THIS IS PART OF THE INSTITUTE FOR MANAGEMENT STUDIES (IMS) LEADERSHIP CONVERSATIONS

These 60-minute IMS live virtual programs provide a quick dive into key topics that are critical to organizations during a time of disruptive change. Packed with actionable learning strategies, participants will experience an interactive virtual program with an IMS thought leader and receive post-session support through micro-learning lessons and a discussion board.

Creativity is fundamental to business innovation and progress. In a recent study by IBM, over 1600 CEOs rated creativity as one of the number skills for business success. Engendering creativity in a team is always challenging, and even more so in remote and hybrid working environments. This practical training will introduce you to tools and frameworks that will help you foster creativity and innovation in your teams. The course is designed for busy managers, project leaders, and senior individual contributors who are looking to adapt in a fast-paced, challenging work environment by maximizing the innovation capability of their teams. The focus will be on what leadership choices will help team members be more creative and innovative.

Creativity involves the generation of new, imaginative idea and is the first step in the innovation process. Creativity and innovation are related, but innovation goes one step further. In innovation, we start with creativity and we need to also engage in realistic planning and follow-through. In team leadership, we call this the opening (creativity) and closing (planning and follow-through) behaviors of the team lead. This training will introduce you to techniques that support both aspects of the innovation process and how to alternate between them.

The Big Five Personality Traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) influence how the team leader and members can most effectively contribute to innovation and high performance. Dr. Kelly will share her research on how to utilize these personality dimensions for team collaboration around new ideas and their effective implementation.

A key is to bring awareness of these traits in yourself as a leader, and that of the team members to tap into the intrinsic motivation that leads to high engagement and performance. We will cover techniques such as brainstorming, idea quotas, wildstorming, crowdsourcing and the Delphi method to add to your innovation tool kit. This training will definitely enhance your ability to managing for innovation-driven performance.

Facilitator: Dr. Louise Kelly
Louise Kelly, PhD is a Professor of Management and Leadership at the University of La Verne. She is a nationally recognized expert on strategy and leadership and has a passion for helping people and organizations unleash their management, leadership, and innovation potential. Dr. Kelly publishes widely, and has authored five books including, A Dictionary of Strategy, Entrepreneurial Women: New Leadership and Management Models, The Psychologists Manager, and An Existential Systems Approach to Managing Organizations, as well as over 125 articles and conferences papers. Dr. Kelly has been designated an outstanding scholar by the United States government and has led executive trainings in the US and throughout the world. Dr. Kelly is fluent in French, Spanish and English. Her research on strategy and mindfulness has been written up in Forbes.com. She has been featured in a series of videos on entrepreneurship and managing innovative teams and has been interviewed for numerous podcasts on management. She serves on a number of boards, and a global taskforce on Covid-19 organizational adaptation and has won top awards for teaching and scholarship throughout her career.

Date: September 1, 2021

Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM CST

An important note: Our goal in Learning and Development is to create the same level of rich engagement in our virtual classroom as we do in our in-person classes. Therefore, the day of the session:

– Ensure you’re in an environment that will allow you to participate fully! This will be an interactive session and your contribution is important.

– Turn off your email and phone notifications to avoid distractions.

– Be camera ready! Participants are expected to have their cameras on during the entire session.

– Have a pen and paper ready. – Log in early to the session through the Zoom link.

Once registered in Learn@Work, you will receive an email with the Zoom information for the date/time selected; instructions will be included in the invitation.

Questions: Contact Shirley_Ikemeier@wustl.edu

All programs are subject to change.