Now companies are looking for creative leaders instead of those who have lots of experience. And this statement is true not only for entertaining platforms, like Netflix or bizzocasino.co.nz, where it’s needed to make everything bright and picturesque to attract the audience, but also for brands like Amazon. Here are the key reasons for this.
What Creative Leaders Are
The curators of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership propose to understand by “creative leadership” a special set of skills that help to act in the rapid development of global markets and technologies. The implication is that today’s leaders observe and interpret events and learn to make decisions based not on assumed patterns and established norms, but on unique circumstances and their own skills and feelings. They create something new all the time and work with innovation, revealing the broader concept of “creativity” in business.
Besides the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, the Co-Active Training Institute in Great Britain and Design Thinkers Academy in the Netherlands train creative leaders. And among the established creative leaders are listed the world’s leading entrepreneurs – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, and Tim Cook. What makes this approach so popular?
- The understanding that the modern leader is authentic. Because he has to be flexible in rapidly changing circumstances, he leads based not on classic scenarios, but on his own unique skills and experience. Accordingly, such a leader cannot be guided by the success stories of others. The basis of training for creative leadership is personalization.
- The ability to find solutions through mastering new behaviors in familiar situations. Personal experience is important to form not only through repetition, but also through experimentation – the modern leader is able to learn, develop and test hypotheses.
- The skill of forming a safe creative work environment. The creative leader’s team is not afraid to create something new and grows with it, having a direct impact on the company’s development.
How a Creative Leader Differs From an Experienced Executive
Not every manager can be a leader, and not every leader is comfortable in a leadership position.
A manager performs specific professional tasks in a company: he coordinates and optimizes processes, makes strategic decisions, and maintains communication with his team, contractors and clients.
A leader, on the other hand, can do anything. Leadership is not a profession, but a soft skill, and it is useful not only for managers. In today’s world, soft skills act as one of the drivers of career growth. They determine the success of a person in the profession by 85%.
Usually, creative leadership skills begin to form even before entering a training program or a long work in a managerial position. Their foundation is life experience.
A creative leader cannot be defined through character traits. What distinguishes him is not a particular trait, but the ability to organize the work of a team, making the best use of what he has at his disposal.
Who Needs a Creative Leader Today?
Any team needs a creative leader: from a young startup open to experimentation to a government agency where trying new things is much harder.
In 2019, LinkedIn named creativity the most important skill in the world. And the World Economic Forum included creativity among the skills that define prosperity in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
According to a survey by Adobe and Forrester Consulting, creative companies are more likely to become market leaders, taking a larger share of the market than their competitors.
How Creative Leaders Work
Creative leadership helps to see and live through familiar situations in a new way: developing as a creative leader, one often abandons familiar labels. Therefore, creative leadership does not assume a “gold standard” of choices made by a leader in a given situation.
A case in point is the building of relationships in a team. Personal boundaries are always at the core of the subordination. And each creative leader has to make an individual decision: to be friends with colleagues or limit themselves to business relations.
And in matters of subordination and in any other important decisions, it is useless to be guided by the experience of other companies. Even if you like them, you still cannot reproduce all the factors that helped them develop. It is important to learn how to make decisions that are best for your situation.
