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,...

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...