2 minutes
The five learning stages of creative excellence
Creativity is the most distinguished quality for every leader in every domain. Creative leaders display distinctly different behaviors, values and characteristics from traditional management, and they get exponential results, inspire creativity in others, build productive teams and drive successful businesses.
Yet while many organizations claim that they value creative leadership, most of them pay lip service to the idea and instead promote leaders who do not espouse creative leadership and instead are perceived as safer, risk-averse and more likely to maintain the status quo. This is diametrically opposed to the necessary leadership needed to move the world forward.
Creative leaders possess a distinctly engaging and inspirational leadership style because they truly put people first, are perceptive about their needs, are inclusive of and empathetic toward different cultures, promote diversity and difference, and have a purpose-led, mission-driven approach to making people's lives better and advancing society toward the greater good. They hold themselves accountable for their actions and have a social conscience and empathy for the environment by continuously managing innovation that powers the products they design, make and sell, and the businesses they run.
The Creative Excellence Model
The Creative Excellence Model is a guide for leaders, teams and organizations that want to build sustainable creative capability. Grounded in real patterns and insights gleaned from some of the most creative teams and organizations globally, the model helps formalize behaviors from a cluster of knowledge, skills, abilities and motivations and prescribes the desired performance patterns required by diagnosing and evaluating performance and talent. It contains definitions and examples of each competency, mainly dealing with different performance levels for each expected behavior contributing to advancement.
The five learning stages are:
- Fledgling. Acquiring knowledge and know-how
- Journeyman. Applying insight and contributing independently
- Expert. Guiding through domain expertise
- Innovator. Innovating through breakthrough execution
- Artist. Leading through artistry and personal mastery
The bottom line is that creative leaders have confidence in their ideas and never give up on bringing them to fruition. It means leading without frontiers by seeing around the corners and fearlessly navigating into the future. Creative leaders are people of action who are always future-oriented. They start things, move the world forward and inspire others to do it as well by driving transformation in society, business and the arts.
What can you do to follow the creative excellence model?
Roy Sharples is the founder/CEO of Unknown Origins, a creative design studio on a mission to save the world from unoriginality by unleashing creative power, the author of Creativity Without Frontiers: How to make the invisible visible by lighting the way into the future and curator of the community-driven storytelling platform that provides the creative industry access to insights and content from creators worldwide.
