A Global Aggregation of Leading Edge Articles on Management Innovation, Creative Leadership, Creativity and Innovation.
This is the official blog of Ralph Kerle, Chairman, the Creative Leadership Forum. The views expressed are his own and do not represent the views of the International or National Advisory Board members. Tweet ______________________________________________________________________________________
No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.
I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.
Drawing on and extending prototype theories of creativity and leadership, Jennifer S. Mueller, University of Pennsylvania, Jack A. Goncalo Cornell University, ILR and Dishan Kamdar Indian School of Business theorize that the expression of creative ideas may diminish judgments of leadership potential unless the charismatic leadership prototype is activated in the minds of social perceivers. Study 1 shows creative idea expression is negatively related to perceptions of leadership potential in a sample of employees working in jobs that required creative problem solving. Study 2 shows that participants randomly instructed to express creative solutions during an interaction are viewed as having lower leadership potential. A third scenario study replicated this finding showing that participants attributed less leadership potential to targets expressing creative ideas, except when the “charismatic” leader prototype was activated. In sum, we show that the negative association between expressing creative ideas and leadership potential is robust and underscores an important but previously unidentified bias against selecting effective leaders.
A Leader’s Image
Your image is the concept that others form about you as a result of the impressions you make on them. Your effectiveness as a leader is tied to your image. Your ability to project a leadership presence in the eyes of employees, customers, other important constituencies, and the general public is closely related to your ability to do your job well.
Your image, then, can be either an asset or a liability as you engage in the tasks and roles of leadership.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that paying attention to image building is superficial and therefore unimportant. However,
An article in the recent Science Daily entitled Attention Makes Sensory Signals Stand Out Amidst Background Noise In Brain shows how neuroscience can begin to help us understand the way we see and percieve. The research carried out at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies has discovered how the brain deliberately isolates what it is, it is trying to comprehend and filters this attention from background stimulae. If we understand that is how the brain operates then it will enable us to be more cognisant of what it is we are trying to focus on.
Whilst reading this article, I chanced upon an article about change blindness and, paying attention as I was, I thought this would nicely illustrate what can happen if you are not able to pay attention properly.
In visual perception, change blindness is the phenomenon that occurs when a person viewing a visual scene apparently fails to detect large changes in the scene. For change blindness to occur, the change in the scene typically has to coincide with some visual disruption such as a saccade (eye movement) or a brief obscuration of the observed scene or image. When looking at still images, a viewer can experience change blindness if part of the image changes.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 03:17PM