved from one topic to the next, but also from the harbour district to the city center. I noticed that people responded to Roosevelt as if they knew him, as if they regarded him as a friend, even before he said a single word. (And that is certainly not the typical Finnish mentality). "How do you do this," I asked Roosevelt. "Well, I love people," he said simply. And by then I could tell that this was indeed a fact, not an idealized vision of himself.

In a way, Roosevelt Finlayson embodied a finding from a study that Helle Hedegard Hein presented at CEB the next day. In order to find out how highly creative employees should be managed, she had spent three years at the Royal Danish Theatre observing how managers and creative specialists behaved. She found that creative specialists can basically be grouped into four categories:
The Prima Donnas who feel that they have a higher calling: Prima Donnas experience flow and get kicks out of working hard and stretching their personal limits. What they want from their managers is honest feedback, recognition and a shielding leadership. Status and financial rewards are not motivating for them, as they feel they have a mission to give their personal gift to the world.
The calling to a higher mission was totally missing in creative specialists in the other three categories: The High Achievers, the Pragmatists and the Pay Check Worker are, in varying degrees, more motivated by status, public praise and financial rewards, while their creativity and commitment decreases. The most difficult creative specialists are those in the "Pay Check Worker" box, as they constantly demand a higher salary while at the same time they defend low performance standards. For them, just coming to work already deserves a special bonus.
Two observations were especially interesting:

1. No one is somehow genetically tied to one category. But creative people can regress to a lower category, either voluntarily (if that makes sense for a period in life), or involuntarily, out of frustration. And unfortunately, the latter seems to be the case most of the time.
2. Managers should never address Pay Check Workers as Pay Check Workers, Pragmatists as Pragmatists or High Achievers as High Achievers as that will cause them to regress even more.

So the solution for managers is very simple: Everyone should be addressed like a prima donna, everyone is at a deep and maybe hidden level, a prima donna, a person with a unique gift to bring into the world.

Which brings me back to Roosevelt Finlayson, who can see the prima donna and the lovable side even in the strangers around him. Strangers, who then started to see him in the same way, as a trustworthy friend.