By Jonathan Halls
 

As a trainer and coach, I love hearing from people who have attended my workshops and courses.  It’s exciting to hear how they are using what they learned.

A few days after one of my creativity workshops, I received an email from a television producer who was on the workshop. 

Unfortunately, she wasn’t sharing a success story.  She was writing to tell me why she couldn't do creativity.

She was up against a major stumbling block. 

First she thanked me and said the workshop had fired her up.  There were loads of things she decided to work on as a result of our exercises and discussions. 

However when she got back to work it became virtually impossible to change her work practices.

“What I didn’t tell you on the day of your creativity workshop,” she said, “was that convincing my manager to pay for your course was an uphill battle. 

“Some friends at [withheld] Company completed your creativity workshop a few months ago and they raved about it.”

“Ever since, they’ve been producing really cool content so I decided I would keep asking my boss to do the course until he said yes.”

“After your workshop,” she continued, “I went back to work brimming with enthusiasm.  I suggested we incorporate some of the routines I had learned to increase our own creativity such as regular brainstorms and finding some space for reflection.”

“But my boss looked me in the eye and said, ‘I don’t know why you bother; that creativity stuff is all just wasted time anyway.’” 

“I could have cried.  How can I ever push my own creativity when the organization is set against it?”

Environment and the creative spirit

This lady was in a tough position.  She had a creative spirit and wanted to take risks but her environment stopped her. 

Unfortunately a lot of people find themselves in this position because many organizations do not encourage a creative spirit. 

They have highly rigid policies and hierarchal structures.  Or, the leadership does not model attitudes that encourage creativity.

Sometimes these organizations will pay lip service to the importance of creativity but their leadership discourages practices that stimulate creativity.

I believe creating an environment that encourages creativity is crucial if you are to have a creative organization.  I also believe your leaders must model the attitudes that will encourage it.

I've written this article because generally if you attend a creativity course, you’ll work on your own individual processes of creativity.  Many of the books on creativity are also focused on mastering personal creativity skills.

However, if that creativity is to take place within an organization - business or government department - your boss must back it if it's to be a success. 

If you are the only person using creative techniques in a department of say 30 people, your ideas will be like a few pieces of sea debris bobbing up and down on the sea.

Sometimes people will listen and take your ideas on board although most of the time they will be asking if it conforms to policy. You'll be a lone voice in the sea of rigid thinking. 

If your organization is creative, you’ll create a wave - along with all your colleagues - that will be bigger than you expect and certainly change the status quo.  And it will be the ride of your life.

Modeling behavior and building environment

So if you’re a boss—and that means corporate executive, middle manager or team leader— and you want your organization or team to be creative, you need to model certain behaviors and attitudes that nurture the creative spirit in your organization. 

As well as modeling behavior and creative attitudes, you need to create an environment where people can feel safe to be truly creative. 

This takes guts, patience, risk and determination.  If you’re a junior member of staff with ambition, you should start thinking about these issues now. 

As you climb the corporate ladder and take responsibility for teams, you have the choice of adopting behavior that spurs the creative spirit in everyone and multiplies your organization’s creativity. 

Or you can adopt behavior that doesn’t inspire creativity but relies on the occasional bit of good luck when one of your staff breaks through with an idea.

This article is for you

I’ve written this article for you if you’re a people leader or starting to think about being one.  These comments are as relevant to corporate executives as team leaders.

People like the woman who emailed me about her boss are just dying to make your business or government agency better.  And I’d like to help you help them. 

This article builds on what I’ve written about creativity in my articles, ICE Creativity, Creativity: What is it? and Creativity: Getting Started. 

To fully understand creativity and then put leading a creative team into context, read these articles as they may help you develop a broader perspective on my comments below.

Behavior and Environment

If you want to lead a creative organization, think about your behavior and environment.  Good leaders model certain behaviors and believe it or not, their staff follow suit. 

If you sit back and watch, you’ll notice staff using the same expressions as their boss, sometimes even wearing clothes that have subtle similarities.

Poor leaders inspire poor behavior in their staff.  If a boss is always late to a meeting you will often find the ‘late culture’ is prevalent across his part of the organization. 

If the boss is sloppy in her communication you will notice her staff also taking little care in communicating the right information to the right people at the right time.

Appropriate behavior is an important part of creating the environment.  But probably more important is how you create policies and structures in your part of the organization to spur on creativity and allow that behavior to prosper.

If you expect creativity from your staff yet don’t allow them time to go and think somewhere quiet away from the office—such as sitting in the park or a coffee shop—they will not have the creativity processes built into their routine to guarantee success.

If you never have team meetings you will not inspire them to share ideas and develop the spirit of collaboration which is important in creativity.

So let’s look first at environment and second at behavior to see how you can lead and create a culture that is swept along by a creative spirit.

Organizational Environment

Large bureaucratic organizations are known as boring, bland places.  A lot of government departments and big old organizations suffer from this. 

Policies and red tape destroy the creative soul because they bind staff into a certain way of working and give workers little room to be fresh and innovative.

Generally, policies are not bad to start with.  They are created to ensure uniformity and consistency across large organizations and this is absolutely fine. 

However, because they are formal they remain way beyond their time; as life and other parameters evolve, the organization continues to follow rules that don’t change and quickly become antiquated, inflexible and dead. 

Questioning the rules is an important process.  However, if you want to lead creativity in your organization it is more important to focus on the vision, not on the rules. 

Communicate your vision

As a leader, make sure you communicate your vision and purpose.  Make sure every person you are responsible for knows your vision.  This site offers some resources on communication for leaders.  Get a coach to make sure you get this right.

Encourage your staff to bend rules in order to meet the vision.  The proviso for bending rules must be that you can show the ‘bending’ is ethical and meets your vision.

I led an organization some time ago that was a $5 million operation.  It was overly bureaucratic.  To get a frontline decision, a colleague would need to pass the request through one, sometimes two managers for my sign off.

I introduced a set of values and told staff to throw out the rule book.  Our frontline staff were experts at what they did.  Why did they need my permission to make decisions?  My new rule was, so long as you can show your decision fulfills the values I set, I will always back you.

Some managers look at me in horror when I tell them that.  “How could you trust them?” some ask.  If you can’t trust your staff you will never inspire or lead them.  Trust is a huge component in leading creativity. 

Trust: do your staff trust you?

More importantly though, and I think leaders sometimes forget this: their staff need to trust them.  It’s a two-way process.  Remember there’s usually only one boss.  And there are many workers. 

Many workers creatively producing equates to more business success.  Many workers just showing up on a Monday morning and following a set of old rules does not.

So, create a clear vision.  Work on communicating that.  Give your staff flexibility to bend the rules and focus on the outcomes rather than following rigid rules that seem only to exist for the sake of having rules.

Avoiding hierarchy is a powerful way to stimulate creativity.  If, as a leader, you can avoid the mentality of, “I’m the boss, the king of the castle,” you will find staff spending less time trying to impress you and more time meeting your vision.

I used to be assistant manager of a small radio station in Sydney.  One of the studio supervisors who worked for us used to come into my office and talk about his authority over the presenters because he was a supervisor.  This is not the behavior of a leader who spurs on creativity. 

My personal leadership philosophy is that we need to remember we are all equal.  And we don’t have authority if we are senior.  Rather, we have more responsibility. 

I also subscribe to the servant leadership model which means that with responsibility comes a duty to serve your staff and help them to be great at their job.  Serving your staff so they achieve your company’s vision only multiplies your effect.

Be open and collaborate

All of this comes down to trust.  Clear and open trust between you and the people for whom you are responsible.  I am always impressed by senior leaders who refer to their staff as colleagues.  What a spirit of openness and sharing.

Trust, communication and creativity are all very closely related when you lead an organization.  The better your skills of communication and collaboration, the easier you will find it to help your colleagues meet your vision.

Creative organizations are open, collaborative and based on networking rather than hierarchy.  It’s the old story of not what you know but who you know.

As a leader, make sure you do team days.  Ask your team to lead these so they are fun and appeal to their colleague’s personalities and interests.  Some people hate being forced to attend a touchy-feely conference, so let them decide how they will meet up and network.

I was asked to teach communication to a group of 70 cynical media practitioners for their team day.  I spent the morning teaching them Salsa dancing and ran a pub quiz in the afternoon.  (Read more about this in Jamelle Wells’ book, “Just Rewards” published by Allen and Unwin.)  What was important was getting these people to talk to each other. 

Build collaboration into the calendar

When I managed the New Media Skills Training unit at the BBC, I introduced a policy which forced all the trainers to conduct no training on a Friday. 

Every week, trainers would have at least one or two days to prep their courses but they fell on different days. 

So I said, “no-one trains on Fridays.”  We only ran courses on Friday delivered by freelancers and contractors.

This routine ushered in one of the most creative and collaborative periods of work I have experienced. 

Trainers spent time with each other, shared ideas and laughed.  During this time we expanded our portfolio of courses from 18 to more than 50.

The final comment about leading creativity in your culture is, make sure people do creativity well.  In Creativity: the ICE Model, I explain that the creative process is about imagination, critical reflection and action. 

Make sure you train and support your colleagues to do each of these well.  And don’t dwell more on one than another. 

Some organizations get nothing done because they spend their time dreaming without selecting ideas based on a clear methodology.  Others spend more time ruling out ideas.  Others just talk and never actually create.

When it comes to the imagine stage of creativity, make sure you have processes that are truly open ended and are properly divorced from critical thinking. 

I have attended so many brainstorms that are poorly led, are full of value judgments and fail to deliver really whacky ideas.  Training is crucial to this.

Likewise, make sure your colleagues are trained in proper decision-making processes for selecting the ideas you’ll put into action.  And make sure it can be all put into action.

Behavior

Your behavior as a leader is just as important as setting the right routines and structures into place.  Sure you can mandate regular creative times for your teams but if you don’t regularly take time off to think, what will they copy?

You’ll find a number of ideas to help your creativity in other areas of this site. 

Picking up on one such idea I write about in Methods of Creativity, how often do you take time out of your schedule to go and dream or think?  How can you encourage your colleagues to create time and space to think of ideas if you don’t model it yourself?

Do you carry a notepad and pen around with you everywhere you go?  Do people see you doing this?

Your conversations with managers and other colleagues also inspire creativity.  For example, have you adopted the attitude of creative discontent?  How do people working for you see this in your conversations and decisions?  Do you challenge your colleagues with the simple question, “what if?”

I’m keen to make these comments because you often find corporate leaders getting excited about creative staff.  They think they have thirty staff working for them so if they’re all creative, they have thirty extra great ideas each month. 

So she sends her staff off to a training course.  But they come back and the leader hasn’t changed; she just demands more great ideas.  It doesn’t happen like that.  She needs to change and inspire others as a role model.

Model creativity to your organization

Here are a few other ways to model a creative attitude in your organization.

Power up your informality.  If you all see each other as having responsibilities rather than authorities, you will be able to cross the boundaries more easily.  Work through informal communication channels.  This requires two-way trust but if you work at it, you will get it. 

Stephen M. Covey talks about the 13 behaviors of a leader that create trust.  (You can find the handout for a workshop he ran at ASTD on the ASTD website.)

Avoid a punishment culture.  The very nature of creativity is risk and mistakes.  Edison tried more than a thousand ways to invent the light bulb.  He had to literally make many mistakes to get there.  Allow people to make mistakes if it is towards your vision.  Make sure they are disciplined and don’t make the same mistake twice though.

Work with Conflict.  Many people shun conflict.  Get over it and work with it.  Help people develop their own levels of security and self-belief so that if an idea they come up with is rejected, they don’t take it as a personal insult but as an important stage of the creative process.  See the idea as being rejected, not the person.

Build creative practices into your organization

I have a few other suggestions too and these are built around building creative practice into your organization’s work routine.

Plan regular workshops.  It might be a brainstorm or a critical review.  Make sure people are disciplined in their behavior within these but put them in your calendar.  They don’t have to be formal and they don’t need to be long.  For example, a half-hour meeting every Wednesday.

Plan regular Thinking or Dreaming Time.  Encourage people to take an hour off to think.  If it’s a sunny day, let them go for a walk in the park with a notepad.  If it’s raining, have coffee in a café. 

Learn to brainstorm properly.  In my experience, just about everyone says they know what a brainstorm is.  And just about everyone believes they know how to conduct one.  But when I run workshops, I discover most people are not developed in leading brainstorms and pushing ideas.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking anyone can brainstorm.  Get them trained to lead brainstorming sessions.

Erect a whiteboard.  We often have our ideas when we are sleeping, walking and freeing our brains from routine activities.  But sometimes ideas pop out of nowhere.  Erect a whiteboard in your office and encourage your colleagues to jot down ideas when the come up.

Remember, the idea may not be so good but having that word up may inspire another idea that revolutionizes a practice or product.

Be critical.  We spend a lot of time talking about unleashing our imagination.  Remember it’s only part of the process.  People need to develop their skills on critical thinking.  You can do this by the way you ask them questions.  However, look at some training to help them develop their critical senses as well.

I believe that as leaders we have a huge responsibility to unleash the power of our staff.  I’ve seen it done effectively and know that with discipline you can revive the creative spirit within your organization.

I often think of the woman who emailed me about her boss.  I remember how she participated in the workshop and know she has so much to offer her boss. 

Her boss is losing out as much as this woman.  Maybe more.  Because if she had the opportunity to really be creative and improve what she did, he would get some of the credit.

After that email, we discussed solutions for her work.  I ultimately asked her if she should really work for that boss.  It’s a question I later found she answered by leaving the organization. 

Forget the costs of recruiting her replacement, and the time her successor would need to get up to speed with the new job.  They’re all easy to calculate.  Think of the higher cost to the organization of someone leaving who could have brought it more success.