Strategic Leadership and Creativity

Strategic Leadership has been defined as "the ability to anticipate, envision, maintain flexibility, think globally and innovatively, and work with others to initiate changes to create a viable future." Success at fulfilling these responsibilities involves generating new perspectives and responses, making strategic choices, and managing strategic change. How do you do this? What skills do you need?

	A Learning Mindset At a recent Leadership Forum for the high potential leaders of one of my clients, I heard Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson talk about the importance of developing a learning mindset in order to be better leaders. According to Edmondson, leaders should want to listen, not just because it's important to show they care, but to learn, to educate themselves, to keep an attitude of "I need to know what you know." It's not about being soft; it's about understanding why others see something differently from you. After all, all ideas have holes. Yet, too often leaders think they have to have the answers, despite growing complexity and challenges that make it nearly impossible for one person to have the answer!
	Breakthrough Creativity Tools for More Strategic Leadership A crucial set of tools for shifting your thinking patterns and developing new competencies and perspectives as a leader comes from getting in touch with your own creativity, that special quality that allows you to find new paths, generate new ideas, and be more open to explore new directions and learn. By identifying, exploring and further developing your creative talents, you will find the power, courage, and self-esteem to manage change more effectively, to handle ambiguity as you reframe and replace old assumptions, and to address the challenges and obstacles leading in today's world can throw your way. In the Breakthrough Creativity approach, creativity is defined as the innate ability that everyone possesses to produce different and valuable results and solutions. This perspective on creativity assumes that creativity is not isolated to certain individuals. Although you may associate creativity with an artist like Michelangelo or a genius like Einstein, creative talents actually appear in many different forms. Creativity is more than 'out of the box' thinking, producing original works of art, or designing inventions that result in revolutionary new patents. The range of creative outcomes is actually endless and can be seen in growing a business, doing a deal, selling a product, finding funding, resolving conflict, building consensus and collaborative teamwork. Your creativity may come out in the use of skillful ways to get around obstacles, using whatever is around to resolve a crisis quickly or improvise a solution. Whatever form your creativity takes, it is an essential tool for successful strategic leadership. (More on the eight creative talents.)
	Using Breakthrough Creativity to Challenge Mental Models One very important benefit from getting in touch with your creativity is the help it can give you to surface, challenge and reframe those "mental models" that can sabotage your strategic choices and actions. Like panes of tinted glass or the mirrors in the funny house at the carnival, mental models color your view of the world and affect your abilities to successfully see, understand and manage these strategic challenges. These often unconscious pictures, images, or stories of the world shape your actions, responses, and decisions. Mental models can be very useful. You need them to function, to filter through the avalanche of information you receive. As foundational beliefs about personal abilities and values, they help you become successful. But mental models also have drawbacks. They often bring with them blinders and filters in the form of assumptions, outdated formulas, and perhaps even inflexible points of view about the world. Incorrect or flawed mental models can lead you to underestimate the severity of problems, can produce over-confidence, and give an illusion of control. Mental models can cause you to ignore facts and evidence that fly in the face of changing circumstances and can limit the range of alternative solutions to a situation or challenge. Mental models can thus become very dangerous, particularly if you use outdated and defective models to make decisions and plan in an increasingly uncertain world. They can also undermine your ability to bring about strategic change. If you fail to grasp the hold that prevailing mental models have on employees in the form of "what is a leader" or "what is excellent customer service," you may not be able to effect the change you want. If you fail to see that mental models in customers may have changed, around the environment for instance, all sorts of misunderstandings and mistakes in new product offerings and services can result. One way you can avoid these pitfalls is by uncovering your creative talents and those of your team. You can then use the perspectives that the different talents bring to a discussion to make better strategic decisions that ensure organizational prosperity.
In addition to adopting a learning mindset and using your creative talents, what else do you need to be more successfully strategic?:
	A Strategic Leadership Style A strategic leadership style, grounded in versatility, that balances the many complexities, tensions and trade-offs of the job. A versatile leader creates the conditions for others in the organization to contribute, feel supported, and be engaged and at the same time exercises power and authority to push for performance. Such a leader also balances positioning the organization to be competitive in the future with driving the organization in the near term to achieve results. (More on leadership versatility.)
	Self-awareness An incredible body of research identifies the value of increased self-awareness to leadership performance. Such self-knowledge of style, strengths and limitations significantly improves a leader's ability to work with others, build teams, ask tough questions, listen to the answers, and learn. Personal reflection, leadership diagnostics, 360° feedback, and well-structured coaching assignments are critical drivers of greater self-awareness.
	Knowledge of Strategic Tools and Concepts A recommended reading list for developing a better understanding of strategic tools and concepts