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Creative leadership… why?

Emotional Intelligence, Engagement, Leadership, Productivity, Wellbeing / My Holland

The 7 Key Principles Of Creative Leadership Whether you’re the CEO of a huge business organization, a team leader or a division manager of such a company, or owner of a small business outfit, creative leadership is important. It’s what leads to innovation. Furthermore, from concept to idea execution, a great deal of creativity is required. Here are 7 of its key principles: “It ain’t your creativity, baby! It’s about your group’s creativity.” : It’s true. Creative leadership has little to do with your own personal creativity and a whole lot to do with your team’s creativity. It’s a case of simple math. If it was only about your creativity, why should you need a whole team? You’ve got to tap the cumulative creativity of your group. This could be 6 to 60 and the numbers will surely give you better results. You don’t need to be a creative genius, but, you’ve got to have an understanding of creativity : If you’re exceptionally creative, great! It’ll set a terrific example to your team members. But to be a good creative leader, it’s not necessary to be a creative person. Don’t feel the need to pretend that you are. What is critical though is that you understand the creative process so you can facilitate it for your people. If you want to, you can talk loudly about your skills as a facilitator of creativity. This is, in the end, a lot more important in a creative leader. Get to know the strengths and weaknesses of your team: You’ll need to do this to maximize your effectiveness. Some of your guys may be incredible with ideas but lousy on execution. Others may exactly be the opposite. Some may do wonders solving problems on their own. Others have got to have teammates to add 2+2! Diversity: If teams have not been thrust upon you by circumstance and you are still in the stage of forming one, go for diversity. Choose diversity of experience, educational background, sex, culture, age, knowledge. If there are people you don’t like but are reputed to bring in results, get them too. Think that creativity is built on diversity. A more extensive range of backgrounds, culture and knowledge leads to a wider array of thinking and therefore greater creativity. It’s ok to make mistakes: If people don’t fail, they’ll never achieve great success. In the creativity and innovation fields it’s ok to make mistakes. As a creative leader, you know better. Encourage your guys to try, fail early in the game and try again. Share the failures with the rest of the team so everybody learns from them. You’ve got to trust your guys: Set clear goals. Give them a budget and tools and let go. Let them work out their own approaches towards achieving their goals. They’ll never learn by doing what they’re told. They learn by researching, trying, making mistakes and trying once more. You’ve got to be the champion of your team’s ideas. Surely, your creative team will come up with many ideas. As the leader of the band, you need to champion those ideas. especially, when they offer values to your company or your customers. When you do this, you make it more likely that the ideas could be realized and it’ll demonstrate to your team that you believe in their ideas and that you’re a creativity champion. A creative leader has an open mind. Start off by giving these principles some thought and apply them as quickly as you can.

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Flow and sustainable happiness…

Engagement, Positive Psychology, Productivity, Wellbeing / My Holland

Flow – the secret of happiness Have you ever done an activity – a sport or something creative – where you have been totally absorbed in that exact moment, without a care about what is going on around you? Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the pioneers of the scientific study of happiness, called this feeling ‘flow’ and says it is the key to happiness. He said: “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” At that moment when you forget yourself and only the thing you are doing at that moment matters, you have effortless control and Csikszentmihalyi says this is an optimum state of happiness. Lots of psychologists and theorists argue that happiness must be worked at to achieve, it doesn’t simply happen. It can be achieved by setting ourselves challenges (nothing too hard or too simple) and making them unique to our passions. We need to cultivate our own happiness and one way to do that is to work out when and how we can achieve flow. Flow happens on our journey towards completing – so for example, it is the creative process of writing a story or painting a picture, or it is what athletes refer to as ‘being in the zone’ when they are preparing or running a race. When we are totally immersed in something we give it our full attention and can forget all of our external issues and problems. Cziksentmihalyi stated that happiness comes from within us and is unique to US –our passions, our likes, what makes us tick. In 1990, he explained flow as: “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” This is why it is so worthwhile to have hobbies in our lives and make the time to do the things we love to do. To achieve flow, Czikszentmihalyi said there are certain things to do and feel, such as having clear goals, allow awareness and action to meet, disregard time and allow self-consciousness to disappear. During ‘flow’ there is no worry about failing; instead we receive immediate feedback in the shape of gratification. So how do can we achieve flow on our lives? Csikszentmihalyi says that we need to immerse ourselves in an activity we can lose ourselves in. This will be different from one person to the next. It also requires us to practise mindfulness – being aware of the here and now. When we learn to enjoy the immediate experiences we face, we can experience flow and its benefits for our happiness.

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Stress and productivity. What is the link?

Engagement, Wellbeing / My Holland

Stress In The Workplace Can Affect Productivity Experts have long acknowledged that job stress plays an important role in employee performance. What happens when there is stress is that it reduces a worker’s ability to concentrate on multi-tasks, and all his energy is directed at the completion of those tasks. It has been established that there exists a level of stress, below which employees become unmotivated and above which, they tend to be overwhelmed. We all deal with stress. It’s is part of what we are and even, who we are. You might say it is a part of how we are wired. And yet, while stress gets us moving, it also directly affects our ability to be creative and productive. Interestingly, we sometimes cause self-inflicted stress by our own lack of organization and very poor management of our time. The $64 Million Dollar Question So, the big question you will need to ask yourself is … “Is stress helping me or hindering me in my job performance?” To help you understand stress and get to the right answer, here are five ways that show how stress impacts your productivity: Stress drains your energy. It is funny. Stress can give you that adrenaline burst to get you going however a project, but after that initial rush, it quickly drains you. Physically and emotionally, you find yourself exhausted. And when you do not get enough sleep because of your stress, your best job performance suffers. Stress clouds your focus. For the most part, stress makes it hard to focus on what is important. It runs you down until you end up doing just the urgent instead of your priorities. Stress wastes time. It is simple. With stress, you worry. Sometimes just worrying all day long when you could have done other productive things. Stress reduces creativity. When you are under stress, you would most likely “lock on” to the first solution that comes to mind, and that is it. End of discussion. End of thinking. In other words, your mind doesn’t open up and limit your ability to come up with new ideas. Stress affects your personality. It would not make you a Dr, Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but have you ever heard the expression … you do not seem to be yourself today? Sure, you have. It is when, because of your stress, you would be irritable and snap at everybody within your circle and may even start yelling like a banshee without thinking. So, there you go. Stress can get you jumping out of your seat right now. It will give you that light jerk your body needs to work on something. but consider the big picture. Down the road, stress can affect your productivity in such a negative way, it will put your job on the line

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Wellbeing

Creative leadership… why?

Flow and sustainable happiness…

Stress and productivity. What is the link?

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