How to Get More Creative Employees

Martha I. Finney

Creativity is an essential component to any department today. It’s the key to differentiation that will make you stand out among all your competitors, no matter what service or product you are providing your customers. This might actually come as bad news to you if you’re not accustomed to thinking of yourself (or your department) as the creative type.

Or it might come as even worse news if you’ve been wishing all along that you were creative and having been watching your competitors eat your lunch. If you’ve tried to train your employees to be more creative, you probably know this already: Creativity may be a discipline, but it’s not a teachable skill. It’s more of a frame of mind that allows people to be more receptive to making fresh connections of notions that result in breakthrough ideas. So you can’t teach creativity, but you can nurture it by providing an environment that inspires and invigorates your employees.

Take your employees on “artist dates.” In her book, The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron recommends that her readers (primarily writers and visual artists) leave their desks and easels and go out into the world a couple times a week to expose their souls to fresh colors, textures, and experiences that will eventually find their way into their work. Similarly at Ferrari, Director of HR and Organization Mario Almondo brings the artist dates to his employees via The Creativity Club. During this special event, Ferrari brings in jazz musicians, painters, writers, orchestra conductors, and actors to show its employees how artists come up with new ideas and solve creative problems.

Dissolve your silos—Cross-pollinate your potential for ideas by bringing in employees from different departments to work on problems and their solutions. The fresh perspectives that outsiders will lend your group won’t be censored with the prejudice of “We’ve already tried that” or “That can’t be done.”

Likewise, lend your people to other departments so that they can experience the creative satisfaction of offering their ideas to other people’s problems.

Give your people what they need—The notion of starving artist is charming only in Puccini operas. Your employees need money, time, rest, play, positive reinforcement, encouragement, and guidance to stay energized, hopeful, and courageous enough to keep coming up with new ideas and approaches to old problems.

Make your people happy—yesterday. Researchers have discovered that breakthrough ideas typically don’t happen at the peak moment of happiness. They mostly tend to happen the day after the subjects reported feeling especially happy.

Find ways to help your employees remember the meaning of their work—Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile says, “People are most creative when they care about their work and they’re stretching their skills.” Never let your employees lose sight of the meaning behind the work they do. No matter what your employees do, if they do it successfully, they’re making life better or easier for someone. So bring some of your employees’ customers into your organization, so they can tell the story of how your product or service made a difference to them. When you make sure they don’t lose sight of that fact, you nurture their potential for creativity.

Open your department to volunteers—Mark Twain once wrote that the definition of work is something you used to do for love but now you do for money. From the phenomena of YouTube and Wikipedia, we have learned that the public’s passion extends into even the geekiest of pursuits, such as building an encyclopedia. If an encyclopedia project can attract volunteers, surely there’s something about your organization that can appeal to discretionary passion. If there is, open your doors to this group and let their energies infect your employees.

As the engaging manager, you’re in a bind. You’re responsible for generating great performance and products that result from creativity. But you can’t force creativity. All you can do is provide an environment where it can thrive. How you go about that is a creative challenge with your name on it.

You Stand Between Inspiration and Implementation

It’s one thing to have a department that generates ideas—especially great ideas—like a machine. It’s quite another thing to know how to take care of all those ideas—even the bad ones. Nobody can reasonably expect all his ideas to be successfully implemented, of course. But your people deserve to trust that you will give their ideas respectful consideration, no matter how good or bad they are.

As their manager, you are the only one who stands between their brainchildren and any chance they’ll have for having those ideas successfully put to good use. You are the gate between inspiration and implementation. The question now for you is whether that gate is routinely shut or open.

Researchers of organizational creativity and innovation say that managers are the main reason why great ideas never see the light of day. There are several reasons for this. You may not know as much as your people do about their field, so you may not be able to assess the value of the innovation. As a result, you might dismiss the idea as being too risky, when it actually opens a valuable channel for change. Or perhaps you built your own personal sense of stability and security based on a certain set of variables, and your employees’ ideas threaten the end of a very comfortable status quo for you. Or the innovations break certain entrenched rules—ways of doing things that your organization has become attached to. Researchers call this phenomenon goal displacement—where the rules that were once set up to support a company in achieving its goals become more venerated than the pursuit of the goals themselves.

This isn’t to imply that with managerial responsibility you become an idea-phobe, that you fear fresh thought. People rarely intentionally close their minds to new ways of doing things. It just happens imperceptibly over time.

But this still doesn’t relieve you of your duty of ushering great ideas toward the next steps of implementation.

Do a gut check—It’s possible that subconsciously your mind has been closing to the notion of original ideas—especially those coming from your subordinates—over recent years. Look back on times when employees presented you with ideas (good or bad). How do you typically react to them? Do you hear them out noncritically? Or do you immediately start looking for operational flaws even as your employee is still speaking? Do you worry that your employees might be taking up too much valuable time making sure that their ideas are bulletproof before presenting them to you? Do you find yourself routinely liking your ideas better than your employees’? If you’re not clear about these answers, ask a few employees you both respect and trust to give you the honest answer. If you’re not happy with their feedback, let your group know that you’re committed to making a change toward more idea-friendly behavior, and seek the coaching or training that will help you get back on the right track.

Sell the idea to the right buyer—An employee has just dropped a great idea on your desk. It’s passed your still-considerable menu of qualifications. Now it’s up to you to put it into action. Evangelize it through the channels only to the people who will take care of it. Who is in the best position to push it along? Will your boss receive it as appreciatively as you did and find the funding for it? Or does it need to be beta-tested first, perhaps by your own team or by volunteers and rabid fans of the company?

Give credit where credit is due—Your people still own the idea, even though they gave it to you. Make sure you tell them what the idea’s status is as it’s being pushed forward to implementation. And make sure everyone along the line knows exactly who originated the idea—whether it was a single individual or a team effort.

You’ll get the credit you deserve. As a manager, your job is to create an environment where other people can put their brilliance to work. As more ideas from your department are implemented, you’ll be known as the person who leads creativity into reality.

Failures Promote Progress

Companies thrive or fail on the power of the next Big Idea. While we think we may have a clue about what is likely to be the next sensation for our market, the chances are that we’ll be either surprised or disappointed with each new venture. It’s rare that our vision unfolds precisely as we expect it will. From your people’s perspective, a lot of time, talent, passion, and ego are burned as fuel in the service of the Big Idea. Each idea is exposed to scrutiny, acceptance, or rejection. Some of those ideas are perfectly sound, with every chance of success except one: The timing is wrong. Other ideas are thunderously dunderheaded notions that deserve to be put down as discreetly and humanely as possible—with no outsider the wiser.

Still other ideas make it through to production and explode in a huge ball of embarrassment, high in the sky, large enough for everyone to see: your own boss, your customers, the media, your team. You may have some explaining to do to your bosses. But you also have a new responsibility to the people who work for you. At this moment, your biggest job is to ignore the bleating of lesser minds who are thrilling at your failure. Focus on taking care of your team. With your people, your job isn’t to save face. It’s to save heart.

Keep your voice down and your head up—Apologize on your own behalf as profusely and abjectly as you want to. But remember that you’re also your team’s representative right now. Your job is to restore its dignity both as its representative to the rest of the company and within your group itself. No one on your staff is being paid to hear you rant and pound your fist. Keep calm, and you will model the most important behavior for the rest of your employees as you, as a group, re-envision the future.

If you have to point the finger, do it in private—Your team may do its best work as a group. But it’s still important to keep in mind that it’s made up of individuals who need to feel that they won’t be publicly humiliated for taking personal risks or making mistakes. You may feel justified in your anger and frustration to make an example of a single employee who, let’s face it, really deserves to be fired. If you do it with the entire group as a witness, the example you’ll be making is your own. And your group will learn only that you can’t be trusted.

Recruit your team as consultants—Conduct a postmortem of the failed project and confer with your team as if they were esteemed, outside consultants. They are, after all, the world’s foremost experts on this particular project. They know better than anyone why it went wrong. Spend some time exploring the things that went right, as well. There’s learning to be captured on both positive and negative sides of this story. Show your employees that you see tremendous value in the (mis)adventure, and they will move forward to the next project equipped with greater wisdom.

Such an inclusive postmortem will also return to your team a sense of ownership of the project. It may have been ridiculed and criticized to smithereens by outsiders, but what’s left still belongs to your group. So, as a group, your team should decide what to do with the remains. Maybe they just want to file it under “never again” and forget about it. Or maybe they decide to conduct a cautionary seminar on what was learned from the project, or write a white paper or article for a business management journal.

It’s easy for success-driven leaders to celebrate victories with their teams. But those are short wins that don’t necessarily result in deepened relationships built on trust. If you’re committed to being a mission-driven leader of an engaged team, you see that even failures are an opportunity to reinforce your collaborative culture of energized, freshly motivated individuals who respect themselves, each other (and that includes you), and what they do.

How you handle this failure will tell them how much risk they can afford to take with the next new Big Idea. Your behavior will solidify your team as a group who survived a big—if bad—adventure, and their shared learning will teach them to work more smoothly together the next time.

Extreme Pressure Kills Inspired Performance

Faster! Better! Cheaper! Faster! Better! Cheaper! Oh heck. Who are we kidding? Let’s go for what really counts. Faster! Faster! Faster! Faster! Come on, people, let’s mooooove!

Fast is good, right? Time is money. When you’re fast, you’re first to market. When you’re fast, you can use that extra time to come up with more new ideas that will bring you first to market (again) with products that your competitor hasn’t even thought of yet. Fast is lean, clean, sharp. Why, there’s even a business magazine named after fast. So it has to be good, right? Who would subscribe to Slow Company magazine?

And fast is fun. It’s a challenge that managers put before their employees every day to see if they can squeeze a little more productivity and performance out of those brains already laboring under ever-tightening deadlines. If time is money, speed is the game in which that money is won. But there’s just one problem: As a manager, when you’re playing with speed, you’re gambling with creativity, quality, accuracy, and performance. When you lose, it shows up in digits on the NYSE.

For most managers, fast is where it’s at. They think that creativity and productivity exercised under pressure will produce hard, sharp, clear diamonds of progress and competitiveness. But Harvard Business School researchers are discovering just the opposite. They have found that extreme pressure kills creativity and insightful thinking. The stress that comes from the modern fondness for fast usually results in lack of mental clarity, physical exhaustion, and even the death of passion for the project. People are the least creative when they are under time pressure.

Still, you’ve got goals to meet. And, as the manager, you have to find a way to inspire and motivate your team to work just beyond what they think might be their capacity—but do it in such as way that you don’t burn out everyone in the process.

Keep your deadlines reasonable—Those circles under your employees’ eyes may not be for lack of vitamins or sunshine. They could be from lack of sleep and spirit. Your team isn’t a success if its members are meeting their deadlines but paying for the accomplishment with their health.

Keep your deadlines real—If you become known as someone who puts artificial heat under your employees by unnecessarily accelerating your deadlines, you will lose all your clout to motivate your team. You will have lost that precious currency that can take you and your team anywhere: trust. If your management imposes absurd deadlines on you, with the expectation that hardship trickles downstream, stand up for your team and say no. Not every stretch goal or production challenge is worth the pain of the game.

Give your employees the time and space they need to get the job done—If the work is so urgent that it demands an accelerated pace, it deserves prioritizing. Clear your employees’ desks of any other competing obligations until this deliverable is met. Cancel all regular meetings, scheduling only those that are essential to the urgent task at hand.

Fully communicate the reasons why this project is so important and why its speed is essential—If you want your employees to commit their passion and energy to meeting insane deadlines, you owe them an explanation as to why. If they understand the urgency behind the mission, they can take personal ownership of meeting that goal. Communication like this takes time, to be sure. But if you’re looking at this last point and thinking, “I don’t have time to walk my employees through the reasons why,” then you need to double-check whether there’s real urgency behind your request or if it’s just a habit of being in a hurry.

Real deadlines set and reinforce an atmosphere of trust and respect among your entire team (including you). But repeatedly applied pressure transforms your people into slaves of the clock or calendar rather than service providers to your customers.

The clock is your friend. Don’t fight it. And don’t make your people fight it either.

Creativity Is a Balancing Act

Some departments seem to have all the fun. Their walls are covered in bright colors, with pretty or funny pictures tacked up everywhere. Little toys sit on cubicle ledges, and shreds of bright bunting are stuck to the acoustic tile overhead, which bristles with pencils that have been flung up there (colored pencils, no less, certainly not that old standby Ticonderoga #2). Laughter rings out from the half-walls on a regular basis. It’s like those guys have no sense of dignity. You’d think this wasn’t an office so much as a kindergarten. What a bunch of goofballs. And that’s the accounting department, for Pete’s sake!

When you see that kind of high jinks inside a company, it’s easy to assume that those folks spend a lot of time goofing off. And they might. But goofing off is good. Playfulness has become acknowledged as an essential component to a company’s most competitive productivity edge: creativity. Creativity is the economic engine that drives the present to the future. According to Fast Company magazine, “The explosion of creative thinking in the past century and a half or so is the main reason living standards have risen eightfold, market economies have outperformed socialist ones, corporations have become innovation labs, and work has become more interesting.”

Few companies can thrive today without some level of creativity or innovation. Whether it’s their product or their internal processes, they need a regular infusion of what University of Chicago Professor of Psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls acceptable novelty. It’s up to the managers to make their departments goofball-friendly, even if it’s only just a little bit. You just never know when the next great ideas will come, or from where—even accounting!

Creativity is indeed a mystery. To be the most effective at managing a creativity-driven team, you have to be willing to relinquish control and give into that mystery. It’s a paradox, to be sure. Get used to it. The paradoxes surrounding creativity are just beginning. In his research on creativity, creative people, and the concept of flow (for which he is most famous), Csikszentmihalyi came up with these paradoxes:

• Creative people tend to be physically energetic but need periods of downtime.

• Creative people tend to have high IQs, but they also harbor a sense of naiveté.

• Creative people tend to express their discipline through playfulness.

• Creative people tend to enjoy wild bouts of fantasy while being firmly grounded in reality.

• Creative people tend to be both extremely introverted and extremely extroverted.

• Creative people tend to be both humble and proud at the same time.

• Creative people tend to be unconstrained by gender-role stereotyping, displaying both masculine and feminine characteristics and behaviors.

• Creative people tend to be both traditional and rebellious.

• Creative people tend to be passionate about their work but coolly professional and objective about it as well.

Learn to hold these paradoxes loosely at the same time, and you stand a good chance of creating an atmosphere where your people can do their best, most original work. That could be your most post powerful creative contribution—provided, of course, that you can control your need for control.

The work that creative people do exposes them to pain, suffering, and rejection. But it also gives them the greatest joy. If, as a manager, you can look at the above list and think, “Well, that describes just about everyone on my team,” consider yourself both blessed and cursed. (Oops, there’s another paradox.) You have people who identify strongly with what they do, who are willing to go out on a limb for the sake of their work, who can be fun to be with (except for those times when they aren’t), and know the importance of developing products and processes that didn’t exist yesterday (and within the confines and rules of convention and tradition). You’re cursed in the sense that you have to somehow corral all this energy and eventually have something to show for it that will impress the, shall we say, less creative types further up the corporate food chain.