“If you hold on too tightly to traditional ideas around control, you might find that you become locked into a mindset or situation without much flexibility.”
Does controlling targets, strategies, and measurable outcomes feel intuitively right to you? Do you have a business persona and a personal one that are poles apart? How much do you let controlling your life control you? To truly evolve, you need to take creative leadership to pivot business strategy.
If you hold on too tightly to traditional ideas around control, you might find that you become locked into a mindset or situation without much flexibility. What should be moving parts that are malleable to changeable drivers and influencers, become rigid and unwieldly. Instead of bending to evolving demands, your business plans can break at a crucial time, leaving you activating damage control rather than progress. Creative leadership, on the other hand, enables you to ride the peaks and troughs of running a business far more smoothly and fluidly. Embracing creativity leadership connects pivotal moments and gives you the mobility to create them, too.
“Creative leadership enables you to change direction, transform, and ultimately seize new opportunities. To attain it you have to let go of control.”
Creative Leadership Begins with EQ
Creativity isn’t just a buzzword for creatives. It’s a sound principle that also acts as a catalyst for business opportunities through creative leadership. It intrinsically means approaching business with an open-minded core philosophy that creates space for innovation to take root and ideas to evolve.
To embrace this ethos, you need to look beyond stats and facts, channel your EQ, and use a more personal, and personable approach. You need to not only read the room but feel connected to it. This leads you to find your unique style. Once you lock into this, you can channel your individuality through greater awareness, empathy, and communication.
Female entrepreneurs are regarded as being more intuitive than their male counterparts. It could be that they are simply more practiced in tapping into this superpower.
“As well as motivating individuals and team dynamics, and potentially boosting productivity, creative leadership acts as a catalyst for change.”
How Creative Leadership Enables You To Pivot
As you connect with this power, possibilities grow because you are broadening your networks. You are also challenging self-limiting beliefs. This brings a wider landscape of business strategy routes and the navigation skills to explore them. If one road closes or turns into an uphill struggle, you have better access to alternative ways forward.
“Creative leadership taps into a more fluid momentum that you can mobilise more easily than with a fixed journey. As a result, you can pivot more easily and change direction, speed, and scale more efficiently.”
By following your gut, along with your professional experience, you can craft more organic and authentic business strategies. For brands, this ability to pivot in multiple directions in various spaces at different times is essential. Consumers are seeking branding messaging that resonates with them.
As well as motivating individuals and team dynamics, and potentially boosting productivity, creative leadership acts as a catalyst for change. The process, or strategy, becomes an important part of business goals. Creativity opens the doors to taking calculated risks and left-field thinking which oil business strategy mechanisms. It informs relationships within corporate culture, as well as with B2B clients and stakeholders, and also consumers. Methodology and results are also impacted by the ease with which you can pivot.
How To Access Creative Leadership
Once you have made the connection between creativity and unfolding business strategy this will guide you as to when to pivot. Beyond this, you can know how to manage change, too. Here’s how you can access this leadership style:
- Be present and mindful in the moment. Do not multitask. Women are used to spinning several plates at the same time in every aspect of life. Take moments of pause and dedicated focus, too.
- Let your instinct and intuition have a voice and learn to listen. Value creativity as a business asset rather than an add-on. Unleash your imagination with a vision board.
- Be more people-focused and communicative to improve corporate culture and respond more naturally to clients and/or consumers in different ways.
- Check in with business strategies and your visceral reactions at a macro and micro level is key. Your experience, skills, and EQ-inspired creativity are valuable so do not ignore them.
- Keep in mind that a creative approach does not negate tying down fundamental elements of strategies or defining goals. Creativity may illuminate the way but do not forget to map out the direction.
- Expressing yourself differently in business does not equate to losing sound principles such as accountability, sustainability, and measurability. These support a sense of balance and keep business strategies in check.
Often one of the biggest obstacles to any type of change is unwillingness. This isn’t born out of stubbornness, but more that taking that first step toward doing anything difficult isn’t the easiest. It is the most important, though. Fear, pride, or a mixture of the two can keep you in the habit of following the same patterns. To let go of control, you need to take control of it first.
About the Author
Name: Natalie Lowe
Professional Title:
Bio: Natalie Lowe is the CEO and Founding Partner of The Orangeblowfish, an independent award-winning creative and branding agency, with headquarters in Shanghai, China and teams in Hong Kong, and Sydney. A TEDx speaker, Natalie runs Creativity Workshops to inspire creative leadership, including a specialisation in Fortune 500 brands across APAC.
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