Engaging your team’s creativity
As we approached the last hours of 2019, putting end to a complicated decade, I read through some of the blogs that I wrote over the last months. I talked about the important of inclusive leadership and how diversity without inclusion was a moot point. I mentioned different ways that leadership research and my own experience believes would make leadership better inclusive leaders. Simple techniques such as actively asking everyone’s opinion during a meeting or ensuring that everyone’s voice is heard, not only help to improve the engagement of employees, but research shows that it improves productivity, creativity and overall profitability of most organizations.
In other blogs, I wrote about one of my fields of study — burnout and incivility. Inclusive leadership help reduce the levels of burnout and incivility, reducing employee disengagement and dissatisfaction. From an economic point of view, reducing the levels of burnout and organizational cynicism, direct impacts the cost of health care of the employees and the organization, reducing absenteeism, low morale and low individual productivity. And again, the solutions are easy — leadership engagement of all the employees. A study found that simply providing a forum for employees to ask questions about organizational change or new process implementation, considerably lowers employee burnout.
Analyzing the different blogs and lessons learned, one link between most of my blogs popped up — creativity. Inclusive leaders have the power to bring out the creative side of everyone. I do not believe that some people are creative, and some others are not. I believe that everyone has the potential of being creative but our society, starting with most educational systems, have a tendency to stifle the creativity in all of us.
As children, we are able to create worlds out of a shoe box, and legions of soldiers out of sticks. We find interpretations, filling in the blanks in the most inventive manners, asking questions because we truly believed that there was no such thing as a dumb question, and we enjoyed an endless curiosity about the world. Over the years of exposure to today’s industrial education, we learned to regularly suppress our own curiosity to maintain a certain façade that better fits with today’s so-called adult society. The fear of failure and ridicule restrains our natural human creativity to the point where we just comply with organizational and societal expectations.
Organizational culture that have a higher tolerance for risk and failure are able to tap and feed employees’ creativity, benefitting the organization as a whole. Leaders have a central role in the smothering the creative constraints of their employees by fueling curiosity and creativity with questions, searching new perspectives and challenging individuals to step outside their comfort zones. Inclusive leadership is all about fanning the flame of creativity using all the available resources at your disposal. It is being open to hearing and fully considering the unexpected idea. Inclusive leaders need to seek the flow of diverse ideas actively. And success comes from not just listening to, but also learning from and incorporating those ideas into our decision-making process.
Today’s VUCA world requires creative solutions. In order to succeed, leaders need to engage the full potential of the team’s ideas. No one person has the better solution. It is a process of incorporating different perspectives, asking the questions no one has thought about asking and listening to different ideas, pulling the best of each one and building the best solution for that specific moment and situation.
I wish you all a Happy and Prosperous 2020!
