This day 10th June 1926, Antoni Gaudí passed away. The Spanish architect known as the greatest advocate of Catalan Modernism, with incredible work such as Park Güell and the church of the Sagrada Família, his main works in Barcelona. He was one of the most prodigious experts in his discipline with an exceptional genius.
Incorporating creativity into your life, in a hobby or other, brings you higher levels of happiness and also has a calming effect. Encouraging and promoting creativity in the workplace has many benefits too; to employees, leaders and managers, the business and subsequently to customers.
What is creativity?
Dictionary.com defines creativity as ‘the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.’
People often associate the term ‘creativity’ with artists or musicians. While not everyone will become a Gaudí, a Mozart or a Da Vinci, it is undeniable that creativity has always been at the heart of business. But today more than ever it should sit at the top of managers’ and leaders’ agenda. In a difficult and competitive market, being innovative and creative is essential.
LinkedIn has regularly cited creativity “the most important skill in the world” on their skills list.
You can’t really ‘manage’ creativity, but the role of a manager or a leader is to inspire creative work, be a facilitator in the team, create the right environment, conducive for innovation and creativity to flourish, and build the right team of individuals. Leaders must not only encourage collaboration, but also enable it, to promote creativity.
Front line teams know customers best, what they like and don’t like, and their needs. Teams are best placed to know what works and what doesn’t. Many organisations are missing a trick by not tapping into their most important asset – their employees – and still function as a top-down organisation, while they should encourage creativity and innovation with a bottom-up pull approach instead.
However, in order to encourage creativity among your teams, and motivate them to perform at their best, leaders need to be prepared to empower them by:
- Providing them with more opportunities to decision-making
- Giving them challenges, which will take them out of their comfort zone
- Welcome new ideas from them instead of quickly squashing them
- Recognising and rewarding creativity
- Giving them more responsibilities so that they have ownership of something
- Delegating more important tasks to them
- Giving them more autonomy and independence, as excessive control stifles creativity
- Not blaming them for failure, but supporting and encouraging them to learn from mistakes
- And last but not least, providing guidance and relevant training and support to them
Some benefits of creativity in the workplace:
- Useful new and innovative ideas
- Better teamwork and team bonding
- Increased employees’ engagement and interaction
- Can help attract top talents
- Increased employees’ performance
- Improved ability to retain good employees
- Increased problem solving and productivity
- Seeing your customers’ needs from different angles
- Increased staff morale and happiness
- Improved wellbeing - creativity relieves stress (see Forbes.com article)
You will notice that these benefits are similar to those of team empowerment; and for good reasons, as promoting and encouraging creativity in your workplace goes hand in hand with empowering your teams. It is an important part of developing a people-centric leadership style and creating a healthy work environment.
I’ll close with a quote from Edward de Bono, Maltese physician, psychologist, author, inventor and philosopher.
“There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.”
Thank you and take care.
