Leadership

CREATIVITY AND THE ROLE OF THE LEADER

“ CREATIVITY “ or creating something useful and innovative is the call of the management today. Not long before organizations believed creativity to be unmanageable and a long term value addition with almost nothing as immediate payoff but at present the economy is innovation driven and management has to play a pivotal role on how to manage for creativity rather than managing creativity.

A leader must prioritize engaging right people from any rank and any position at right times to right degree of creative work with enough freedom to work on with one’s own initiatives and ideas. The leaders must believe that today innovative ideas is a source from many contributors rather than a genius lone inventor as was the case in past. They should look forward to tap creativity of many smarter under ranked employees rather than the heftily paid managers placed at the crown of hierarchical system. The employees who help others to climb the ladder of success should be felicitated and can be set as an example for others to follow. As the notion goes “diversity enhances creativity “. Innovations are more likely when collaborations are from people of different disciplines, backgrounds and areas of expertise. Creativity can be enhanced by encouraging individuals for diverse experience and identity integration among the workers along with outsourcing ideas from outside the battery limit of the organization. Higher level of creativity depends upon the people with the higher levels of identity integration. A breakthrough does not necessarily depend upon the prototypes but also metaphors, analogies and stories. In simpler words a result can be attained by applying technical knowledge of one field on a problem of different field which is called as “Coordination totems “. Talking in detail on collaboration not bounded by walls leads to open source development. Though open source innovations are restricted to very few fields it is...