The New Leader

Renee Kosiarek

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781631572784
• eBook ISBN: 9781631572791
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Leaders in the 21st-century must learn to solve problems and motivate followers with a combination of creativity, leadership, and effective change. In The New Leader: Harnessing Creativity to Promote Change, readers will develop an understanding of the relationship between creativity, leadership, and change. They will analyze the creative process, learn how to develop a creative culture, and understand effective leadership styles that promote creativity and change. They will explore training to enhance creativity and leadership, and develop practical ways to create an environment that encourages positive growth. The book offers simple techniques to enhance creativity and leadership immediately, while also pointing to long-term changes that will bring even more success. Stories, reflection questions, and theories are intertwined to help the reader develop sound strategies to lead with enhanced creativity. The book will help an overwhelmed leader learn engaging tools to lead change, while encouraging disengaged leaders to try new methods to revive their leadership and accomplish a motivating vision. In the end, leaders will become more effective, engaging, and transformational by adopting the ideas in the book. They will serve as a model for creativity, create spaces that enhance creative growth, and encourage cultures where employees are free to create positive changes for their organizations.

CHAPTER 1

Creativity

The Crucial Ingredient for Success

Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people. It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century.

—President Obama, March 11, 2010

Status quo, you know, is Latin for “the mess we’re in.”

—Ronald Reagan

The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.

—Warren Bennis

So much has changed in the last 20 years.

• We have become an interconnected world, networked in ways we did not anticipate. Customers, leaders, and employees live and work all over the world.

• We have access to data and information on nearly every subject. This gives clients a chance to easily find solutions to common problems online. It also makes it easier for clients to find your competition and assess their strengths compared with yours.

• Sometimes, three generations of employees work side by side. This presents a host of different challenges and rewards, but certainly can make leadership more complex.

• Employees are now on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Clients, bosses, and peers expect immediate responses to problems via email, text, and phone calls. And employees are burned out and disengaged.

• People are expected to communicate in new and unique ways. We want organizations to be able to share information in 140 characters or less. But they also must create compelling stories discussing their purpose and successes in order to stand out and beat the competition.

• Marketing and sales are more complicated. Social media, LinkedIn, face-to-face networking and affiliations bring success in new ways.

• Services are being phased out as technology advances. Automated tools and vast access to cheap freelance work make it easier for clients to do things that were once hired out for larger dollars. Companies must continue to develop creative service offerings in order to stay ahead.

Unfortunately, leadership has not evolved at the pace of everything else. We are faced with unique problems every day in our workplaces, and yet we still rely on hierarchical or sometimes situational leadership. We do not know how to tackle our problems with creativity, and we are burned out looking for the right answers to move our organizations and teams forward.

All too often, we are trying to lead people on the basis of outmoded concepts of hierarchical leadership, relying on power and authority to motivate workers. Leaders and organizations are clinging to the status quo because it worked in the past. Rather than building on the unique strengths of their employees, managers push people to produce quick and dependable work. Some micromanage while others delegate everything. They parcel out bonuses and expect full engagement. Or they work in a hierarchical, structured way, leaving little room for challenge and creativity.

This type of leadership may have worked in the past, but it will not guide us into the future. Top down, hierarchical leadership no longer works. Neither does micromanaging.

Recently, Harvard Medical School surveyed 72 senior leaders and found nearly all of them reported signs of burnout.¹ Gallup reports that only 30 percent of employees in the United States and only 13 percent across the globe feel engaged at work. And fewer than 25 percent of white-collar workers feel connected to their organization’s mission. When individuals are not fully engaged, organizational performance suffers.²

But there is a way out. This involves creativity and the creation of original and useful ideas.

Creativity is about bringing new, novel, and useful ideas, thoughts, processes, and sometimes art and music to life. When leaders embrace creativity, they bring original and useful ideas to their organization. These ideas may enhance followers’ motivation and performance, or boost the success of the organization.

Creativity and creative problem solving make us feel alive; they are part of our humanity. We are the only species that is able to be truly creative. We come up with new solutions and use our brains to discover tools, technologies, and ideas that other animals simply cannot imagine. When we produce new ideas, we feel alive.

Creativity, in fact, is often seen as a peak experience and has been associated with strong mental health and stability.³ Creative people are typically “engaged, motivated and open to the world.”⁴ And this type of engagement is what we need in order to enhance our organizations and the people within them.

Try It Yourself

Grab a piece of paper and pen. If possible, also find a comb.

For the next 3 minutes, create a list of 30 or more uses for a comb. Imagine the comb as a tool, utensil, and building block.

Have fun, experiment, and enjoy. There are no wrong answers. Do not censor yourself.

When complete, share this exercise and your results with others.

Now, notice how you feel. Is there a shift in your energy and enthusiasm? Do you feel a bit energized and playful? A bit more alive?

If you are like students in my undergraduate classes, you will notice that creativity brings a palpable shift in energy. Don’t we want to create that shift more often in our lives and organizations?

Creativity can also create a sense of accomplishment and success. In surveys and testimonials, people overwhelmingly say that they feel a sense of pride when they share what they create. Some even believe that creativity is an essential component to fulfillment and yearn to create new things and bring innovative ideas to life. As noted psychologist Rollo May says, “If you do not express your own original ideas, or listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself.” Psychologist and author Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi agrees, stating that “perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy . . . provide as profound a sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves.”⁵

Creativity also enhances a person’s sense of value and worth according to some studies, including Adobe’s 2012⁶ study on people’s attitudes and beliefs about creativity at work, school, and home. In this study, Adobe surveyed 5,000 adults: 1,000 from the United States, 1,000 from the United Kingdom, 1,000 from Germany, 1,000 from France, and 1,000 from Japan. The findings were dramatic. Over 80 percent of participants felt that being able to create enabled them to make a difference in their lives, and nearly two-thirds of the people surveyed felt that creativity is valuable to society. As well, over 75 percent of those in the United States felt that being able to create enabled them to make a difference in the lives of others. “The ability to create defines who I am as a person,” said almost 70 percent of U.S. respondents.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of people believe that they are not making the most of their creativity. In fact, more than 75 percent of people globally believe that they are not living up to their creative potential.

As well, most people do not describe themselves as creative individuals. In a recent survey of over 5,000 people, only about 50 percent of respondents in the United States described themselves as creative. In France, the numbers were even lower, with only 36 percent of respondents describing themselves as creative. In Japan, only about 19 percent of those surveyed believed they were creative.⁷ And yet scholars and creatives agree that “creative confidence will be a necessary mindset for doing business.”⁸

Most people know that creativity is an inherent and important value to enhance businesses in the 21st century. In 2010, IBM asked more than 1,500 CEOs questions about leadership and creativity.⁹ These 1,500 CEOs consistently reported that creativity is the single most important leadership competency for enterprises facing the complexity of global commerce today.

In the last several years, politicians, educators, and business leaders in the United States have recognized that creativity is an essential component for economic success. Business and graduate schools see creativity as a desirable factor in admission decisions, and even medical schools are changing the way they educate to accommodate the need for creativity more formally.

Innovative organizations enjoy greater market share than do less innovative ones,¹⁰ and some believe that creativity is a greater predictor of success than intelligence.¹¹ With our rising global problems and the complex challenges that we have before us, creativity is needed now more than ever. Jobs that don’t require creativity are beginning to be automated, and positions and leadership require creativity in order to solve complex ambiguous problems that machines cannot solve.

Creative problem solving can help us navigate through difficult problems and motivate our workforce. Millennials and Generation-Z’ers are moving into the workforce. Many of these people are no longer motivated to work solely for a strong income and security. Rather, they have motivations that are distinct and unique. They yearn to collaborate, contribute, and be engaged. Creativity helps these workers feel that their work matters and gives them opportunities to collaborate on new and novel ideas.

Not only does creativity enhance the livelihood, self-esteem, self-confidence, and motivation of many of our workers, but it also helps us solve complex and ambiguous problems like customer relations, effective marketing in the 21st century, or strong teamwork in a global organization. You can use creativity in many ways in an organization including:

• Developing new and original ways to gain customers

• Determining original and useful ways to hire the best and brightest people for the organization despite limited resources

• Creating new and appropriate methods to retain those individuals, despite limited resources

• Designing new and useful ways to display material, create marketing ads, reach out to new generations of customers, determine branding, and use social media effectively

• Learning and applying original ways to make a grumpy customer happier, keep an old client in her organization, or renew a store that seems lackluster compared wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Creativity: The Crucial Ingredient for Success
• Chapter 2 Finding and Using Creativity in Your Organization
• Chapter 3 Strong Leadership: The Foundations
• Chapter 4 The Transformational, Creative Leader
• Chapter 5 Cultures that Enhance Creativity and Change
• Chapter 6 Collaboration: The Key to Enhanced Creativity
• Chapter 7 Creating Spaces to Enhance Engagement and Success
• Chapter 8 Creativity and Leadership Training that Inspires Positive Growth
• Chapter 9 10 Immediate Shifts to Become a More Creative and Effective Leader
• Index