How To Foster Creativity and Fuel Organizational Growth
Creativity is an important skill whether you work with words, numbers, or images. It sparks innovation and collaboration while leading to problem-solving.
It’s not enough to just try and hire creative people though. Leaders need to inspire creativity in their team daily and it needs to be a cornerstone of the business culture to truly succeed.
How to Transition into Being a Creative Company
To make room for creative thinking in your company, you should actually expect your team t to be creative as part of their job. Allow them time each day to work on their ideas individually or as a team, and give a little bit of freedom to them in order to take risks as ideas need room to breathe and any benefits from that will outweigh the costs.
Big ideas and small ideas alike should be valued and appreciated, ideas that don’t work out the first time can be improved upon by other colleagues in the future which could really make an impact on the market.
Creativity As A Resource
Creativity is at the heart of business innovation, and innovation is the engine of growth. While creativity is a necessity, we need to treat it organizationally like a finite resource. Then again, any resource is renewable, if you take the right time horizon. So it is with creativity. Your team only has so much creative, mental energy available to you in a day – some more than others.
The good news is that given the right conditions, you can renew this resource. Just be mindful that while creativity is strongly correlated with superior business performance, senior executives can hardly expect better results simply by exhorting their people to “be more creative” and expect a constant stream of creativity with ebbs and flows in the process.
Create Time for Creativity
Encouraging your team to be creative is one thing, but without the proper time allotted in order to relax, prepare, and get into the zone of creativity, ideas will not blossom. It’s important that people know in advance when they can work on creative projects, spontaneous intervals suddenly arising will not be helpful, there will be pressure to get quick results in a situation where there has not been time to organize materials or resources.
Scheduling creativity will have the benefit of focusing your teams’ attention on their projects and overall time management. They will be prepared and will have an idea of what they want to achieve, therefore not wasting the creative time only thinking about the task ahead. You will see greater results this way, and your peeps will feel more fulfilled seeing their development.
Gaining market share will require Courage, Brains, and Innovation. To achieve this, you must truly capitalize on your ideas; you must organize processes and systems for supporting your team through all the different stages of development. Not following through with this will actually inhibit the growth of your company, the people that work with you, and the amount of profit that you can earn.
MVP
Megan Van Petten
Van Petten Group, INC.