Wednesday, June 15, 2016

“Leadership Master” Book Introduction Chapter 2: Creative Leadership

11:35 PM  Pearl Zhu  No comments

The characteristics of Creative Leadership show the following dispositions: visionary, adaptable, competent, courageous, and curious, etc.

 Digital is the age of innovation. And creativity is the #1 wanted skill in the 21st century. Therefore, creative leadership has also emerged as one of the most important digital leadership trends to improve leadership effectiveness and accelerate business & society advancement. But more specifically, what is creative leadership all about, and who are creative leaders?
Creative leaders are Out-of-Box thinker: Creative leaders are forward thinking and capable of predicting future trends, manage the presence, and delegate the past. Realizing that what has worked in the past isn’t today’s best solution and having the vision to see what is has now become. In each context, a creative leader is always conscious of the changes needed to connect the past with the future. They are flexible enough to adapt to the situation and the players involved. Creative leaders are also resourceful. That is, they have multidimensional competencies to formulate creative alternatives or solutions to resolve problems, to show versatility and adaptability in response to unpredictable or unanticipated circumstances.


Creative leadership is described as “Adaptability meets Agility”: The characteristics of Creative Leadership show the following dispositions: visionary, adaptable, competent, courageous, and curious, etc. Creative Leadership requires the strength to review a recommendation to a problem or decisions. It encourages the culture of innovation, with consistent expectation for innovative solutions while leading people to grow beyond existing levels of performance and capability. It combines restless dissatisfaction with the current state coupled with the excitement of leading individuals or groups to find solutions that will produce great results.

The qualities of innovative leaders: An innovative leader today is a superior problem solver, who has to create, manage, and exploit innovation networks and business ecosystem. An innovative leader has the transdisciplinary knowledge and cross-functional experience to connect the dots via unconventional connections, promote a healthy climate for innovation, inspire team members to create a portfolio of new ideas, concepts, and scenarios, and coach team members on innovation management practices and how to overcome the barriers to innovation. An effective innovation leader has the right mix of soft leadership qualities and hard business and technology expertise, with a strong focus, perseverance, and capabilities of doing the opposite of the crowd with confidence, with the goal to lead forward via a clear vision.

Being a good manager is not enough, being a creative and effective leader is a journey full of pitfalls. It takes courage, persistence, and discipline to practice creativity as a high-level thinking, to manage innovation with higher success rate, and to amplify leadership influence not via brute force, but through unique leadership strength.

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