Leaders providing a Climate for Creative Thinking

Often, I have been asked by our clients on how to establish a climate of creating thinking among his staff to improve productivity, quality, and satisfaction. In fact being creative is one of the requirement of effective leadership.

One of the way to have staff creativity is for the company to establish a vision and mission that include creativity. Vision statements and mission statements set the pace, but they must be supported by the right climate and extensive use of the techniques which I am going to share with you this week.

Information about establishing a climate for creativity can be divided into leadership and managerial practices for enhancing creativity and methods for managing creative workers.


Individual Challenge

Matching people with the right assignments enhances creativity because it supports expertise and intrinsic motivation. The amount of stretch is consistent with goal theory; too little challenge leads to boredom but too much challenge leads to feelings of being overwhelmed and loss of control. The leader must understand his group members well to offer them the right amount of challenge.


Freedom to choose the method

Workers tend to be more creative when they are granted the freedom to choose which method is best for attaining a work goal. Stable goals are important because it is difficult to work creatively toward a moving target.



Supplying the right Resources

Time and money are the most important resources for enhancing creativity. Deciding how much time and money to give to a team or project is a tough judgment call that can either support or stifle creativity. Under some circumstances setting a time deadline will trigger creative thinking because it represents a favorable challenge. An example would be hurrying to be first to market with a new product. False deadlines or impossibility tight ones can create distrust and burnout. To be creative, groups also need to be adequately funded.

Effective design of work groups

Work groups are the most likely to be creative when they are mutually supportive, and when they have a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives. The various points of view often combine to achieve creative solutions to problems. Homogeneous team argue less, but they often less creative. Putting together a team with the right chemistry – just the right level of diversity and supportiveness – requires experience and intuition on the leader’s part.


Supervisory encouragement

The most influential step a leader can take to bring about creative problem solving is to develop a permissive atmosphere that encourages people to think freely. Putting creative work is important because, for most people to sustain their passion, they must feel that their work matters to the organization. Creative ideas should be evaluated quickly rather than put through a painfully slow review process.

Organizational Support

The entire organization as well as the immediate manager should support creative effort if creativity is to be enhanced on a large scale. The company wide reward system should support creativity, including recognition and financial incentives. Organizational leaders should encourage information sharing and collaboration, which lead to the development of expertise so necessary for creativity and to more opportunities for intrinsic motivation. Executives who combat excessive politics can help creative people focus on work instead of fighting political battles. In a highly political environment, a worker would be hesitant to suggest a creative idea that was a political blunder, such as replacing a product particularly liked the chief executive officer.


The six observations above covers important leadership and management initiative for creating an environment conductive to creativity, yet several other points also merit attention. Loose-tight leadership enhances creativity. Looseness refers to granting space for new ideas and explorations, whereas the tight approach means finally making a choice among alternatives. Innovation is also enhanced when workers throughout the organization are able to pursue absurd ideas without penalty for being wrong or for having wasted some resources. An axiom of creativity is that many ideas typically have to be tried before a commercially successful one emerges.


Conclusions

And now, how can we manage creative workers:-

Give creative people tools and resources that allow that work to stand out. Creative workers have a high degree of self motivation and therefore want to achieve high quality output. To achieve such high quality, they usually need adequate resources, such as state of the art equipment and an ample travel budget for such purposes as conducting research.



Give creative people flexibility and a minimum amount of structure. Many creative workers regard heavy structure as the death knell of creativity. Structure for these workers means rules and regulations, many layers of approval, strict dress codes, fixed office hours, rigid assignments, and fill in the blank paperwork. The leader or manger will have to achieve a workable compromise in this area that stays within the framework of organizational policy.

Employ creative people to manage and evaluate workers. Managers of creative workers should have some creative ability of their own, so that they can understand creativity and be credible as leaders. Understanding the creative process is important for evaluating the creative contribution of others. What constitutes creative output is somewhat subjective but the output can be tired to objective criteria.