Forming high performance teams means that leaders must develop each professional’s best individual result. These efforts must involve both soft and hard skills.
Stimulating your team’s creativity is therefore an essential part of fostering an innovative high performance culture that will you to obtain better results in expanding market opportunities, attracting new clients, and resolving day-to-day issues.
With this in mind, would you like to learn more about how to boost your team’s creativity? Read our tips below to find out how!
1 – Overcome your fear of making mistakes
Before anything else, you need to make people feel welcome and secure in proposing new ideas and potential directions to take and, as often occurs, make mistakes.
For these reasons, there is a lot that can be said about the importance of creating a punishment-proof culture. In practice, it means that leaders must listen to their team’s suggestions, thereby creating a safe space for the exchange of ideas and development of solutions that optimize internal processes and the offers provided to clients.
So, before questioning your team’s lack of creativity, approach the issue from another direction: how can you lead in a manner in which people feel comfortable sharing ideas?
Promoting informal meetings, practicing attentive listening, and leading by example and inspiration are excellent ways to start stimulating creativity among your team. Take a few moments to try to implement these principles each day.
2 – Offer autonomy
Micromanagement — an attitude in which the leader tries to control the entirety of the processes in place within a team — has long since given way to the era of intrapreneurship, a movement in which each professional adopts a proactive attitude and seeks out growth within the company.
Despite the fact that this behavior may not be accepted by some leaders, who may feel threatened by such a decentralized form of leadership, the autonomous model has been gaining popularity among companies since autonomy and freedom create spaces for each professional to deliver their best, thereby incorporating a higher level of creativity and innovation into business activities.
3 – Create a culture of humanized feedback
While feedback is typically a well-established rite within organizations, it is essential that leaders refrain from waiting for these moments to arise to inform their team of the areas in which they doing well and where they need to improve.
However, the importance of feedback focused on the development of skills and competencies rather than its use as a tool for control and criticism is becoming increasingly appreciated on the market.
The frequency of feedback depends on each group and the pace at which deliveries are expected from the different areas of an organization; however, it is recommended that team members are generally provided with feedback more than once a month.
Some companies have even adopted check-ins and check-outs at the beginning and end of the week, respectively, in order to quickly identify potential areas of improvement and continuously optimize the performance of each team member.
4 – Develop more diverse teams
Age, gender, personal tastes, geographic location… diversity among your team members will bring different views of the world into your organization, thereby increasing the repertoire of ideas that are available.
According to a study by Accenture, inclusive and diverse companies are 11 times more innovative and have employees that are six times more creative than their competitors.
This means that having people of different ages, genders, and with different views of the world will broaden the repertoire of ideas from which you can draw in solving business challenges.
5 – Structure the brainstorming process
We’ve all had experiences in which we were part of a meeting that was full of good ideas, none of which ended up coming to fruition due to a lack of organization.
Tools that organize brainstorming processes allow innovative ideas to truly become innovation. Design Thinking, for example, is an excellent tool that can be used to structure brainstorming processes and stimulate your team’s creativity.
6 – Incorporate new information and encourage discussion
Rather than requiring that your team keep up to date with current events, try to present your team with new information in order to curate relevant content and propose discussions on current themes that are relevant to your organization.
If your team likes to read, for example, suggesting that they form a book club may help to stimulate their creativity. Or how about bringing in speakers from outside the company once a month? Maybe you could even reward your employees with a short course?
Regardless of the strategy that you use, remember that stimulating creativity and innovation among your team is a task that involves constant attention. To stay on top of these approaches, you need to be well-informed about the techniques that are available in order to get the best out of your team and ensure that good ideas become innovation in practice.
To learn more about how to do this, how about watching theMasterclass Innovation and System Logic, which is taught by Prof. Jacopo Filippo Bargellini from CUOA Business School? Enrolment in the course is free of charge. Make sure to take advantage of this opportunity! And if you are really interested in boosting your career, take a look at the in-person course Creativity, Innovation & Entrepreneurship from CUOA Business School (Italy). The course is directed towards students and professionals interested in developing entrepreneurial skills and aims to empower executives in leading Innovation processes both within and outside their organizations.