Ways To Help Team Creativity At Work
©2010 by Edward Glassman. Ph.D.
According to Professor T. Amabile, a renowned creativity scholar at the Harvard Business School, there are many things that can be done to help creativity at work, including the following:
-- Expect everyone in your company to be creative, and they will be.
-- Make assignments not only on talent and skills, but also on the person’s interests. Creativity flourishes when people enjoy their work.
-- Allow enough incubation time in their work, so creativity can take place.
-- Protect people from distractions that interfere with the creative process.
-- Foster fun at work and creativity will bubble up.
-- Provide some degree of job security, so creative people will take risks.
-- Foster collaboration so creative people will share data and ideas to help put the pieces together.
-- Insist people do work they love and are involved with, and then value and recognize that work; that will boost creativity.
Professor Amabile backs all this with solid research. You can read more about this in my new book, “Team Creativity At Work: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best.” Here is an excerpt from this book…A Dozen Ways to Help Creativity at WorkHere are a dozen ways to help creativity and innovation at work.
1. Discuss and share books and articles on creativity and innovation during luncheon discussion groups.
2. Use advanced creativity procedures, shift paradigms, solve problems creatively.3. Provide workshops on advanced creativity procedures to help creative thinking.4. Bring in guest speakers and creativity consultants.
5. Reward creative accomplishment with more time and resources to enjoy being creative again. Foster and stress the daily enjoyment of intrinsic motivation in your team.
6. Celebrate "creativity day" at work occasionally. Wear funny hats. Use everyone's creativity to decide what to do that day that would motivate their creativity. Wear costumes on Halloween.
7. Stop criticizing new ideas soon after they are suggested.
8. Revive the pleasure of knowing you are creative and competent.
9. Stop your habitual automatic NO and quick negative criticism when confronted with new ideas.
10. Mentally resist and immunize yourself against the lures of future extrinsic rewards and instead concentrate on the immediate pleasure and enjoyment when focusing on creativity.
11. Relentlessly squeeze out new alternative solutions.
12. Transform old ideas into new ones: recombine, magnify, distort, reverse, add to, subtract from, reduce, condense, expand, delete, double, digress, manipulate, twist, fantasize, meditate, daydream, connect, assemble, disconnect, take apart, free associate, and more.
13. Incubate looking out the window with your shoes off.
14. Use bizarre trigger-ideas to spark different ideas.
15. Raise your level for tolerating low conformity for different clothes, ideas, and behaviors in your company.
16. Don't comment that there are more than a dozen ideas here. Quick negative criticism over such a trivial issue spoils motivation for creativity.
Want to lead for greater creativity and innovation at work?
• Arrange for workshops on advanced creativity procedures for your team.
• Establish an incentive program for new, productive ideas based on intrinsic rewards whenever possible.
• Provide enough time to solve problems creatively.
• Devise non-evaluative meetings that will let people freewheel and flow easily with new ideas.
• Form unusual short-term task forces to allow people to cross-fertilize their thinking to solve problems creatively.
• Set up a creativity room with materials for playing and tinkering.
• Reduce fear of failure if trying something different.
• Rotate people so new people occasionally work on old problems.
• Conduct performance reviews that encourage risky creative efforts.
• Develop separate incentive systems for low and high conformers.
• Hang sheets of paper outside your office door with problems that need creative solutions, and ask for ideas.
• Ask a consultant to observe and suggest ways to help.
• Arrange a team excellence workshop to improve the creative climate and innovation.
• Hold a meeting where people devise ways of enriching their own jobs creatively.• Allow people to volunteer for new tasks instead of assigning them.
• Expect yourself and everyone else to solve problems creatively.
• Allow people enough time for creative thinking by the deadlines you set.
• Introduce advanced creativity procedures to define problems and generate ideas.
• Provide quick resources for testing or implementing new ideas.
• Train people to sell ideas. Encourage the combining of ideas for greater creativity during problem solving.
These are just a few of the many ways you can help creativity & innovation in your work unit. List your own ideas on how you will lead your team for greater creativity and innovation. Write me if it works to my website http://www.offbeatbooks.net
©2010 by Edward Glassman. Ph.D.
According to Professor T. Amabile, a renowned creativity scholar at the Harvard Business School, there are many things that can be done to help creativity at work, including the following:
-- Expect everyone in your company to be creative, and they will be.
-- Make assignments not only on talent and skills, but also on the person’s interests. Creativity flourishes when people enjoy their work.
-- Allow enough incubation time in their work, so creativity can take place.
-- Protect people from distractions that interfere with the creative process.
-- Foster fun at work and creativity will bubble up.
-- Provide some degree of job security, so creative people will take risks.
-- Foster collaboration so creative people will share data and ideas to help put the pieces together.
-- Insist people do work they love and are involved with, and then value and recognize that work; that will boost creativity.
Professor Amabile backs all this with solid research. You can read more about this in my new book, “Team Creativity At Work: Creative Problem Solving At Its Best.” Here is an excerpt from this book…A Dozen Ways to Help Creativity at WorkHere are a dozen ways to help creativity and innovation at work.
1. Discuss and share books and articles on creativity and innovation during luncheon discussion groups.
2. Use advanced creativity procedures, shift paradigms, solve problems creatively.3. Provide workshops on advanced creativity procedures to help creative thinking.4. Bring in guest speakers and creativity consultants.
5. Reward creative accomplishment with more time and resources to enjoy being creative again. Foster and stress the daily enjoyment of intrinsic motivation in your team.
6. Celebrate "creativity day" at work occasionally. Wear funny hats. Use everyone's creativity to decide what to do that day that would motivate their creativity. Wear costumes on Halloween.
7. Stop criticizing new ideas soon after they are suggested.
8. Revive the pleasure of knowing you are creative and competent.
9. Stop your habitual automatic NO and quick negative criticism when confronted with new ideas.
10. Mentally resist and immunize yourself against the lures of future extrinsic rewards and instead concentrate on the immediate pleasure and enjoyment when focusing on creativity.
11. Relentlessly squeeze out new alternative solutions.
12. Transform old ideas into new ones: recombine, magnify, distort, reverse, add to, subtract from, reduce, condense, expand, delete, double, digress, manipulate, twist, fantasize, meditate, daydream, connect, assemble, disconnect, take apart, free associate, and more.
13. Incubate looking out the window with your shoes off.
14. Use bizarre trigger-ideas to spark different ideas.
15. Raise your level for tolerating low conformity for different clothes, ideas, and behaviors in your company.
16. Don't comment that there are more than a dozen ideas here. Quick negative criticism over such a trivial issue spoils motivation for creativity.
Want to lead for greater creativity and innovation at work?
• Arrange for workshops on advanced creativity procedures for your team.
• Establish an incentive program for new, productive ideas based on intrinsic rewards whenever possible.
• Provide enough time to solve problems creatively.
• Devise non-evaluative meetings that will let people freewheel and flow easily with new ideas.
• Form unusual short-term task forces to allow people to cross-fertilize their thinking to solve problems creatively.
• Set up a creativity room with materials for playing and tinkering.
• Reduce fear of failure if trying something different.
• Rotate people so new people occasionally work on old problems.
• Conduct performance reviews that encourage risky creative efforts.
• Develop separate incentive systems for low and high conformers.
• Hang sheets of paper outside your office door with problems that need creative solutions, and ask for ideas.
• Ask a consultant to observe and suggest ways to help.
• Arrange a team excellence workshop to improve the creative climate and innovation.
• Hold a meeting where people devise ways of enriching their own jobs creatively.• Allow people to volunteer for new tasks instead of assigning them.
• Expect yourself and everyone else to solve problems creatively.
• Allow people enough time for creative thinking by the deadlines you set.
• Introduce advanced creativity procedures to define problems and generate ideas.
• Provide quick resources for testing or implementing new ideas.
• Train people to sell ideas. Encourage the combining of ideas for greater creativity during problem solving.
These are just a few of the many ways you can help creativity & innovation in your work unit. List your own ideas on how you will lead your team for greater creativity and innovation. Write me if it works to my website http://www.offbeatbooks.net
