A company’s ability to break the rules isn’t revolutionary—it’s evolutionary.

AmCham Greece’s new Rule Breaking Leadership Survey 2025, presented at the Chamber’s 9th Women in Business Forum on June 4, 2025, revealed the contradictions, paradoxes, and deeper truths behind the risk and innovation culture of Greek companies.

Do employees really feel safe enough to think outside the box? Are organizations really encouraging innovation? Are we really breaking the rules, or are we just rewriting them in finer print?

It takes more than just a statement of intent for an organization to truly shift the culture away from focusing on safety and risk aversion and toward growth and development. What’s needed is a modus operandi for innovation. The ability to break the rules is not an act of rebellion; it is a sign of maturity. The question is not whether to take risks; it is whether they can handle the newness that they themselves want and welcome.

 

The three top attributes for the future are creativity, vision, and teamwork

 

Key findings of the Rule Breaking Leadership Survey 2025

  • 2% of respondents stated that their company encourages risk taking “relatively often,” yet only 9.1% see this as a regular practice.
  • 34% of management executives believe they consistently encourage unconventional thinking, but just 20.9% of junior executives agree.
  • Just 1 in 5 (19.7%) respondents stated they feel truly safe to put forward unconventional ideas; 31.1% said “it depends.”
  • 1% acknowledge the fear of failure as the main obstacle to risk taking, followed by limited resources (39%) and rigid structures (33.9%).
  • 3% stated that their companies provided tools for innovation “quite often,” but only 19.7% felt fully equipped.
  • Just 22% believe that their company is actively preparing future leaders.

Notably, the survey showed that according to respondents, the three top qualities for the future are creativity (55.9%), vision (48.8%), and teamwork (47.2%), indicating that the future belongs not to technical knowhow but to empathy, imagination, and collective wisdom.

The takeaway is clear: It is time to put words into action and move from mere rhetoric to a lived culture of innovation. Organizations that want to evolve and thrive need to create an environment that rewards creativity, protects risk-taking, and doesn’t silently punish out-of-the-box thinking.

Five key elements essential to successful organizational innovation:

  1. Safe zones for failure – teams and pilot programs with an explicit tolerance for failure as a learning tool
  2. New creativity metrics – introducing KCIs—key creativity indicators—to measure and assess creative quality: How many ideas were proposed? How many were implemented? How many felt safe to disagree?
  3. Low-vanity leadership – leaders who create space for the ideas of others and don’t purport to have all the answers
  4. Empowering out-of-the-box thinking – establishing a status quo that inspires change rather than perpetuates stagnation
  5. Internal ecosystems of trust – implementing safety nets and going beyond training to empowerment and encouragement in practice

The survey was carried out by the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce and was directed and supervised by psychologist and social researcher Agnes Mariakaki, CEO of MindSearch and member of the Chamber’s Women in Business (WIB) Committee. The sample included 254 business professionals of varying seniority levels and was conducted in collaboration with the Athens University of Economics and Business.