Adobe recently conducted a study that made a strong case for the increasing importance of creativity as an essential job skill. Their study dovetailed with another study by the U.S. Department of Education looking at the role of technology in education, which recommends the following skills if America wants to stay globally competitive:
- Critical Thinking
- Collaboration
- Complex Problem Solving
- Agency/Self Development
- Multimedia Communication
What lubricates this system of skills? Creativity.
Whether you push products down a production line or create and edit rich digital media, creativity plays a role in what you do. Creativity is what we use to solve problems, regardless of size or scope.
So, should you hire for creativity? And once you’ve acquired it, should you cultivate and create a healthy environment for it? Do you own/run/manage an organization? If the answer to this last question is yes, then the answer to all of them is yes. Here’s a cursory, highly-simplified list of management principles to help keep creativity flowing in your organization. They just so happen to be good life skills and general management/leadership skills, to boot.
Use Future-Based Language to Grease the Wheels
Environments with many problems to solve, especially environments that rely heavily on creative input, also include a lot of “noise.” Digital communications flying back and forth, multiple deadlines piling up, meetings that enforce shifting or changing priorities, relationships and personnel dynamics – we increasingly operate in very complex work environments. And we often get bogged down in those details and start to mistake them with the identity of our work or, worse, our organization. Staying competitive as an organization requires a focus on the future. Shockingly, according to Gary Hamel, author of Competing for the Future, the typical firm spends less than 3% of it’s time formulating and executing on a vision of the future. What is your organization doing to anticipate and address future problems? How is the vision of your organization driving its culture, and HOW you approach problem-solving and work, in general? Can your most rudimentary employee, an intern, perhaps, articulate in simple terms your organization’s identity and where it’s headed?
Get involved, however you can, in cultivating and communicating the vision for your organization, and then set to work weaving that vision into your work and that of your teams. In the process, you’ll leave behind the language of the static present and past. With future-focused cultural goal posts in place, your teams will have something to shoot for, instead of just piles of work to “get through.”
Give Away All the Credit
The key concept here is that you’re part of a team, no matter what your position or rank. Creativity doesn’t work nearly as well in a vacuum – ideas are made stronger/better when they are bounced around, and rarely do they come back to the originator in the form that they sent them out into the world.
Praise your team, and authentically THANK them CONTINUOUSLY for their contributions and achievements in the creative process.
Taking credit is not necessary, and it can be quite demotivating to your creatives if they feel like they’re not being given due credit. Praise your team, and authentically THANK them CONTINUOUSLY for their contributions and achievements in the creative process. In fact, THANK them for their failures as well! Failures are the often overlooked or even shunned contributors to the creative process – we learn so much from failure, but our instinct is often to sweep it under the rug or try to pass it off. Taking credit for accomplishments not only dampens others’ enthusiasm for contributing, it magnifies this instinct to bury failure, and you could be missing out on a boatload of creative cargo.
Ditch “But” in Favor of “And”
This takes a little practice, but it’s worth the mental effort and will pay out in spades, not just on the job site but in everyday life. Stop using the word “but.” When you are providing feedback and you put “but” in your sentence, the assumption (which is right 99.99% of the time) is that you’re about to get critical. The effect is that your listener immediately has a tendency to disagree or want to negate whatever it is you’re about to say, even if it’s constructive. Or worse, they shut down and tune you out completely. Replace “but” with “and” and watch the magic unfold.
“Hey Margo, I love the layout you came up with, but I think the calls-to-action are buried too much under those strong elements in the middle.”
“Hey Margo, I love the layout you came up with, and I wonder if we could strengthen the calls-to-action a bit, which seem to be buried a bit under those strong elements in the middle.”
See the difference? You’ve included them in the conversation and built upon your initial positive feedback. It also causes you to rethink how you might phrase the concern you have – you can’t help but deliver it in a more constructive, empathetic way.