‘All are Cs’ – ‘Creative Leadership’ Part 4

Real Leaders drawing on the Right Minds

Rene Magritte -  'Le Fils de L'Homme'

Following the series of articles about the Creative Leadership and how Leaders must treat themselves and the people who are engaged and collaborate with them, they need to rely more than ever on the intelligence and resourcefulness of their staff. Collaboration is not a “nice to have” organizational philosophy. It is an essential ingredient for organizational survival and success.

The first priority of leadership is to engage the right people, at the right times, to the right degree in creative work. That engagement starts when the leader recasts the role of employees. Rather than simply roll up their sleeves and execute top-down strategy, employees must contribute with imagination.

Creative Leaders must have the capacity to enable their teams to be more creative and to be the right example, influencing their people.

This involves, allowing people to work out their own way of being creative. Again, the creativity profiling tools work really well here in helping people understand their approach to creativity.

The practice of leadership is setting the right example, providing vision and guidance and doing everything that is necessary for the people in the organization to succeed. The really difficult part for the Art of leadership is, knowing what to do and when, why, and how to do it and this needs practice.

Left Brain Right Brain thinking skills for Creativity & Innovation

1. Analytical intelligence includes how you frame a problem. Also how you evaluate an idea, including critical thinking.
2. Artistic intelligence includes using your imagination, visual thinking, and how you envision possibilities.
3. Relational intelligence includes how your idea connects or impacts others within a system. Also how you collaborate and co-create with others.
4. Operational intelligence includes planning and organizing; how you turn an idea into action.

 Creative Leaders know that we live in Connection Economy, and they understand that they have to learn to connect to everything that surrounds them.

For leaders, the administration of responsibility and execution of tasks may not be glamorous, but it is essential. Without a strong attention to detail and adherence to goals and objectives, organizations go awry. At the same time a leader needs to manage not just detail but also people. Managing people involves putting them into positions where they can succeed and supporting them in that effort.

As with so many things in life, leaders need to pick their moments. Not every situation calls for a leader to act; sometimes a leader does more by standing back and letting the team decide what to do. Though, in times of crisis, the leader may need to be front and center, making decisions, providing hands-on advice, and taking action to help get things done. Knowing what to do and when to do it, comes with experience, but knowing how to act and the degree of involvement to use is something that cannot be prescribed exactly; it will be perceived by others as an art form.

Leaders work, react, connect through diversity and allow people to pursue their passions, also to tap ideas from all ranks, they are curious with everything and the most important, connect the seemingly unconnected.

Creative Leaders like Artists, give us a taste of the mystery and help make sense of the world, also they do not view the world through Scarcity.

Great Leaders like Great Artists have their own style, their own trade mark and they are not copying.

Creative Leader engagement:

Asks inspiring questions, allowing ideas to bubble up from the workforce, helps others succeed, use metaphors, analogies, and stories—to help teams conceptualize together and get people with different backgrounds and expertise to work together.

Encourage individuals to gain diverse experiences that will increase their creativity and  provide sufficient time and resources for exploration.

Accept the inevitability and utility of failure, create psychological safety to maximize learning from failure, recognize the different kinds of failure and how they can be useful and create good mechanisms for filtering ideas without killing dead-end projects.

Motivate others with intellectual challenge, clear paths through the bureaucracy for creative ideas, allow people to do ‘good work’, show the higher purpose of projects whenever possible.

Creative Leaders should always ask questions to themselves, in order to continue progress. Some example questions are:

• Are you constantly looking for new goals, something new to accomplish?
• Do you like to look at what already exists and ask “What if?”
• When you try something new and different, does it make you feel smarter?
• Do you enjoy teaching someone a new skill?
• Are you good at problem solving?

 Some other topics and advices for Art Leadership are:

• Asking why.
• Thinking of new ways to do things. Don’t be afraid to challenge traditional thinking. (Just like thinking outside of the box).
• Maintain the motivation.
• When something challenges or strikes your interest, go with it and find the twist.
• Study the arts and artists, whose reason-for-being is to look at what everyone else is looking at and see what no one else sees.

 Topics of ‘Art InSide Business’ seminars for Creative Leadership

• Develop Creative Self-Confidence.
• Develop Creative Personal Marketing Skills.
• Develop EQ (Emotional Intelligence) and connect it with IQ.
• Seminar about Acceptability, Acceptance, and <Collection of things>.
• Develop an automated - unconscious reaction and more <sophisticated> dealing between executives, business partners and employees.
• Develop and create better working conditions.
• Focusing on elements and skills that will dominate in Business on 2020, in line with the World Economic Forum, such as Critical Thinking, Complex Problem Solving, Emotional Intelligence, Crisis and Decision Making, Cognitive Flexibility.
• Many workshops for performance at a practical level (Practicum is of great importance for organizations-companies), better assimilation of objectives and seminars of the program.
• Observing, Questioning, Associating Networking, Experimenting.
• Focus on making the participants/Leaders to become innovate also in their everyday lives.
• Creating questions for Innovation.
• Development of <Adaptability>.
• Seminars to connect different elements and things and how to use more successful image/pictures at social media.
• Seminars for better engagement with customers.

Mike Petrakis

 Next articles, ‘Creative Management’, ‘All are Cs’ (Part 5), ‘How Images help us to understand and communicate’, ‘Art and Business commons’.

Next posts... 'Creativity and Leadership', Part 2, 'Elements of Creative Management'

‘All are Cs’ – ‘Creative Leadership’ Part 3

Real Leaders are Real Artists

Continuing the series of articles with reference to the most important characteristics of soft skills and remaining  on creativity, which I think is the most important skill, we will analyze 'Creative Leadership' because a remarkable Leader must have practiced and developed this element.

 Creativity in Leadership is an important skill, whether he/she collaborates, communicates, develops the vision of the company / organization, solves important issues-problems, or negotiates, even when he/she contacts and connects with other executives, with employees, with clients and competitors. Creativity is also essential for keeping the balance between IQ and EQ. Leaders have gut instinct, focus and embrace, are imaginative, accept criticism, seeking for progress, balance themselves and their team, motivate people/employees, aren’t afraid to expose their thoughts, being outside of the box, being authentic. Moreover they are visionaries, their work has purpose and they take actions. 

That is what artists do. 

Leaders:

• Explore – express and experiment on new trends in our society, whether it is technology, art, etc
• Steal an idea, like an artist does, recreating and remaking it, presenting it through their own vision.
• Function through critical thinking and view because their mind is always in a creative process.

Creative leaders know how to manage bright people...raising questions, connecting different people, elements and ideas and how to connect with everything that surrounds us.

Creative Leaders connect and bridge the current with the past, the past with the future, the old with the new, seeking the unexplored just like Artists.

They refuse to conform. They seek a better way. Such attitudes lie at the heart of the quality movement, predicated on a faith in continuous improvement.

Real leaders don’t try to transform others, without first transforming themselves. First of all they know who they are and what they stand for, striving towards excellence, based on their talents and potential. Leadership also requires humility, deep listening, creative expression, the willingness to step into the unknown and risk failure.

Great leaders like great artists, give us perspective of our social condition and greater appreciation of our world, ourselves and choices. Moreover, they challenge, excite, comfort, and are motivated by intrinsic to extrinsic, transferring this motivation also to people around them.

Leaders and artists create space for shared experiences by forging a sense of community. Both animate social encounters. They can change our lives essentially, having the capacity to come up with ideas for solving problems and exploiting opportunities.

Innovation is the ability to turn those creative ideas into new products and services.

Great Leaders’ way of conduct and reaction is similar to that of an artist.

Imagination, Curiosity, Intent, focus, engagement, authenticity, criticism, form and reform, skill, representation, context and purpose are elements of a great Leader.

On the next article we continue with Creative Leadership, also with the topics of ‘Art InSide Business’, focusing on the training elements and services of my program, just for leaders.

Mike Petrakis

End of part 3 (Next,‘All are Cs’ – 'Creativity and Leadership', part 2)

As mentioned in the previous article, with reference to the necessity and value of the development of soft skills for today and in the future, starting from the most important element, the creativity, we continue by referring in the whole series of articles to the art / creative industry, combined with science and research and evidence that I have also presented in my lectures, seminars, collaborations and my artistic career.

Creativity is to see the world with a different eye, to create questions, to interpret and to simplify the elements around you and your feelings. 

‘Creativity is a Learning Processes’