Crafting Leadership
Leadership isn’t software you install or frameworks you execute or even humans you gather and influence. It’s craft: the kind that demands your hands get dirty, your awareness sharpens, your mind and heart grow, and your practice evolves daily. As we navigate an era where data streams, platform dynamics, network effects, and AI reshape how we live, work, and create value, the age-old principles of craftsmanship offer surprisingly relevant guidance for developing meaningful and effective leadership capability.
The Craftsman’s Approach to Leadership
NYU and LSE sociologist Richard Sennett cuts through the noise of business and management discourse that treats leadership development as a largely intellectual and stepwise exercise with a simple insight: craftsmanship, he writes, represents “the desire to do a job well for its own sake” (Sennett, 2008: 9). Leadership as craft emphasizes practice over theory, attention over ambition, and the iterative development of skill through engaged work with real materials, particularly in creative industries where inspiration and execution must integrate seamlessly – in this case, the people, relationships, and organizational challenges shaped by digital ecosystems.
This perspective is shared by American philosopher (and motorcycle mechanic) Matthew Crawford, in his Shop Class as Soulcraft, which argues for “the inherent dignity of manual work” and intimate connection to problem-solving through practical wisdom (Crawford, 2009: 15). For leaders, this translates into a call to develop intuitive understanding of how teams function across hybrid environments, how communication patterns shift in platform-mediated settings, and how to respond to challenges emerging from network effects and algorithmic feedback loops.
Crawford illustrates this through motorcycle mechanics who develop what he calls “attentiveness to the machinery,” that is, an ability to diagnose problems through subtle changes in sound, vibration, and performance that no diagnostic computer can detect (Crawford, 2009: 21). Leaders cultivating similar awareness learn to read team dynamics across digital platforms, sense organizational tensions through data patterns, and maintain authentic relationships while navigating systems designed for optimization rather than human connection. This isn’t mystical insight but developed capability earned through deliberate practice in increasingly complex, interconnected environments.
The challenge intensifies when traditional leadership practices like empathy must operate through today’s screens and data dashboards. Research-backed approaches to empathetic leadership, developed in face-to-face contexts, increasingly require fundamental adaptation when interactions occur on platforms that filter, amplify, or distort emotional cues.
Presence in Platform-Mediated Environments
Put more directly, a premise here is that leadership emerges through the lived experience of leaders and followers in specific circumstances and contexts, rather than existing as a static set of labels or an abstract set of principles. Such an active and embodied nature of effective leadership becomes more complex when our interactions increasingly take place through screens, dashboards, and algorithmic recommendations.
The craft of presence, for instance, translates to platform-mediated environments but requires new forms of attention. Emergency room nurses maintain a centered presence during crises through deliberate attention to movement and voice. Digital leaders must develop parallel skills: reading energy in video calls, sensing team cohesion through communication data, and maintaining authentic connection while navigating multiple information streams.
When building psychological safety – Harvard Business School leadership professor Amy Edmondson’s well-researched concept for enabling team learning and innovation – leaders must now account for platform dynamics that can amplify or suppress voices unpredictably. The traditional markers of psychological safety (open questioning, admission of mistakes, demonstration of vulnerabilities, discussion of problems) operate differently when mediated through digital channels where algorithmic ranking affects visibility, where communication occurs asynchronously across time zones, and where data analytics may capture and evaluate every interaction.
UBS’s current commitment to craft, articulated by Group CEO Sergio Ermotti, illustrates this adaptation in traditional industries: “Banking is a craft – where every service, every product and every interaction is an opportunity to excel.” This perspective recognizes that even in heavily regulated, technology-dependent financial services, the quality of human attention and care distinguishes exceptional performance from algorithmic execution.
While “Banking is a craft” serves as both internal philosophy and external marketing campaign – and part of UBS’s broader “House of Craft” initiative celebrating excellence across diverse disciplines from couture to gastronomy (UBS, 2024) – it reflects a more thoroughgoing organizational commitment to craft principles in digital environments. UBS’s approach demonstrates how traditional financial institutions must balance algorithmic efficiency with human judgment, regulatory compliance with relationship-building, and data-driven decision-making with contextual wisdom about client needs and market dynamics.
Leading Through Data-Driven Feedback Loops
Contemporary leaders operate within accelerated feedback environments where data streams provide continuous input about team performance, customer sentiment, and market dynamics. The craft dimension involves learning to work skillfully with this information while maintaining capacity for contextual wisdom that emerges through experience rather than computation.
When algorithmic recommendations conflict with human judgment about team needs or ethical considerations, leaders need what University of Warwick sociologist Margaret Archer calls “the internal conversation,” an ongoing dialogue between concerns and contexts, personal values and professional demands (Archer, 2007: 91). Leaders must develop what we may understand as a kind of data consciousness similar to craftsmen’s material awareness: understanding how information systems shape what they see and don’t see about organizational reality.
Leaders working within digital ecosystems must therefore develop a systems perspective to understand how their decisions propagate through interconnected networks and feedback loops. Groundbreaking systems scientist Peter Senge’s framework for learning organizations offers valuable guidance here, particularly his insight that “systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes, seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static snapshots” (Senge, 1990: 68).
Consider how Netflix’s creative leadership approach combines data-driven insights with creative decision-making. Over decades of successful market and technology transitions, Co-founder and Chairman Reed Hastings and Co-CEO Ted Sarandos have interpreted massive viewer analytics while maintaining space for creative risk-taking, using what Sarandos calls “data-informed intuition” in greenlighting decisions rather than letting data dictate creative choices (Variety, 2024).
Their leadership craft has involved balancing algorithmic content recommendations with intuitive judgment about storytelling and cultural trends while leading creative teams across global markets, employing Netflix’s culture of “farming for dissent” – actively seeking out different perspectives before making major decisions – to ensure diverse viewpoints inform investment choices that affect both creators and audiences worldwide (Hastings & Meyer, 2020: 144).
The challenge of maintaining trust, long understood as essential to effective leadership, becomes complex when algorithmic systems mediate many interactions. Trust-building practices developed for face-to-face environments must adapt to contexts where team members may interact primarily through platforms, where performance evaluation incorporates automated monitoring, and where decision-making increasingly relies on algorithmic processing of human behavior patterns.
Network Effects and Creative Friction
The shift toward platform-based business models creates new requirements for what the late and influential environmental scientist and systems theorist Donella H. Meadows recognized as “systems wisdoms,” the deep understanding of complex systems thinking and concepts that allow one to practice them, behaviorally, in leadership and in life (Meadows, 2008: 145). Leaders must understand how their decisions propagate through networks, how platform dynamics amplify or dampen initiatives, and how to facilitate emergence rather than control outcomes.
Founder Tim Sweeney’s leadership at Epic Games exemplifies this systems approach through Fortnite’s evolution as a live service platform. Rather than dictating gameplay evolution, Sweeney’s team creates conditions for emergent player behavior while maintaining coherent game design vision and fostering creative innovation across development teams. Since Epic is “trying to build the metaverse, per Sweeney, rather than just create a destination for creators to entertain audiences or create revenue,” a sophisticated understanding is required of how millions of players interact within virtual environments and how platform updates affect community dynamics (Lee, 2025).
The craft involves reading player behavior patterns across massive networks, facilitating community-driven content creation while ensuring technical stability, and making real-time decisions that affect gameplay experiences for global audiences where network effects function as human social phenomena mediated through digital platforms.
Creating productive creative friction – the generative tension that sparks innovation – requires reimagining in networked environments. Traditional approaches to fostering creative conflict assume co-location, shared temporal experience, and direct interpersonal dynamics. Platform-mediated creative friction must account for asynchronous collaboration, algorithmic content filtering, and network effects that can either amplify diversity of thought or create echo chambers.
For contemporary leaders, the “material” of craft work includes not just people and relationships but also data streams, algorithmic recommendations, and network dynamics. American woodworker and maker theorist Peter Korn writes that craft work provides meaning through the profound engagement of maker with material and, further, that meaning exists in a wider cycle involving others and marketplaces (Korn, 2013). Such an astute observation applies directly to the leaders’ engagement with complex situations, problems, human interactions, and the markets and societal contexts in which they live. The craft involves learning to shape these elements while remaining shaped by them, maintaining human purpose within technological systems.
This systems-level craftsmanship requires leaders to develop the ability to sense how decisions ripple through interconnected systems, how platform algorithms amplify or dampen human intentions, and how to work skillfully with emergence rather than seeking to control it. The challenge lies in maintaining leadership presence and intention while operating within systems designed for optimization and scale rather than human meaning-making.
Daily Practice in Digital Ecosystems
The craft perspective emphasizes continuous, incremental development through what the late organizational psychologist Karl Weick describes as “an embellishment of small structures,” whose outcomes, like jazz improvisation, compound over time (Weick, 1998: 553). In platform-mediated environments, such continuous development entails building sustainable practices that work within digital constraints while maintaining human connection and organizational purpose.
Co-founder and CEO Dylan Field’s leadership at Figma provides a model for craft-oriented daily practice in platform-mediated creative work. Figma’s approach to collaborative design tools that enhance creative leadership across distributed design teams demonstrates how leaders can enhance rather than replace human creativity through thoughtful platform design, reflecting designer Field’s vision to “democratize creative design through software” (Lazarus, 2025). His leadership style, rooted in “continuous iteration and a strong focus on user feedback,” guides the team’s regular sensing practices that combine quantitative usage analytics with qualitative designer feedback (jcarlos, 2025).
The development cycles respond to both immediate user needs and longer-term creative workflow evolution, with Field maintaining direct engagement with designer communities globally, participating in design critiques and feedback sessions, and building features that strengthen rather than standardize creative collaboration across distributed teams (Rimer, 2025).
Maintaining empathy and psychological safety when traditional emotional intelligence operates through digital mediation is the challenge. Leaders must learn to read team energy and interaction through video calls, build trust across time zones and cultural differences amplified by platform dynamics, and create space and dynamics for the kind of authentic relationship-building that enables both individual growth and collective achievement.
The craft here involves understanding how technological mediation affects the emergent properties of team dynamics and organizational culture. A principle observed by organizational theorist and systems thinking pioneer Russell Ackoff decades ago remains particularly relevant for today’s leaders managing distributed teams and digital workflows: “the performance of a system” – and, by this, he explicitly included social systems – “depends more on how its parts interact than on how they act independent of each other” (Ackoff, 1999: 19).
As a daily practice, crafting leadership in digital environments thus requires a hybrid ability, or attention, to maintain human presence while working through technological interfaces, the kind of creative leadership that balances individual creative vision with team collaboration and contextual engagement. This includes developing new rhythms of engagement that honor both the speed of digital feedback loops and the slower tempo of human relationship-building. Leaders must increasingly learn to create moments of genuine connection within platform-mediated interactions, to build trust through data transparency while maintaining space for intuitive judgment, and to foster team cohesion across both synchronous and asynchronous communication channels.
Future-Oriented Craft
This integration can’t be automated because it emerges through distinctly human capacity for meaning-making and adaptive response within complex systems. A helpful direction here is provided by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner’s concept of “good work” as technically excellent, personally engaging, and ethically sound (Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, & Damon, 2001). The craft dimension ensures that leaders maintain this tripartite focus even as artificial intelligence handles more analytical and procedural tasks.
Leaders must combine analytical capability (the head) for working with data and algorithms, emotional intelligence (the heart) for maintaining human connection across platforms, and practical skill (the hands) for effective action within technological constraints. British journalist and social policy writer David Goodhart’s “head, heart, and hands” framework therefore proves particularly relevant for this needed integration (Goodhart, 2020: 89). His balanced approach becomes essential as leaders navigate environments where each dimension requires both human judgment and technological fluency.
Contemporary leadership involves uniting art, craft, technology, and people through synthesis that combines data literacy with emotional intelligence, platform expertise with human purpose, and network thinking with local relationship-building. The approach demands treating leadership development as ongoing craft practice rather than skill acquisition, updating well-researched leadership approaches for platform-mediated realities, and maintaining focus on intrinsic value – the meaningful work, authentic relationships, and purposeful contribution that matter to leaders, teams, and stakeholders – while engaging network dynamics and algorithmic systems.
By not choosing between human and technological capabilities, the future of leadership craft lies instead in developing co-creative leadership that integrates human judgment with AI-generated insights, emotional intelligence with machine learning analytics, and personal relationships with algorithm-mediated connections. As AI systems become more sophisticated at handling routine analysis and optimization tasks, this co-creative orientation increasingly centers on the distinctly human work of meaning-making, relationship-building, and ethical judgment, especially in creative leadership contexts where human imagination and cultural intuition remain irreplaceable. The challenge is developing local forms of co-creative leadership that honor both the speed and scale possible through technology and the depth and nuance that emerges through human attention and care.
The Practice Ahead
The craft of leadership in digital environments creates new tensions that leaders must learn to hold simultaneously: moving fast while building deep relationships, scaling decisions while maintaining personal touch, and optimizing efficiency while preserving space for emergence and experimentation. These tensions cannot be resolved through choosing one side over another but, instead, require an ongoing, dynamic ability to decide on tradeoffs in situations involving human judgment and algorithmic recommendation, when and how to standardize or customize, when and how to intervene or allow systems to self-organize.
Such a leadership practice demands new forms of organizational learning that extend beyond individual skill development to encompass a shared capacity to sense and respond to the subtle dynamics of human-technology integration, particularly crucial in creative organizations where individual artistry must align with collaborative vision. Supporting the emergence of a collective craft consciousness will allow organizations or ecosystems to create cultures where teams can experiment with different combinations of human and technological approaches, where failure becomes learning rather than judgment, and where the quality of attention and care and creative experimentation becomes as valued as the speed of execution.
As we launch this exploration of crafting leadership, the central question isn’t whether recent technological, work, and social transformations will change how we lead – they already have. The question, rather, is whether we’ll develop the craftsmanship necessary to lead well in environments where human judgment, data insights, platform dynamics, network effects, and AI combine to create new possibilities for organizational effectiveness, social and economic impact, and human flourishing.
References
Russell L. Ackoff (1999) Ackoff’s Best: His Classic Writings on Management, John Wiley & Sons.
Margaret S. Archer (2007) Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge University Press.
Matthew B. Crawford (2009) Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Penguin.
Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, & William Damon (2001) Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet, Basic Books.
David Goodhart (2020) Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, Free Press.
Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer (2020) No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, Penguin Press.
jcarlos (2025, January 7) “Dylan Field Steers Figma’s Journey from Startup to Design Powerhouse,” Key Executives;
https://www.thekeyexecutives.com/2025/01/07/dylan-field-steers-figmas-journey-from-startup-to-design-powerhouse/
Peter Korn (2013) Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman, David R. Godine Publisher.
Lily Mae Lazarus (2025, August 1) “Dylan Field, Figma’s 33-year-old cofounder, is a former LinkedIn intern who launched the $68 billion Wall Street darling with $100k from Peter Thiel,” Fortune.com;
https://fortune.com/2025/08/01/figma-ipo-cofounder-dylan-field-former-linkedin-intern-peter-thiel-fellowship/
Alexander Lee (2025, June 9) “Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney hopes to outbuild YouTube, outmaneuver Apple and outlast the metaverse hype,” Digiday;
https://digiday.com/media/epic-games-ceo-tim-sweeney-hopes-to-outbuild-youtube-outmaneuver-apple-and-outlast-the-metaverse-hype/
Donella H. Meadows (2008) Thinking in Systems: A Primer, Chelsea Green Publishing.
Danny Rimer (2025, July 31) “Figma Goes Public: Thirteen Unforgettable Years with Dylan Field,” Index Ventures;
https://www.indexventures.com/perspectives/figma-goes-public-thirteen-unforgettable-years-with-dylan-field/
Peter M. Senge (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Doubleday.
Richard Sennett (2008) The Craftsman, Yale University Press.
UBS (2024) UBS House of Craft;Retrieved from https://www.ubs.com/us/en/wealth-management/about-us/craft/hoc-us.html
Variety (2024) “Ted Sarandos Recalls Reed Hastings’ Original Pitch to Him About Netflix’s Streaming Future: ‘It Sounded Nuts to Me’”;
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/ted-sarandos-reed-hastings-original-pitch-netflix-streaming-it-sounded-nuts-1236516486/
Karl E. Weick (1998) “Improvisation as a mindset for organizational analysis,” Organization Science, 9(5), 543-555.