A recent survey found that 80% of CEO’s rated creativity as the most important leadership competency. They said the business environment is growing so complex that it literally demands new ways of thinking. However are CEOs and senior managers really willing to make the moves necessary to develop cultures of real creativity and innovation?
Here are the six fundamental moves I believe they must make:
- Satisfy Individual’s Needs. Recognise that questioning convention, the key to creativity, begins with questioning the way people are expected to work. How well are their core needs (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual) being met in the workplace? The more people are distracted by unmet needs, the less energy and engagement they bring to their work. Begin by asking employees what they need to perform at their best. Next, define what success looks like and hold team members accountable to specific measures, but as much as possible, let them design their days as they see fit to achieve those outcomes.
- Teach Creativity. It isn’t magical and it can be developed. There are five well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking: first insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification. They don’t always unfold predictably, but they do provide a roadmap for enlisting the whole brain, moving back and forth between analytic, deductive left hemisphere thinking, and more pattern-seeking, big-picture, right hemisphere thinking.
- Nurture Passion. The quickest way to kill creativity is to put people in roles that don’t excite their imagination. This begins at an early age. Children who are encouraged to follow their passion develop better discipline, deeper knowledge, and are more persevering and more resilient in the face of setbacks. Look for small ways to give employees the opportunity and encouragement to follow their interests and express their unique talents.
- Provide Meaning to Work. Human beings are meaning-making animals. Wages pay the bills but rarely provides a meaning. We feel better about ourselves when we we’re making a positive contribution to something beyond ourselves. To feel truly motivated, we have to believe what we’re doing really matters. When leaders can define a compelling purpose and vision that goes beyond an individual’s self-interest, it’s a source of energy not just for higher performance, but also for thinking more creatively about how to generate new solutions.
- Allow the Time. Creative thinking requires relatively open-ended, uninterrupted time, free of pressure for immediate answers and instant solutions. Time is a scarce in companies that live by the ethic of “more, bigger, faster.” Ironically, the best way to insure that innovation gets attention is to schedule ‘ring fenced’ time for it, on a regular basis.
- Value Personal Renewal. Human beings are not meant to operate continuously the way computers do. We’re designed to expend energy for relatively short periods of time, no more than 90 minutes, and then recover. The third stage of the creative process, incubation, occurs when we step away from a problem we’re trying to solve and let our unconscious work on it. It’s effective to go on a walk, or listen to music, or quiet the mind by meditating. Exercise, that raises the heart rate, is another powerful way to induce the sort of shift in consciousness in which creative breakthroughs spontaneously arise.
These activities are only possible in a workplace that places values on the power of renewal.
