If you are like most of the managers and leaders I’ve spoken to in the last month, the coming year is likely to be filled with hard work. With a tightened economic environment that has led to higher competition, many organizations are seeking ways to enhance and sustain their competitive advantage.
Last month I wrote about the importance of aligning organizational tasks and team member talents to gain performance and productivity benefits. Yet even with an aligned team, leaders are often besieged with team members coming to them for decisions and direction on ways to proceed with problems or tasks to be completed.
How do you best create a work-group or organizational culture that encourages problem solving and innovative solutions?
Business organizations often have a hard time with the concept of creativity. Organizational creativity isn’t always about the large idea or radical new direction. Most frequently, creativity is about finding a new solution to a problem or developing an adaptation of a product or service that better fits a need. Yet most organizations tend to make such thinking excruciatingly difficult, forcing team members to come to managers to ask for direction, affirmation or permission.
Think about business creativity as evolutionary instead of revolutionary. While revolutionary change does indeed need to be carefully considered, evolutionary change responds and adapts to client, customer and environmental needs. It develops new ideas and improves processes.
How do you support creativity? It turns out that organizational leadership plays a significant role in determining whether employees engage in creative thought and action.
According to work done by Anne Herman and Jeffrey Saltzman at the Kenexa Research Institute, creativity emerges when job tasks are aligned with talents, goal setting encourages creativity, supportive supervision controls conflict, and time and energy resources are freed up.
Giving team members even some small choices in their activities provides them the ability to choose the work they are best suited to doing, and gives them a sense of autonomy, according to these researchers. Freedom and flexibility correlate with creativity, so building some level of these attributes into your work group or organization helps.
Herman and Saltzman also recommend making overt creativity goals. In other words, your goal-setting process should include areas of creative focus and innovation, with boundaries set within which the members can operate. Such clear encouragement of creative thought and action motivates team members to sustain creative efforts.
