Most organizations are striving to be more innovative these days, and in my last post I looked at the impact curiosity can have on those efforts.
Today, I'd like to look at the role leaders can play in setting a good example for their followers. It comes after a recent study found that leaders play a crucial role in supporting innovation by having confidence in their own creativity.
Setting A Good Example
The researchers surveyed leaders in a large technology company to determine their creative self-efficacy (CSE) score. This is basically their ability to complete creative goals.
The researchers then surveyed employees at the organization to test whether they were also willing and able to engage in creative activities themselves.
It emerged that they were much more creative themselves when they were led by managers who scored highly on CSE. Unsurprisingly, they then scored those managers as being supportive of innovation.
This then translated itself into greater creative output, with the leaders rating their team as highly creative, thus completing what appears a virtuous circle.
A Virtuous Circle
Suffice to say, a solitary study of a single organization should strike a note of caution, but the findings have a distinct logic to them. When leaders are confident in their own creative abilities, they are also likely to value creativity more highly, and therefore seek it in their team.
This matters, because previous studies have found that creative people are not often particularly popular at work as they strive for change when most people would much rather preserve the status quo.
They also suggest that employees tend to weigh up a number of factors before deciding whether to venture their creative ideas. These include their level of job security and their relationship with their boss.
The Other Side Of The Coin
Now, as with most things, there is a flip side that we should be careful of. Leaders are well known to display narcissistic tendencies, and studies have found that such dominant leaders can squash the ideas of those around them, such is their confidence in their own ideas.
The original study suggests that this wasn't the case in the technology company included in the research, but I'm sure we've all encountered bosses that would fit that bill.
Nevertheless, it does appear that if you have a balanced leader that is confident in their own creative capabilities it will result in the facilitation of creativity throughout the organization.
Supporting Innovation
If you want to be in little doubt, however, a 2014 study provides a number of behaviors that go into supporting innovation:
- Challenge your subordinates by giving them tough problems to solve and ambitious targets to aim for
- Encourage employees to stretch themselves intellectually
- Promote knowledge sharing and idea capturing
- Assemble diverse groups, and by diverse I mean intellectually diverse, and encourage idea sharing
- Model the core competencies of creative expression
- Provide the right resources to allow creativity to thrive
- Create a challenging physical and social work environment
- Provide feedback and recognition when people contribute creatively
Now, it should be said that the study found that women tend to do this much better than men, but they might provide you with some guidance on supporting creativity in your own teams.
Watch on Forbes:
