When your business depends on your team members having new and innovative ideas, a creative block can mean more than a bad day. Here are some creative leadership strategies business owners and managers can use to encourage collaboration and innovation among your creative teams.
What is Creative Leadership?
Creative leadership is a management strategy that leverages creative ideas to find solutions to complex problems and adjust to changing solutions. It favors innovation and encourages team members to use new ideas to find solutions to the problems that arise doing business. Using creative leadership strategies depends on taking an open mindset, and being willing to change or even discard established patterns or procedures if they no longer serve the company.
Get Help with Leadership, Conflict Resolution, and Business Strategy
Talk to a consultant who can help you make strategic decisions about the future of your business.
How Creative Leadership Can Make Creative Businesses Thrive
You don’t have to be a naturally creative person to use creative leadership strategies. “Creative types” may find it easier to approach projects with an open mind or use divergent thinking while brainstorming solutions to complicated problems. However, creativity is a skill, not an inherent trait. With time and practice, leaders can learn to make space for new ideas, and find strategies to encourage creativity among your team members, and sort through and iterate on those ideas to develop better strategies for your team.
That said, creative professionals including artists, marketers, developers, and other innovators may find it easier to step into an open mindset than other employees who thrive on structures and processes. If you manage a highly creative team, then using this strategy can invite your team members to use their strengths without the limitations of strict policies or creative limitations.
How to Encourage Innovation Among Creatives
Creative leadership can be summarized as a two-step process, which relies on divergent thinking and convergent thinking one after another. In the face of complicated or challenging problems, you may need to shift back and forth between these two steps multiple times, iterating on the creative ideas your team creates each round.
Phase 1: Casting a Wide Net for Divergent Thoughts
Creative leadership works best when you have more material to work with. That’s why the first step is to encourage your team to come up with as many ideas as possible to address the problem. At this stage, as a leader, your job is to encourage your team to share anything that comes to mind, no matter how unlikely, unreasonable, or far-fetched they may seem.
The goal here is quantity of ideas, not quality. There is no such thing as a bad idea at this stage. Instead, you should consider every thought as raw material you can use to develop the right answer in a future stage. This may require you to shield your team members from criticism and refocus the team on generation, rather than evaluation of ideas.
Phase 2: Using Convergent Thinking to Draw Connections Between Ideas
Once you and your team have completed your initial brainstorming process, it is time to shift gears from divergent to convergent thinking. If phase 1 generates a field of dots, phase 2 finds ways to connect those dots, finding connections between the different ideas. Creative leadership means inviting your team to find the patterns among their brainstorming.
This is also a creative process. Focus on new or unlikely connections between these ideas. Discard outliers and prioritize the ideas that gather momentum around them through new or different connections. Those connections can trigger a breakthrough which in turn will invite new ideas, bringing you back to phase 1 so you can iterate on that new idea.
Developing a Collaborative Working Environment
Employing creative leadership strategies depends on having a collaborative working environment where all your team members feel comfortable and supported in focusing on results for the company. This is a matter of trust. Your team members need to believe that you will have their back, even if their divergent thoughts are excluded during the convergent phase, or don’t lead to good solutions. As a leader, it is up to you to develop and protect a collaborative working environment in which your staff can exercise their creative skills without fear of judgment or retaliation from you or the rest of your team.
David Stanislaw is an organizational development specialist with over 25 years’ experience in helping leaders develop and implement creative leadership strategies. Through business consulting and facilitation, David helps businesses and teams improve productivity and team cohesion. Contact us to meet with David to make your creative business thrive today.
Recent Comments