Let's get a sense of 'Creativity' first. Creativity is much broader and more universal that what people typically consider the 'artistic' fields (1). In principle, creativity can be thought of as using our imagination to create something new in the world. It comes into play wherever and and whenever you have opportunity to generate new ideas, solutions, and approaches. Anyone who observes their surroundings well and tries to connect elements via various possible permutations and combinations to give shape to something entirely new, is a creative soul.
In the business world, creativity manifests itself as innovation that can change lives of billions of people.
The innovation can come in the form of new technologies, new products, new processess, and new way of working. Last 3-4 decades have witnessed leaps of imaginations coming to life in the form of companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon and much more. However, the innovation itself does not come into existence overnight. It takes a lot of experimentation, effort, and resilience at every step.
But, at the core of every innovation lies someone's (individuals or groups) concious effort in observing the environment and connecting things in a way that may not have been done before. It also implies that the creativity does not grow in silos. One has to be an active part of the environment and ecosystem to be able connect different elements of them together to build something new. The 'Direct Experiences' is what helps humans to get the all rounded sense of their immediate environments.
Go Beyond Being The Passive Observer.
So what does Creativity have to do with Leadership?
As a leader of your organisation, you have tremendous amount of opportunity to build a creatively confident organisation. Creativity is primarily about observing our environments and finding out new ways of organising the elements and their interactions. The topmost leaders of any organisation are usually the people who have built them from scratch. They have seen the business environments, their own processes, people, and technology evolving through time. Thus, usually as we go towards the top of an organisation, people have greater access to the immediate information (that they are open to be receptive about) as well as the historical knowledge of inner workings and evolution of the organisation and how it connects to today's environment.
Thus, people placed higher in heirarchy usually have tremendous opportunity to impart innovation in their companies. As we do down to the susbsystems of an organisation, people have limited access to informations available that can affect the overall organisations. What leaders can is to impart a culture of creativity in the organisation at every level that helps people take risks and strech their abilities.
This can come in the form of creating new ways of how the organisation approaches thinking about new products, new ways and processes of developing products, new ways of operating within the particular subystem and interoperability between various sub-systems.
This is something we can call as culture of innovation.
Creative processes contagious
Creative processes are usually contagious and people from all the levels of organsations get hooked to these when they are open to it. As a leader, you are required to bring people together who have good observational mindset and openness towards creative endeavours.
It falls upon the leaders to unleash the inner reserves of the people help broaden their portfolio of creative experiences and endeavours. To build creative oraganizations, you need to build creative confidence among key players, one individual at a time(1).
Source - Creative Confidence
The place to start is with you, as an individual. Even when your ultimate goal is to instill creative confidence in your group, your department, your peers, or your organisation, you need to start by focusing on your own. If you can unleash your creativity and lead by example, it will be much moore pursuasive and just trying to talk to others in changing their behaviour (1).
Creative confidence of leadership matters because it helps infuse a creative confidence in their organisations at all levels.
It is the creative confidence of the leaders that has resulted into Amazon, Apple, IBM, Google, Facebook, Starbucks, Tesla and many such inspirational companies in the world.
(1) Creative Confidence - Tom Kelley & David Kelley
Will be sharing more insights on leadership in upcoming newsletters.
