Is your organization nurturing your creativity?

These days organizations work in highly competitive environment where industry dynamics and changing technology makes creative approach and innovation essential. Creativity needs to be prioritized by senior leadership. Talent manager should pay a key role in decisions that impact the creative work environment. While most organizations tend to develop environment that nurtures creativity, yet there are a number of organizations that still believe that creativity has mainly to do with R&D, marketing or design departments.

As a matter of fact, each profile demands creativity to look for better solutions or better ways of handling issues. At an individual level also, creativity is needed for long term success in career. No employee would like to work in an environment where there is no scope of reflecting and sharing ideas. Gone are the days when employees used to join an organization with certain skills and continue to do same task for years on end.

Organizations that do not focus on the innovation lose best and brightest employees too soon. Thus, creativity is not just needed for meeting organization’s objectives but it has become a key component in working towards hiring and employee retention.

Creativity has 3 major components:

-Expertise

– Creative thinking skills

-Motivation

Managers can manage all the 3 components of creativity, though expertise and creative thinking are individual’s raw materials. But these can also be enhanced by conducting seminars, conference, training, forming collaborative groups and multi- tasking teams. However, motivation is central to any effort towards creativity. Managers opt for both extrinsic and intrinsic motivators to motivate a culture of creative thinking in the organization. Extrinsic motivators like salary hike, incentive plans or promotion may not be of much use if we really need to spark a creative mindset. Intrinsic motivation is of real help when you understand the interest, long term goals of employee and ignite passion towards the goal.

Introspect once you read following questions:

–Are you getting challenging and interesting tasks?

Simple effort that managers can do to stimulate creativity is by matching people with right assignments. Results of one of the surveys by Ipsos Public Affairs Poll indicated that most of the employees believe that they are creative but they do not find their positions at work to be creative enough.Irrespective of your profile, there is always something new to work on and you know you are able of doing that task. These days organizations work towards building competency maps to identify the unique characteristics that differentiate you from others and equip you for a particular role, job, assignment or culture. eg: a manager identifies the caliber of few team members in leadership role and requests the management to sponsor their online MBA.I have seen many candidates looking for opportunities after joining an organization. These organizations fail to develop strategies to meet the creative needs of the employees.

-Does your organization offer some autonomy in your day to day work?

Autonomy is instrumental in any creative venture that would be concerning the process and not necessarily the end. Employees are more creative when you give them freedom to decide how to climb a particular mountain. In order words, giving freedom in how to approach problems in ways that use most of their expertise and creative skills. But any kind of innovative approach which is being delegated to employees comes with some amount of sensible risk. So, the next question obviously arise-

-Is your organization having tolerance for failure?

If no, they will always avert risk taking initiatives. These organizations have fixed protocols and processes to follow and expect their employees to abide to them with dedication. These organizations prefer hierarchical structure which might inhibit any creative venture resulting in stagnation on account of red tapism.

– Is creativity inbuilt in the culture of your organization?

Creativity is enhanced in its true sense when organization has systems and procedures to support and prioritize it through effective communication.

Let’s take the example of Google. Google is one of the best organizations to work and has developed effective system to ensure a climate of creativity and innovation. The company constitutes an Innovation Time Out (ITO) policy that encourages employees to spend 80% of time on core projects and 20% on innovation activities based on their interest and passion.

There were other companies like Proctor and Gamble(P&G) which realized that they were moving slow in terms of product innovation and product development. In response, they formed a Corporate New Venture-CNV which had cross functional team that works on creativity enhancing practices. Members select assignment for themselves, keeping themselves intrinsically motivated. Members take up challenging strategic goals towards product innovation.

– How your boss reacts when you come up with alternate solutions in a meeting?

In many organizations, leadership or for that matter boss never reinforces creativity. In fact,they are so rigid with status quo that any deviation in terms of ideas or procedures is badly being criticized. I have met many employees who say that they know how to deal with the issue but would not like to share with the boss because of prior experience. Such employees look for better roles with different organizations too soon.

Leadership behavior varies from person to person. Some bosses are cerebrals as they tend to do a lot of research before endorsing your view. Others are skeptics as they will only review your point of view or solution to find mistakes in them. Still others are in the category of controllers who would always like to take charge of entire situation and will never entertain different view.

We need bosses who are charismatic, friendly, delegate tasks and encourage their subordinates to come up with solutions in their own way based on their perception and logic, thereby promoting creativity and innovation.

We can work on our creative skills using several tools and techniques. One of the most popular tool is NUF Test . It stands for:

New-not tried before 

Useful-solves the problem 

Feasible- can be implemented in practice 

With similar training and opportunities from real world practice, we can upgrade our innovation skills. Other factor is to remain open minded if you want to think out of the box. As Hillis put it. “The biggest risk in innovation lies in sticking too closely to your plan".It is also well known that creativity flows from the employees, so we must try to work with organizations that employ a structure or process where winning ideas are encouraged, funded and developed into innovations.

Devika Anand