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The Most Important Leadership Quality Among CEO's? Integrity? Think Again…

June 23, 2010

What is the most important leadership quality for CEO's? Integrity? Global Thinking? You may be surprised… Creativity came up first on the list. According to a study by IBM, which polled over 1,500 corporate heads and public sector leaders across 60 nations and 33 industries, creativity was chosen as the key motivator for successful company management today.

 

According to the same study, these creative leaders are much more inclined to break with the status quo of industry, enterprise and revenue models and 81% of them rate innovation as a 'crucial capability'.

 

Leadership expert and NSB speaker, Lee-Anne McAlear addresses this topic through her presentation entitled, Positive Turbulence: Unleashing Creativity in Times of Constraint. McAlear discusses how people are innately creative and how this creativity is the greatest source of ideas for organizational improvement and with CEO's supportive of it all!

 

To read more about creativity in the workplace, view the Fast Company article here.

 

CEOs, CIOs, governors and mayors are asking:

* How do I infuse intelligence into a system for which no one enterprise or agency  responsible?

* How do I bring all the necessary constituents together?

* How do I make the case for budget?
* How do I get a complex solution through my procurement department?
* Where should I start?

 

This marries up with the increasingly urgent requirement for senior leaders to approach their challenges differently. Creatively, if you will. No one person, no matter how senior, is going to have all the answers and one strategic session with a blue sky, brainstorming element is not going to cut it. Innovative, creative thinking has to start at the top and include a strategy for baking a creativity- supported gene into the company's DNA.

 

The quotes that most accurately capture the senior leader's dilemma today are "If you do what you did, you'll get what you got" and "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results". Doing what we did HARDER no longer works. It simply exhausts everybody. Outcomes change if the activities, approaches and thinking that informs them change. The requirement for new thinking is self evident. The question is "How do we change our thinking?". A good start is to note that companies that are changing the game (Apple, Rim, Facebook, Interface) have leaders who not only think creatively themselves but have actively engaged their workforces in the creative pursuit of new solutions and business models.

While there are leaders today who are big, creative, synergistic thinkers ( Steve Jobs or Jim Balsillie come to mind), there are many more who know that solo efforts work rarely. Creativity is a team sport (A.G. Lafley, Ray C. Anderson). If creativity is the new key CEO capability then engaging the whole organization (starting with the executive team) in the sustained pursuit of new thinking, new approaches and new business models becomes paramount. Creativity and innovation are organizational enablers that require focus, operationalizing, training and reward.

 

To book Lee-Anne McAlear for your next speaking engagement please contact NSB at 800-360-1073 (Toronto/east) or 800-661-4110 (Vancouver/West).

 

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