Discuss what skills might be required from managers to cultivate and Essay

Discuss what skills might be required from managers to cultivate and foster creativity and innovation in workforce - Essay Example The objective of this paper is to determine the skills that leaders and managers should possess in order to foster creativity and innovation in their teams so that organizational success is achieved. With the age of globalization upon us, change and development have been launched on a faster pace. This resulted in the need for creativity in innovation, especially in the business world, if one wants to jump ahead of the competition. Companies seek the best candidates who possess dynamism and fresh ideas to contribute to their businesses. Employers prefer people who are creative, open to learning and can think ‘out of the box’ so their imaginative ideas can inject new blood into their products and services. Nicola Bell, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, New Zealand heralded creativity as the new lever of change necessary to â€Å"re-imagine different futures for businesses†. She claims that â€Å"creative leadership† is essential to successful businesses, acknowledging the fact that an IBM study recognized creativity as the â€Å"single most important leadership quality†. (Shipley, 2011, p. 6). A perfect example of a creative leader who was able to save his company from ruin during the global economic crisis is Richard Branson of the Virgin group of companies. Faced with a dire economic low in 2009 with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) collapsing 55% from 2007 to 2009 and the banking system on the verge of a breakdown, Branson’s company was down 40%. How he successfully navigated the company and steered it back to the top was the greatest challenge he had in his decades of creative leadership. He used his innovative ideas to take advantage of the opportunities he found during this low time and determined the strategies with his team to grow from the chaos their company was in (Finkle, 2011). The concepts of creativity and innovation, often intertwined, should be differentiated. Creativity is mostly