As a company leader, you know the importance of promoting productivity, efficiency, and unity among your employees. However, a single approach is not always the most effective for employees with different learning styles who come from diverse backgrounds and respond differently to varying communication styles.
Additionally, any given situation may require a customized approach that wasn’t necessary previously.
The key here is to pair two essential leadership styles, so your employees feel confident, comfortable, and motivated.
Let’s break down these two leadership styles – adaptive and creative – to see how they can be used hand in hand for the best results.
Differentiating Between Creative Leadership and Adaptive Leadership
Creative and adaptive leadership are distinct management styles; however, they can significantly benefit your organization when used together.
What is Creative Leadership?
Creative leadership is needed when new ideas and approaches start to be implemented within your team. It is indispensable to help clarify a team’s purpose during transition or when new strategies are adopted.
The idea behind creative leadership is based on working cooperatively with your team to discover and develop new ideas and innovations.
Creative leaders demonstrate:
- Resilience following failure
- Persuasiveness
- Solid personal ethics
- Dislike of pettiness
- Innovative solutions
- Courage to think beyond the conventional
- Enthusiasm
- Trust
- Humor
As you develop your skills as a creative leader, you’ll learn to find the solution in unexpected ways, be open to exploring new perspectives, and see the big picture.
What is Adaptive Leadership?
Adaptive leadership focuses on finding solutions and on what’s most important to the organization. They embrace challenges and help their team adapt to new circumstances.
Adaptive leaders demonstrate:
- Mutual trust
- Emotional intelligence
- The desire to learn and improve techniques
- Respect for individuals in their team
- The ability to help team members embrace change
- Patience
- Ambition by looking for opportunities and investing resources
- Humility when admitting mistakes or changing to a more productive strategy
- Encouragement and positivity among team members
The skills an adaptive leader adopts not only build up their team but result in gradual and long-term success for the company overall.
The Relationship Between Adaptive and Creative Leadership
There are several similarities between adaptive and creative leadership styles. For example, they each require humility, innovation, and respect for your team.
When you adopt both leadership styles, you’re able to build a team that isn’t afraid to think outside the box, approaches their job enthusiastically, and isn’t discouraged when they have to go back to the drawing board.
A team that feels comfortable sharing new ideas and learning to embrace challenges and change results in a company that pulls ahead of the competition.
Become a Successful and Effective Business Leader
If you’re interested in becoming a more creative AND adaptive leader for the betterment of your team and organization, we’d love to have you join us at Aden Leadership for group leadership coaching where you’ll learn how investing your skills into authentic leadership will pay off by bettering your team and growing your company.
