Did you know that Creativity and Innovation is a competency that you can develop? We define the Creativity and Innovation competency as, "Creating new approaches, designs, processes, technologies and/or systems to achieve the desired result." Who do you know who is highly skilled at Creativity and Innovation?

With practice, you can grow and develop this skill just like other "hard skills" you might be good at like cooking, public speaking, employee coaching, or playing golf.

How do I grow as a leader: Creativity and Innovation?

Those with a highly developed skill of Creativity and Innovation exhibit the following:

• Notices unique patterns, variables, processes, systems or relationships.
• Expresses non-traditional perspectives and/or novel approaches.
• Synthesizes data, ideas, models, processes or systems to create new insights.
• Challenges established theories, methods and/or protocols.
• Encourages and promotes creativity and innovation.
• Modifies existing concepts,...

Did you know that Conceptual Thinking is a competency that you can develop? We define the Conceptual Thinking competency as, "analyzing hypothetical
situations, patterns and/or abstract concepts to formulate connections and new insights." Who do you know who is highly skilled at Conceptual Thinking?

With practice, you can grow and develop this skill just like other "hard skills" you might be good at like cooking, public speaking, employee coaching, or playing golf.

How do I grow as a leader: Conceptual Thinking?

Those with a highly developed skill of Conceptual Thinking exhibit the following:

• Demonstrates the ability to identify patterns, themes or connections not
  noticed by others.
• Gathers hypothetical or abstract concepts to formulate new insights.
• Evaluates many patterns to formulate connections.
• Recognizes unique or unusual perspectives.
• Envisions hypothetical situations to formulate new concepts.
• Utilizes patterns to develop new ways to process information.
• ...

So far, we've gone over three of the five areas you need to understand to be a great leader who grows a healthy team: Driving Forces, Behaviors, and Emotional Intelligence. Next, we're going to cover Competencies or soft skills. 

All people have all of these personal skills to one degree or another. Everyone can't be good at everything, however, so you want to focus on developing the competencies that

• A) You are already strong in 
• B) Focus on the ones that you need to be strong in for your current and future roles.

Over the next few lessons, we will be investigating each of these 25 abilities one at a time to help you grow as a leader.

How do I develop as a leader?

Developing your skills as a leader is just like developing any other skill, it takes practice and lots of it. The trouble is, it's not always as easy to identify how developed our skills are at work, especially in "white-collar," creative or knowledge work. In fields with lots of technical skill...

Jeremy from Ironwood Venture recently shared this Harvard Business Review article and I've been sharing it with all of our clients.

You should read it too.

Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine who shared this story about leading a healthy team, but not the kind of team we typically think of, or who hires Kutsko Consulting. His team is his son's little league team. Check it out:

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My son is playing in an 'instructional' little league and I am the head coach. Instructional means the idea is to focus more on learning than winning. After losing badly in our first two games, however, I've realized that you can't take  winning out of the equation with kids. They know the score...and they want to win. When we won for the first time last night, they raised their arms in celebration, ran to high five one another, and then gathered around me for a post-game talk (and some candy). They were glowing, and my first 'instructional' instinct was to focus on their behaviors, like how hard they played and how they encouraged each other, rather than the...

As it relates to growing a healthy team, one question we've been hearing a lot lately at Kutsko Consulting has been...

Why is it important to understand my style as a leader?

As a leader, you have a big job and people depend on you. Leadership is a skill that you can develop and, like any skill, it will dull if you aren't intentional about sharpening it. We define leadership as organizing and influencing people to believe in a vision while creating a sense of purpose and direction.

How developed is your leadership competency? If you've taken our TriMetrix DNA assessment you can find out by looking on the Development Indicator page of your report which should be around page 40-41.

The first step to developing your leadership competency is to clearly understand yourself and the unique leadership style you offer, so that you can lead from your strengths and adapt your weaknesses to the various people you lead and environments where you work.

If you want to see how your skills have...