My Barriers to Creative Leadership

My Barriers to creative leadership

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Barriers to Become a Creative Leader

Barriers to Become a Creative Leader

Guillermo A. Beltran Barreneche

Fairleigh Dickinson University

Leadership has significantly evolved along the history and in today’s competitive world being a situational leader is not enough. Leaders whom stayed in the past with caveman’s ideas will certainly not triumph nowadays. The world is in constantly change and such is leadership. Good leaders adapt and evolve in order to direct their objectives and goals in the correct path. Nowadays creative leadership has the spot light, a kind of leadership that enables to think out of the box, that brings non-conventional ideas and solutions. However, not all leaders have this so desire creativity (me included).There are certain barriers that I possess that stop me for being a creative leader, but that certainly I will overcome.

As a student of the Master in Administration Science: Global leadership I consider I have the basic qualities of a leader. Nevertheless, I lack of an important characteristic of normal leaders and creative ones that is “the ability to open people’s minds to ideas they might otherwise not be open” (Gamble & Gamble, 2009, p 16.). In many occasion I might have a crazy and non-conventional idea, but it was turned down as soon as I shared with someone. Although the idea might be good and have a future, it was not presented in an attractive way that could convince the person to go on board in the project. My ability to describe an eye-catching project is minimum. This part of my communication skills I do not master and to be an effective leader the dominant of communication competence is a must.

“Effective leaders enact superior communications skill, demonstrating what we call the performance of communication competence.”(Gamble & Gamble, 2009, p 4.).In order to become an effective creative leader I must have outstanding communication skills, to share and transmit ideas, solutions and support to my team. This issue is my main barriers in my path to become a creative leader, fortunately for me, is not unfixable.

First, as the book Leading with communication suggests, I must become self-aware, know how I affect the people that surround me, the understanding on how my actions move others, will help me work better with my team. Having said that, one good exercise that is worth trying is imagine myself when presenting an idea, by doing that, it might be possible to acknowledge which are my mistakes and why is not attention-grabbing the way I share my thinking. Moreover, asking for feedback is also a great mechanism in which I could target my weaknesses as a communicator and improve them. It is important to get the opinion of others. Others may have thoughts that can be helpful but never expressed it openly to me because they thought it was offensive. This first barrier have opened the door for many others and some more dangerous, even toxic that can