Leading at Light Speed is a powerful leadership book by Eric Douglas for businesses, public agencies, and nonprofits revealing the 10 Quantum Leaps to build trust, spark innovation, and create a high-performing organization.

Quantum Leap #6 is all about how to Stimulate the Creative Flow.

With rare exception, teams and work groups should be empowered to develop the plans and strategies for achieving the organization’s strategic focus. After all, they know the local operating conditions. GE demonstrated the extraordinary power of local invention. In his now famous “workout meetings,” CEO Jack Welch brought hundreds of employees together with their managers and asked them to suggest ways to make the business better. Welch put his managers to the test by saying they had three choices: Accept the employee’s idea on the spot, reject it on the spot (but only if they could justify their decision), or study it for ten days. If a company's manager has not, for one reason or another allowed an innovative idea to be initiated, then by company's regulations, it goes into effect without official approval.

At meeting where employees met and conferred, Welch made known that workers should not worry if they voiced new innovations and company waste. Workout meetings became powerful symbols of creative thinking and local invention at GE .

A software manufacturer in California at Broderbund gave a senior manager of new product creation the task of making an first time educational line of software to new, young programmers. One of their first innovations was assembling a user group of eight-year-old girls and boys. Broderbund's click/point graphic interface has been superceded with a schematic that's nonconventional and moves images and buttons that are hidden all effecting a standard of high efficiency and draws in users that are younger with advanced levels of skills.

Innovation feeds an essential need. We respond positively to people who inspire our creativity, and negatively to those who don’t. This spark is crucial if you’re going to succeed in a world where change is constantly accelerating. But spark without trust can be damaging, leading to useless innovations and even destructive ones. Gaining trust from employees by leaders in a company can be a difficult process not to mention the responsibility of simultaneoulsy inspiring new product ideas, means for them to be completed and innovative processes to complete them.

Take this free work survey to see if your organization practices the 10 Quantum Leaps of high-performing organizations.

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