Nurturing creativity in your team is one way to help them be more effective at work. Creativity is the source for innovation and ideas, which provide the basis for competitive advantage in any industry. So, it makes a lot of sense to focus on improving team creativity if you’re keen to make your people more effective. Here are a few simple ways to do it.
● Build more creative confidence. We are all born creative but this can be knocked out of us as we progress through life and we can forget just how much creativity we naturally have. The process of building creative confidence in your team involves reminding everyone of their innate creative abilities and then helping them to find the courage to act on those. This is about encouraging people to entertain their own ideas, no matter how leftfield they might seem, and then being able to speak up and share them with the team.
● Ensure that the atmosphere in the office is set up to optimise creativity. If you don’t feel like your business is currently full of creatives then it may simply be because the environment you’ve created doesn’t bring out that side of your existing staff. You don’t necessarily need to hire in a whole load of new creatives - change the atmosphere and you might suddenly see this in those who already work for you. Simple changes to achieve this include creating a culture where failure is celebrated and all ideas are encouraged and switching to more positive language, such as “let’s see how we can” instead of “we can’t.”
● Add empathy to encourage innovation. Empathy is one of the most powerful tools in business because it allows us to understand what someone else wants or needs. Working out what customers really need can be transformative in terms of the way that products are designed or service is delivered. Look at how your business interacts with customers through a more empathic lens - what are their struggles, what could you simplify to help them and where is there a gap in your products or services that could make a difference?
● Use the power of storytelling. We all communicate more effectively when we are engaging our audience and storytelling is a very powerful way to do this. Leverage the power of storytelling to explain innovation and sell an outcome. This creativity tool is one of the most effective ways to get a message across.
● Make space for trial and error. Creativity loves the freedom to fail so it’s vital that this is part of the business culture. Trial and error is a key part of the process of producing something great - most of the best inventors had thousands of failures first.
Nurturing creativity within your team can make them vastly more effective, not just internally within the business but in terms of engaging customers too. From changing the business environment to finding ways to build creative confidence, there are lots of opportunities to do this. Find out more by booking on to our Effective Management of your Team training course...