How to help ‘non-creative’ folk be more creative. Four tips to bring out the creative streak in every team member
When one thinks of traditionally creative jobs, a designer or art director might spring to mind. But what of those people working in non-creative roles, are they not creative? Of course they are. The essence of creativity is about looking at things differently, being innovative, having ideas and finding solutions to old issues. Creativity is about solving problems in original ways.
Creativity is also the top skill that employers are looking for in 2019, according to analysis from LinkedIn. It’s also a skill that will always be required. AI won’t be able to be creative in the same way humans are.
So when the well of creativity is dry, what can we do to get the juices flowing again?
Head somewhere different. Next time you’re planning a strategy day or team meeting, change your surroundings. When I ran a workshop for the leadership team at a bank, we eschewed their usual sleek corporate environment and headed instead to a low-key, quirky coworking space. Removing them from their familiar surroundings sent a clear signal to their brains that they were now to view their business from the outside in. It gave them the physical and mental space necessary to detach themselves from what they were used to seeing, and to look at things afresh and allowed different ideas and views to flourish.
Go on a journey of exploration. Sometimes, when we’re head down at our desks, mired in the problems of day-to-day firefighting we sometimes lose sight of what’s outside our immediate environs. During a workshop for a management team in Belfast, I sent the participants out on the streets simply to notice the world around them. Everyone came back full of excitement about what they had seen. It reminds me of the story Howard Schultz tells when he returned to Starbucks as CEO in 2008. At the end of an offsite meeting, Shultz went out into Seattle’s food market seeking inspiration. He stumbled across an independent food stall where he was so taken with the passion and knowledge of one of the traders that he instigated a mega retraining exercise - closing 7,000 stores for three and a half hours to retrain baristas to make the perfect espresso. Getting ideas from the world outside our offices can help us see things from an entirely different perspective.
Collaborate and mix with other disciplines. Encourage your employees to mix with people from other departments. When I visited the Jamie Oliver Company HQ last year I witnessed a lunchtime ritual where over 100 employees came together in the lobby to eat a freshly prepared lunch. The communal tables might lead you to sitting next to someone you don’t know from a different department. Mixing it up with your dining companions - even if you don’t talk about work - could provide an extra sprinkling of tasty morsels.
Give your team space to think. If your employees’ calendars are full of back to back meetings and they’ve got many demands on their time, how the heck are they meant to be creative? Give them permission to put some white space in their calendar. Let them work from home or from a coffee shop when there is particularly challenging problem to solve. Encourage them to visit a gallery in their lunch hour. Even let people just gaze out of the window and daydream. Squeezing every moment of the day with meetings, calls and tasks just isn’t allowing time for freeflow thought and expression. See what happens when people are allowed to free themselves up from some of the daily constraints.
If you’d like to energise your team with a whole load of fresh ideas and inspiration, hire Ian to deliverhis More Good Days at Work session
