(This morning’s leadership lesson comes from John Maxwell’s book, Leadershift. What creative principles are you encouraging in your environment?)

Creative Principles To Learn And Live By

If you want to shift from maintaining to creating in your life and leadership, then you need to take your crayons back.
Here’s how:

Build A Creative Culture
If you lead a team, department, or organization, take responsibility for promoting creativity and building a creative culture.

Fuel Passion
Creativity requires time, tenacity, testing, options, U-turns, imagination, questions, failure, and change. All these things require a lot of energy. Passion provides the fuel.

Celebrate Ideas
What gets celebrated gets done. If you reward ideas with money, praise, and opportunity, people will come to value ideas and work toward generating and sharing them.

Foster Autonomy
Allow people to have enough autonomy to be creative. Micromanagement undermines creativity while freedom and flexibility foster it.

Encourage Courage
Creativity requires risk, and taking risks requires courage. As a leader, you need to model it and encourage it.

Minimize Hierarchy
In creative environments, decisions are made closest to the problems. For that to happen, leaders need to minimize the number of layers between the top and the bottom.

Reduce Rules
Creativity gets stifled when everyone expends too much energy worrying about following rules. Too many rules cause idea anemia.

Fail Forward
If you fall down, you should learn from it, get up, and step forward. Any time you learn what doesn’t work, you’re a step closer to what does work.

Start Small
If you want one great idea, look for a lot of good ideas. If you want to create something significant, build it in small increments. Do that consistently, and you make creative progress.

~Evolution of Self
#creativity #energy #courage #team #environment #mondaymotivaton