A friend sent me a picture recently of a poster with the caption “easily distracted by music and cats.” She added: “you have to buy this!” The image showed a woman holding a cat with musical notes filling her thoughts.
She knows me well.
I’ve always been a music person. Some of my earliest memories are of playing vinyl in our living room, and discovering music always led somewhere else. Bob Dylan led to On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Kate Bush led me to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Rufus Wainwright led to Turner and regular escapes to art galleries. A Vogue subscription, a love of female stories and a passion for fashion inspired GCSE art coursework gave me genuine respite from exam pressure.
That’s where creative passions have always lived for me. As a way through, and a way out, with music always as the starting point.
Even this weekend, I put on my essentials playlist and went on a journey through previous decades and musical loves while doing the chores.
The tension I’ve been sitting with
I’ve been reflecting a lot on creativity this year.
It keeps appearing in the books I’ve been reading, and as I work on balancing my health, I know that creative pursuits genuinely improve my wellbeing. Even a quick five-minute burst on the guitar resets a working-from-home afternoon.
But there’s a tension there.
I’m a self-described creative person who studied the arts (with a side of economics) and has spent her career in numbers, in an industry nobody associates with creativity.
Financial services. Impact investment. Fund management. Leadership. Not exactly what comes to mind when someone says “creative.”
More creative than you think
So how creative can money really be? Turns out, very.
In my earlier career in invoice finance, I’d regularly face businesses in crisis. We’d be asked to pay wages for a company that was failing and had to weigh up every possibility: bring in advisors, release enough cashflow to complete a specific piece of work before closing the doors, explore a sale, negotiate with suppliers. Every situation was different. There was no template. You had to find a way through that didn’t exist yet, drawing on all of your and your colleagues’ experience.
That, as I now know, is creativity. It just doesn’t look like it from the outside – and I don’t think I appreciated it at the time.
For a while, I felt like my career didn’t fit with this naturally creative side of me, but as I took on leadership roles, I could see how creativity, emotional intelligence and self-awareness – those most human aspects of my character were what led me to excel in these roles. I could balance the technical with the personal.
As I repositioned my career for scale and impact, I drew on my creativity more than I realised at the time. Designing product launches under pressure quickly. Building a pipeline from scratch and choosing to do it with personality rather than a corporate brand. Finding ways to improve customer service with the resources I actually had rather than the ones I wished for. Looking back, creativity was threading through all of it – and I slowly began to name it that way.
When I came across the job description for an Investment Director role in impact investment locally, one word stopped me. Amongst the expected requirements, there it was: “committed, creative, precise and driven.” I couldn’t remember ever seeing creativity listed so explicitly in a finance role before. It rang completely true – and it was part of why I applied. That role is the one I’m in now!
Building Greater Cambridge Impact as Investment Director has brought plenty of this. Legal negotiations in fundraising rarely go to plan, and when something unexpected lands on your desk at the eleventh hour, you have to think differently, quickly, and without a blueprint. Deal structures fall apart. Fund models need a complete rethink. There have been moments where I was simultaneously recruiting for a role and fundraising to pay for it.
None of that comes with a template. You just have to find a way through.
Your reflection: Where is the creativity hiding in your role? What problems have you solved this year that had no obvious answer?
Creativity and leadership make good friends
What I keep coming back to is this: you are creative even if you don’t think you are.
A lot of early-career leaders in finance and professional services don’t see themselves as creative people. The word feels like it belongs to artists, designers, people with paint on their hands. But creativity is also bravery. It’s self-awareness. It’s the willingness to try something that might not work.
Those are essential leadership qualities.
I picked up my guitar again this year, after a long gap. My fingers hurt, I was rusty, and there were moments of genuine frustration at how the ability to play long-loved tunes had disappeared. But I kept going. Focused on my most favourite tune to play (Blackbird by The Beatles if you’re asking), and slowly pieced it all together again, step by step. Much like those cashflow crises or fundraising dilemmas.
I’m even contemplating finding a way to play live again, which honestly terrifies me more than any investor conversation! That process of returning to something difficult, the perseverance, the resilience, the willingness to feel like a beginner again, are abilities that make everyone a better leader.
Grainy picture from my one and only live performance. November 2011, Chorlton Irish Club.
There’s also something to be said for what creativity does for mental health. It reduces anxiety. It creates space for emotional processing. It gives meaning when everything else feels uncertain. Creativity isn’t a nice-to-have when you’re building a first-time impact investment business in an environment of uncertainty. It’s how you find your way through.
Your reflection: How are you making space for creative pursuits outside of work? What would you return to if you gave yourself permission?
The artists that made me
As I’ve been pondering creativity in leadership and finance, I’ve also been reflecting on artists that have influenced my own creative journey. I’ve been reading books by or about these four artists this year and so they’ve loomed large over this piece.
Each represents something different about what it means to create on your own terms. Here’s a suggested playlist for your next creative moment. It’s an eclectic mix and a perfect encapsulation of the unexpected roads music has taken me down.
Barbra Streisand – I’m Still Here. A Broadway showstopper that became a personal anthem when I was 14 (though I’m not entirely sure what I made of it at the time!). A direct response to anyone who ever questioned Barbra’s right to take up space. Barbra stands for executing a creative vision across multiple domains, and never apologising for any of it, and this captures it perfectly. If you listen to the 1994 live version, you even get a few bars of Don’t Rain on My Parade for more showstopping empowerment.
Kate Bush – Moments of Pleasure. Kate’s whole career is an exercise in total experimentation, doing things nobody expected and not asking permission. This song is a reflection on the people and experiences that shaped her. Creativity and connection, woven together. Who knows what the story of ‘George the Wipe’ was but I know we all have similar stories in our own lives.
Joni Mitchell – For the Roses. Joni’s reminder that you don’t have to play for worldwide adoration. You can play for the soundhole and your knee. The creative work has value regardless of the audience. Also, this is the first gatefold album I remember seeing on that living room floor!
Kae Tempest – People’s Faces. Building on the themes in his writing, this is about finding hope and connection in a chaotic world. 7 years old now and feels as relevant as ever. Always crosses my mind at a train station. This is creativity as a way through difficult times, and toward each other. I’m savouring his book On Connection at the moment, trying not to rush through it.
And these are the four companion books:
My name is Barbra, Barbra Streisand’s autobiography
Running Up That Hill: 50 Visions of Kate Bush by Tom Doyle
Travelling: on the path of Joni Mitchell by Ann Powers
On Connection by Kae Tempest
Questions for your own reflection
- Where is the surprise creativity in your industry?
- How do you use creativity at work, even in ways you’ve never named as creative before?
- What creative pursuits have you set aside that might be worth returning to?
- What would change if you started describing yourself as a creative person?
- Who are the creative figures that have shaped how you think and work?
What’s your relationship with creativity? I’d love to know whether this resonates, and whether you see yourself as a creative person, at work or outside it.
Feel free to share this with your fellow creative friends.
You can email me at hello@fayemcdonough.com and add your email to be notified when I publish (at the moment that’s monthly on a Friday towards the end of the month).
Faye McDonough 
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