Category: Leadership

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Promoting Creativity

Creativity is recognised as a cornerstone to ongoing, successful innovation. It doesn’t just happen.

How can a manager foster creativity?

Gleeson et.al. (1999) propose five principles for promoting creativity in R&D.  As they point out, these “are simple principles, indeed stunningly so, given the complexity of the creative process and of the institutional cultures within which R&D operates”.  The five principles are:

  • Goals:  Creativity is fostered by setting both creativity and productivity goals but not by prescribing R&D processes to attain them.
  • Bounded Freedom:  Creativity is affected by the psychic balance experienced by the researcher or field participant between what she/he seeks to achieve and what the organisation or group desires her/him to achieve.
  • Recognition:  Creativity is enhanced by reward and recognition, as long as it is experienced as an appreciative and/or informational event and not as a means to control or manipulate.
  • Social Interaction:  Appropriate peer and social interaction is an essential prerequisite to creativity.
  • Leadership:  The development and communication of insightful organisational visions and leadership help foster creativity.

Gleeson, T., Russell, G. and Woods, E. (1999), Creative Research Environments.  Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation: Canberra, Australia Report No. 99/128

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A Leader is a Dealer in Hope

In practical business terms, “empowering” others, means that today’s leaders like to delegate, to urge others to share the vision and get involved…..Even more important, you raise the individual level of aspiration; you strengthen self-confidence.  That’s what Napoleon was talking about when he observed that ” a leader is a dealer in hope”…..

Lloyd E Reuss, former President, General Motors, Detroit.

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Four ways to make your job as a manager more enjoyable

Step Back from the Immediate Tasks.

Take some time to think and reflect – objectively identify the high-payoff activities.  These activities should be judged based on the end result – not on the action itself.  Writing emails is often a low-payoff activity, but when the email helps everyone on the team to focus on one goal, it is undoubtedly a high payoff. Write it deliberately…don’t just produce a “stream of consciousness” that blurs the message.

Delegate, delegate, delegate. 

The best leaders are undoubtedly the best delegators  – make sure the jobs you give people a whole and meaningful and that you do give them the jobs.  Don’t get them to report unless they are in trouble.  Develop the self-confidence to let them do their jobs. Delegating is a development tool. Delegating is a way to distribute the workload. Delegating is a way to help the organisation work on essential tasks. Delegation should not add to your workload, so delegate…and forget until the results roll in.  You’ve cleared the decks to do other things.

Plan AND SCHEDULE daily.

Go beyond a simple “TO-DO List” or a list of priorities and also schedule your activities. Schedule time to complete a slice of an important, long-term exercise.  Don’t plan to do the not urgent, or the urgent but not important and hope you will get time to do what is critical to getting results.  Schedule first the high-pay-off activities, and fit the rest around those.  Do everything in their power to stick to the schedule.

Get Results.

Help the entire team focus on the essential issues.  Indicate that actions are judged on results, not progress reports. Outputs lead to outcomes – a report is seldom an outcome!!  Make sure you and the team are clear on the outcomes wanted and the outputs needed to get there.