A Right Sized Attitude in a Downsized Market
Part 2
By Valarie D. Willis

There are five key attitudes that leaders should possess to survive this downturn and downsized market. Today's down economy gives every leader the opportunity to display a new sense of courage, a new sense of innovation, and a new sense of creativity within their work environment.

The Right Sized Attitude - Part 1

What better time than now, is it for leaders to stretch their creativity?

Innovation and creativity occurs when the pain of something is too great to bear, or the need is so great, or your passion is so great, that something needs to change.

During these times clearly the pain and the need should be enough to move leaders into a position that says, "look let us try to do things differently" and take a creative look at situations.

Now is the time for leaders to look at how their systems, processes and structures are either helping them to stay alive in these times or getting in the way of them becoming more competitive during this time.

Setting the Stage for Ideas

Now is the time to seek input from all those people who are still working in the organization. Leaders need to ask them how we do it differently, how do we do it better, what one thing would you suggest that we change in order for us to become more competitive in the marketplace?

The answers may surprise you. Leaders should foster an atmosphere that allows for the freedom of expression of new ideas. Even ideas that may initially seem 'far-fetched'c an turn into winners. Remember, the telephone was once considered a 'far-fetched'idea.

If an organization does not know how to be creative, then take the time to introduce creativity in small doses to the organizations. Take your meetings outside into the fresh air and start having conversations of how things could be different. Sometimes just changing the environment for people will help them to think more creatively.

When want people to be creative it takes more than just telling them to be so, we need to provide them some sort of stimulus. Introduce the problem or opportunity to the team and tell them to think about it for awhile.

To stimulate their thinking, bring in a stack of diverse magazines and have people look at pictures as they think about the problem. The pictures will help to stimulate their creativity, and ideally new thoughts should emerge.

An attitude of creativity would help us to start reframing our problems and opportunities. I love the example of the watermelon problem in China how they took the problem of not having storage space to store those large oval watermelons and turned it into an opportunity by growing square watermelons. That is creativity at its best.

It was not a group of idealists, or creative people, or even marketing people that solved this problem. The people who solved the problem were the ones who were experiencing the pain of a problem; which were the growers of the watermelons.

What's your "watermelon problem" and how can you change it?