Making a change in organizations through creativity
Have you ever had an unbearable and arrogant boss? Even though this used to be very common, the way we work and the roles inside organizations are changing. If you don’t want to become one of them, we have something to tell you.
First of all, we may identify the difference between the terms of boss and leader. A good boss may be a leader but a leader doesn’t need to necessarily be the boss. How is it possible? The boss’ role is to order what to do, where, when and how, without the need of explain why. Instead, the leader has the ability to encourage the team to achieve a common goal without “establishing” rules.
The leader’s role is to have the ability to influence the way the team members act, making them work enthusiastically to achieve their common goals.
Even though every leader has this ability, they are not equal, they are not robots. Each one will follow the methodology that fits the best with his characteristics. There are different profiles:
And, last but not least, there’s our favourite leader, the Creative Leader, he owns all the previous characteristics and comes up with new innovative improvements. The creative leader goal is to push the company to the next level.
Among Creative Leadership, we can identify three key profiles:
If you can’t identify your profile and your goal is to be a great leader, we advise you to make The Basadur Test (1).
Identify your strengths to know how to encourage your team.
Despite their differences between the explorer, gardener and coach, they share skills like creativity and imagination. These are the magic ingredients of the success potion, but pay attention, measure and analyse their impact to readjust their effectiveness. It is important to identify the balance between knowledge, imagination and results because their variables of an equation so if one is void, the result of creativity would be null.
CREATIVITY = KNOWLEDGE X IMAGINATION X MEASUREMENT
The different creative profiles
Once you have identified your profile, analyze it thoroughly. Have you ever think about the way you get information? It is indeed hard to believe that there are only two ways to do it:
This computer experiment will tell you the way you create new ideas: do you create new ideas and check if they work? Or do you resort to ideas you already have and adapt them to the new situation?
According to your answer, you’ll be:
As you can see, each leader is completely different from the others, so they can have working confrontations. This is very usual in every teamwork, many times we realize about the people with who we don’t match. Even if we have great personal relationships, we can have different working styles. The same applies to leaders, the optimizer profile will crash with the generator because at the time he looks for the perfect idea, the generator keeps giving new ones. On the other hand, conceptualizer could have a conflict with the implementer, when the first leader develops new ideas, the second one aspires to test and sell them.
Nevertheless, this is a good fact. If you identify your profile, you will know your limits and who can help you. Likewise, if we know our team characteristics, we will know how to interact with them and overcome any obstacle.
As you can see, this is not a smooth process. In addition to colleagues conflicts, we will deal with some limitations. These limitations, can be good, as time or resources which help us to schedule our actions, or bad, as members attitude or lack of knowledge about our methodologies.
As a leader, you may take charge of solving these situations. One more time, the way you do it will identify your profile:
As you have seen, there are many profiles, which makes unique each team you lead. Knowing their different attributes and existing methodologies (such as Creative Problem Solving, Design Thinking or Lean Startup) will support you in the development of innovation projects and inspire your colleagues through your example, passion for creativity and skills
(1) Basadur Test
Updated at 02/12/2020
How has our way of working evolved? Before March 2020,...
The necessary tips to enhance work sessions. I want you...
How to find the right path to develop a business....
Design Thinking
It is a method for generating innovative ideas that focuses its effectiveness on understanding and providing solutions to the real needs of users. It comes from the way product designers work. Hence its name, which literally translates as "Design Thinking", although we prefer to translate it as "The way designers think". It is, in short, a change of perspective from designing FOR people to designing WITH people.
Lean Startup
It is a working method that aims to increase the chances of success when a project comes out of the paper and begins to be realized, eliminating everything useless and inadequate. The idea is to adapt the product to what the market demands and not to our own vision, which is the best way to launch something new. To do this, we must focus on the customer's needs, relying on their feedback to modify the product until the final version is developed.
Agile UX
It is a set of methodologies for developing projects that require speed and flexibility to adapt to changing industry or market conditions, leveraging those changes to provide a competitive advantage. The main characteristic of the principles and values underlying agile methodologies is to be able to deliver quickly and continuously. In other words, the project is "sliced" into small chunks to be completed and delivered in a few weeks. In this way, if a change is needed, it is made only in the part involved and in a short period of time.
