What is creative leadership?

Описание: What is creative leadership?

Creative leadership is the ability to enable teams to confidently generate ideas with strategic and innovative value.
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► Read the complete guide to creative leadership: https://ebz-coaching.com/creative-lea...
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How do you develop creative leadership skills?

First by knowing how and why the creative process works, second by practicing it, and third by passing it on to your team.

Here is what you need to know to get started:

Creativity is not a talent, it’s a process based on two steps - nobody is born more or less creative than others, the so-called creative types have just figured out intuitively how this two-step process works, but this doesn’t mean you cannot do the same.

The goal of step 1 of the creative process is to give you as much material to work with as you can, and by material I mean ideas.

Step one is also called divergent thinking and here you just go for quantity. You need to throw in all ideas that you can come up with, regardless of how ridiculous or absurd they sound - note everything down. Remember: quantity is what you are going for in this step, not making sense.

The goal of step 2, also called convergent thinking, is to look at the material you have generated in step 1 and try to find connections between different concepts that you have, ways of looking at the problem or at the solution from different perspectives that would generate new meaning.

That is also how several products that you use on an everyday basis have been developed.

Take the case of Georges de Mestral for example - a Swiss man who one day went for a walk in the woods and then when he came back, noticed that he had a bunch of little seeds with little spikes stuck onto his jumper.

He could have let it go but instead he made a connection between the texture of the jumper and the texture of the seed that generated new meaning.

And that helped him come up with the idea for the company he became famous for and that you know: Velcro.

That may have been by accident, but the process still stands - and it doesn't mean that you need to just hope you and your team will come up with something and will just stumble upon the process.
Once you know how it works you can actively apply it.

This 2-step process is valid both for group ideation techniques, like brainstorming, or for coming up with ideas on your own.

And on that point, a research published in the journal of personality and social psychology shows that individual ideation - coming up with ideas on your own - is invariably more effective than group ideation techniques, like brainstorming again.

In other words, groups are worse at coming up with ideas than individuals - counterintuitive as it may be.

The reason is due to the amount of social pressures within a team. Simply put, you want to look professional at all times and are afraid of throwing in an idea that could make you look silly.

If everyone thinks that way, then, you end up with a handful of very conservative ideas that you probably have seen before, and that are very poor material to work with in the optic of our 2-step process.

Creative leadership also means knowing about this, and knowing how to go about it.

For example, if it's true that everyone is better at having ideas won their own, ask them to come up with ideas beforehand and group the ideas that everyone has come up with individually afterwards.

At that point nobody knows who came up with what idea, so everyone will be free to comment on each idea and to build upon each idea. What this does is circumvent social pressures all together.

There is much, much more to know and a lot more to developing creative leadership skills. So if you’re interested in becoming a better creative leader, I want you to head over to my site and look for the creative leadership guide:

It’s a practice- and science-backed collection of podcast episodes, content and videos designed specifically to help you develop better creative leadership skills, and to enable you to develop better more innovative ideas at a faster pace and on command.

You can find it here: https://ebz-coaching.com/creative-lea...

Thank you and talk soon.

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