CREATIVE LEADERSHIP STUDY

The engine that drive personal and corporate change.

-         Creativity is the basic tool for change.

-         Everywhere you see change, you can’t miss creativity

-         In the beginning, creativity brought change to God’s style of leadership.

-         Scriptural speaking, to create refers to “extraordinarily exalted activity”

o   The Hebrew and Greek words for create are respectively, bara and kitzo,

-          In an increasingly change-driven world, leaders are called upon to evolve their mind-sets and skill-sets to reflect and serve the demands of the new millennium.

Creative thinking and problem solving are shown to be indispensable to leaders who want to thrive in times of complexity and change.

These post-modern environments require leaders with new mind-sets and skill sets; leadership must be flexible enough to not simply permit change to occur, but to help initiate and then manage it.

we propose a new leadership paradigm, that of creative leadership, which is grounded in both the rich history of the leadership field and decades of work training professionals in creative thinking and creative problem solving.

The seemingly disparate fields of leadership and creativity are linked together by change; leadership is requiring it, and creativity helps leaders achieve it.

Ultimately, creative leadership is about establishing a climate that encourages our innate creativity, and provides leaders with the skills to facilitate processes, such as problem solving, in new and useful ways. (The place of e-learning)

Why We Need Creative Leadership?

As we are more than a decade into the 21st century, it has become abundantly clear that we are experiencing change at a level never before seen in human history.

 A brief examination of some of the trends in the new millennium underscore this fact, such as shorter and shorter product life cycles (e.g., high tech products undergo fundamental redesign every 6 to 12 months),

erosion of a stable and predictable work life (e.g., school age children today can expect to change jobs 11 times before they hit their mid-forties),

and more than 60% (although not confirmed) of the Nigerian workforce now hold jobs considered to be part of the creative economy (compared to roughly 10% in 1900).

Based on these trends, many national education experts and Fortune 500 company leaders now argue that creativity and innovation have become crucial 21st century skills (National Center on Education and the Economy, 2008; Trilling & Fadel, 2009).

We agree and contend that leading in times and contexts that are increasingly complex require leaders to adopt new and more creative mind-sets and skillsets – the need for e-learning

A recent major study by IBM (IBM Corporation, 2010) found that the complexity manifest in today’s world is only expected to increase, and that a primary concern of CEO’s globally lies in their ability to initiate and manage change.

According to the over 1500 CEO’s that participated in the study, “creativity is the most important leadership quality”

This finding is echoed in a recent article by Newsweek (Bronson & Merryman, 2010) which reinforced the fact that not only is creativity a “part of normal brain function”, but “that lack of creativity – not having loads of it – is [a] real risk factor” when it comes to initiating and managing change, a key 21st century leadership skill.

We need to acknowledge that creativity is both being seen as increasingly important to leadership practice, and to showcase the fact that leading creatively involves a learnable skill-set that is available to everyone.

Creative Leadership Defined

At the most basic level, creativity can be defined as the production of something “novel

and useful” (Puccio, Murdock & Mance, 2007, p. 21).

This definition can be applied to products, policies or processes.

If we understand leadership as being about “positively influencing people, contexts and outcomes” (Puccio et al, 2007, p. xvi), we can more specifically define creative leadership in the following manner:

·         The ability to deliberately engage one’s imagination to define and guide a group towards a novel goal—a direction that is new for the group.

·         As a consequence of bringing about this creative change, creative leaders have a profoundly positive influence on their context (i.e., workplace, community, school, family, etc.) and the individuals in that situation. (Puccio, Mance & Murdock, 2011)

My own take on the definition of Creative Leadership is as follows:

Ø  It is the ability to use available resources to solve complex issues.

Ø  It is employing the invisible towards solving the impossible.

Ø  It is using unseen ideas to solve existing challenges

Ø  It is exploring imaginative capabilities.

Ø  It is engaging the mind to draw virtues inherent in the divine.