1. Leadership: Intelligence and Creativity
Topic 4
Leadership: Intelligence and Creativity

2. How do Intelligence and Creativity Affect Leadership?

3. Cognitive Ability and Knowledge of Business
Leaders need to have cognitive ability to formulate suitable strategies, solve problems, and make correct decisions
Effective leaders have knowledge about the company, industry, and technical matters
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4. Intelligence
Intelligence is a person’s all-around effectiveness in activities directed by thought.
Intelligence is relatively difficult to change.
Intelligence can be and is modified through education and experience.

5. Intelligence and Leadership
Intelligent leaders:
Are faster learners.
Make better assumptions, deductions, and inferences.
Are better at creating a compelling vision and developing strategies to make their vision a reality.
Can develop better solutions to problems.
Can see more of the primary and secondary implications of their decisions.
Are quicker on their feet than leaders who are less intelligent.

6. Theories assessing the nature of intelligence:
Intelligence is a unitary ability.
Intelligence involves a collection of related mental abilities.
Intelligence is based more on the process by which people do complex work rather than the number of mental abilities.

7. The unitary view
The unitary view is founded on findings early in this century that individuals’ scores on different types of intelligence were all positively correlated – a person doing well on a vocabulary test was likely to do well on a memory or numeric reasoning test and vice versa.

8. The multiple intelligence’s view
The multiple intelligence’s view is based on common observations of people and finds that every person possesses linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal intelligence.

9. Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
Analytic Intelligence
Practical Intelligence
Creative Intelligence

10. Cognitive Resource Theory Concerns
The apparent dichotomy between intelligence and experience:
Research showed not only that many leaders were both intelligent and experienced, but also that they would fall back on their experience in stressful situations and use their intelligence to solve group problems in less-stressful situations.
The leader’s ability to tolerate stress:
Leaders may do well in high-stress situations even when they lack experience because of their inherent ability to handle stress.

11. Cognitive Factors
Cognition refers to the mental process or faculty by which knowledge is gathered
Leaders must have problem-solving and intellectual skills to effectively gather, process, and store essential information
Six cognitive factors related to leadership effectiveness have been identified
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12. Cognitive Factors and Leadership

13. The WICS Model of Leadership in Organizations
This model of leadership encompasses and synthesizes
wisdom
intelligence, and
creativity
to explain leadership effectiveness

14. The WICS Model (cont’d)
According to the WICS model, a leader needs the following for the successful utilization of intelligence:
Creative skills to generate new ideas
Analytical skills to evaluate whether the ideas are good ones
Practical skills to implement the ideas and to persuade others of their value.
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15. Implications for Leaders
Research has shown that leaders tend to be somewhat more intelligent than others in their groups. Nevertheless, intelligence alone is no guarantee a person will be a good leader, and extremely intelligent people may have a difficult time communicating with followers.

16. Intelligent people do not always make successful leaders and sometimes can make quite a mess out of their lives. In his book, Intelligence Applied, Sternburg (1986) described some of the reasons why smart people fail, which include:

17. Sternberg’s “Why Smart People Fail”:
Inability to See the Forest for the Trees
Distractibility and Lack of Concentration
Indecision
Procrastination
Inability to Complete Tasks
Spreading oneself too thick or thin
Lack of Motivation
Lack of Impulse Control
Lack of Perseverance
Fear of Failure
Inability to translate thought into action
Too Little or Too Much Self-Confidence

18. Leaders and Stress: Cognitive Resources Theory
Leaders with higher experience but lower intelligence perform better under high stress conditions, while leaders with lower experience but higher intelligence will do better under low stress conditions. The best leaders are often smart and experienced.

19. Emotional Intelligence and Leadership
Emotional Intelligence is:
A group of mental abilities that help people to recognize their own feelings and those of others.
Another way of measuring human effectiveness and a set of abilities necessary to cope with daily situations and get along in the world.
The degree to which thoughts, feelings, and actions are aligned.

20. Implications of Emotional Intelligence
People can be extremely ineffective when their thoughts, feelings, and actions are misaligned.
Leaders who are thinking or feeling one thing and actually doing something else are less effective in their ability to influence groups toward the accomplishment of their goals.
When recognized and leveraged properly emotions can be the motivational fuel that help individuals and groups to accomplish their goals.
Some researchers believe that emotional intelligence is more important than intelligence when it comes to leadership success.
It appears that EQ attributes would be difficult to change as a result of training intervention.

21. Components Of Emotional Intelligence
Self-awareness
Managing emotions
Self-motivation
Empathy for others
Interpersonal skills

22. Emotional Intelligence What’s your Emotional Quotient? EQ Handout

23. Limitations Of EQ Literature
Research does not indicate that EQ is more important than intelligence in leadership.
Few EQ researchers have acknowledged the existence of personality-leadership effectiveness research.
If the EQ attributes are essentially personality traits, then it is difficult to see how they will change as a result of a training intervention.

24. Organizational Creativity
Leaders should remember that their primary role is not so much to be creative themselves as to build an environment where others can be creative.
Research has shown that people tend to generate more creative solutions when they are told to focus on their intrinsic motivation for doing so rather than on the extrinsic motivation.
Leaders may want to hold off on evaluating new ideas until they are all on the table, and should also encourage their followers to do the same.
Leaders who need to develop new products and services should try to minimize the level of turnover in their teams and provide them with clear goals.

25. Creativity and Leadership
Organizations not only solve problems which require the use of proven procedures; they must apply innovative solutions to unexpected situations.

26. What is Creativity?
Also known as divergent thinking, creativity involves seeing things from a new perspective. Intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creativity. Tests of creativity have many possible answers and have no hard and fast standards for judging responses.

27. The Components of Creativity
Creativity is composed of expertise (knowledge base from which to generate solutions), imaginative thinking (ability to recognize new connections or patterns), and intrinsic motivation (interest or satisfaction in solving the problem for its own sake).

28. Blocks to Creativity
Lack of technical expertise ,concern about evaluation of ideas, focus on extrinsic motivation, and lack of autonomy may stifle creativity.

29. Steps for Improving Creativity
Look at things from as many perspectives as possible. Use analogies (synectics technique) or pictures. Use power relationships constructively to enhance creativity. Be receptive to new ideas, encourage open expression, reward successes, and empower followers. Form diverse problem solving groups.

30. Implications for Leaders
Being a good leader in today’s dynamic environment means being creative or at least stimulating and nurturing creativity in others. A clear vision of the goal or goals is needed in managing creativity.

31. Characteristics Of Creative Leaders
Perseverance when facing
obstacles
Self-confidence
Willingness to take risks
Willingness to grow and openness
to new experiences
Tolerance for ambiguity

32. Creativity and Innovation
Creativity is the production of novel and useful ideas
Innovation refers to the creation of new ideas and their implementation
Organizational creativity is the creation of a valuable, useful new product, service, idea, procedure, or process by individuals working together in a complex social system

33. Steps in the Creative Process

34. Characteristics of Creative Leaders

35. Componential Theory of Individual Creativity
Creativity takes place when three components join together
Expertise: the necessary knowledge to put facts together
Creative thinking: the ability to imaginatively solve problems
Task motivation: persevering or sticking with a problem to a conclusion

36. Outside the Box Thinking
A box in this sense is a category that confines and restricts thinking. A creative person is not confined to a box, but sees opportunities outside the box.

37. Organizational Methods to Enhance Creativity
Systematically collecting fresh ideas
Brainstorming
Using the pet-peeve technique
Using the forced-association technique
Equipping a kitchen for the mind
Engaging in playful physical activities

38. Leadership Practices for Enhancing Creativity
Intellectual challenge
Freedom to choose the method
Ample supply of the right resources
Effective design of work groups
Supervisory encouragement
Organizational support
Having favorable exchanges with creative workers
Leaders as talent magnets

39. Methods of Managing Creative Workers
Give creative people tools and resources that allow their work to stand out
Give creative people flexibility and a minimum amount of structure
Give gentle feedback when turning down an idea
Employ creative people to manage and evaluate creative workers

40. Leadership Initiatives to Enhance Innovation
Continually pursue innovation
Take risks and encourage risk taking
Acquire innovative companies
Avoid innovation for its own sake
Loose-tight leadership enhances creativity and innovation
Integrate development and production
Encourage people across divisions to share ideas

41. Summary
A creative leader brings forth ideas for things that did not exist previously
The creative process involves five steps: opportunity or problem recognition, immersion, incubation, insight, and verification and application

42. Summary (cont’d)
Creative people have five distinguishing characteristics: knowledge, intellectual ability, personality, and passion for the task and the experience of flow
Creativity requires overcoming traditional thinking
There are several organizational and self-help techniques to enhance creative thinking and problem-solving

43. Summary (cont’d)
Effective leadership requires establishing a climate conducive to creative problem-solving
Special attention should be paid to managing creative workers
Leaders can enhance innovation through several initiatives