The Power of the Creative Leader

There are a tonne of different leadership styles that you can choose from, each of which will directly impact your employees, and thus, your business.

Don’t believe me? Think about the supervisors and managers that you’ve had in the past. I know I’ve had one micromanager, one manager who would throw employees under the bus if something went wrong, one lazy manager, one who ran a tight ship but let us do our thing, and one who gave us room to grow.

I now know that this last manager was a Creative Leader, which is easily the most effective leadership style. In this post, we’ll show you why.

What Makes Someone a Creative Leader? 

Creative leaders aren’t just creative in how they solve problems; they actually enable everyone on their team to solve their own problems and come up with new ideas on their own. They give their teams the tools they need to handle things themselves and bring value to the table.

This type of leader understands that great ideas can come from any employee, regardless of how long they’ve been there or what their position is. They’ll welcome ideas from all employees—even entry levels one. This allows for diverse perspectives that you likely won’t have heard or come up with otherwise.

Why Creative Leaders Will Revolutionise Your Business

Creative leaders will revolutionise your business with all of these new solutions; the increase of different perspectives and ideas means that you’ll gain immense new insight that you didn’t have before. This will help you solve problems more efficiently from every level of your business.

You aren’t just solving the business’s biggest problems that affect the CEOs and owners of the company; instead, you can solve a large number of smaller problems more effectively.

Your sales team, for example, may notice that people aren’t converting because the free trial of your software requires a credit card and your competitors’ doesn’t. They can offer a solution to this; they can either offer a free demo instead, or choose to waive this requirement. This will increase your sales and number of happy customers. By letting people actually doing the work solve their own problems, you’ll get more effective solutions.

This is especially true considering no one may have even noticed the problem otherwise, and it would have quietly cost you money and put it in the pocket of your competitors.

Having all these diverse perspectives in your business will help you and your team create solutions that no one else is. This will help your business stand out from—and beat—your competition.

How Does This Affect Employees Directly?

All this doesn’t just make customers happy, it makes employees happier, too. Since disengaged works have an average of 60% more errors, 49% more accidents, and 37% higher rates of being absent than engaged workers, this is significant. Especially since employees are 2x more likely to be disengaged if they (and their ideas) are ignored by their manager.

By being a creative leader, your retention rates and employee productivity will skyrocket. Why does this matter? One third of new hires will quit within six months, and high turnover costs are more expensive than ever.

How to Become a Creative Leader

Becoming a creative leader is all about enabling your team to do their jobs will and allowing them to contribute to the business in creativity, not just time.

You can do this by:

• Motivating them. Motivation can boost self-esteem and jumpstart creativity, giving them the ideas and the confidence to share them.
• Creating an environment of open ideas and feedback. This is called a “feedback culture.” This means that you’ll give your employees feedback regularly, and they’ll be encouraged to give you feedback, too. This will help you lead them, and will provide an open channel for ideas and solutions to be shared.
• Allow for experimentation. Does one of your employees have a unique idea for how to solve a problem? Unless you see big, huge red flags for why you shouldn’t, test it out. Even if the idea doesn’t work out, it validates your employees and shows them that you’re taking them seriously.
• Encourage collaboration. Collaboration is fodder for creativity, and most innovations today will come from a team instead of an individual.

Final Thoughts 

Being—or employing—creative leaders sets the stage for an incredible company culture. Both your employees and your business will benefit. Despite what some businesses think, this type of company culture and leadership style can scale well as your company grows, as long as the right measures are in place. This leadership style alone will allow you to keep more customers, more employees, and more profit. Who could say no to that?