3 Tips to Help You Boost Creativity in Your Team


Guest post by Ashley Wilson

Leaders have a penchant for inspiring their team members to do their best and achieve great outcomes.

Can they inspire
creativity too?

source: pexels.com

Yes, leaders can make team members more creative—and
the biggest companies today are already echoing this statement.

Google encourages its employees to spend 20% of their work time on creative projects, one of which leads to Google News.

Twitter’s open
workspaces are designed to get its people’s brain juices flowing.

Apple built a
worldwide following with its “Think Different” slogan.

Why is creativity
important for organizations anyway? Isn’t it reserved for more artistic,
expressive ventures rather than B2B deals?

It turns out
creativity is one of the most important soft skills to have in building
successful businesses.

According to a study
by Adobe, businesses that invest in creativity training see improvements of over 80% in vital areas like productivity and customer
happiness
.

In fact, the most
in-demand trait that employers look for in 2019 is creativity.

While some are more
imaginative than others, creativity can be taught and improved. As a leader, it
is your responsibility to help your team members be more innovative in
their work.

The question is:
what can you do to boost creativity in your team?

Champion
Creativity and Cultivate an Open Environment

The best thing you
can do to foster creativity is to create an environment that allows it to
happen.

This is why the
workspaces of many leading companies feel more like an adult playground rather
than an office; it gives team members freedom and with it comes creativity.

Be lenient (but reasonable) in giving your employees
breaks.
A snack or smoke break is all it takes for a
fatigued team member to bounce back and get creative.

This can also be
supplemented by doing fun activities
from time to time
. Board games, team retreats, and office sports are some
events you can consider to break the monotony of work.

The most important factor in boosting creativity, however, is open communication.

When people are
allowed to discuss freely with each other, a creative environment is
established where ideas and opinions are exchanged, eventually resulting in
droves of innovative solutions.

Some moderation is
needed to stop discussions from going haywire but for the most part, it’s best
to give your team members the freedom they need.

How do you establish
an open environment in your organization?

Let your team members know it’s OK to voice out their
thoughts even if the opinion is not favorable for your company.

A lot of employees
are still afraid of speaking out as
they’re worried about the consequences.

If your organization
is practicing this, understand that businesses lose $7,500 on average to employees
who don’t speak up about a concerning project or situation.

Abolishing penalties
is not limited to opinions as well.

Give your employees permission to try out their ideas and more importantly, allow them to fail.

It might cost your
organization in the short-term but in the long run, consistent experimentation
will improve your business’ innovation efforts a lot more than not thinking out of the box.

Don’t
Limit Your Team Internally, Mix Things Up

Collaboration can
boost innovation but there is a point where groupthink kills creativity
instead.

When the same
individuals work with each other for extended periods, it’s hard to maintain
inventiveness as each person can only come up with so many new ideas at one
time.

To avoid this issue,
practice diversity.

One way to do so is
by bringing in people outside of the
company to give your team members fresh perspectives on their tasks
.

For example,
bringing in a loyal customer or an influencer in the industry to work with your
employees can help them discover avenues they might have missed—or are not even
aware of—which leads to increased creativity.

Consider mixing up teams and departments to overcome
creative block.
The marketing team can take a day or
two to work with the accounting team to uncover useful insights, for instance.

If you have a hand
in the hiring process, you can also prioritize
candidates with varying backgrounds and skills to further improve diversity

in the company.

Multicultural
offices are excellent creativity boosters as well.

Another area where
variance makes sense is in distributing
employee tasks
. We are not designed to work on the same thing every day
like robots. Variety is the spice of life and that applies to task delegation.

If your developers
have been coding every day for the past year, spruce things up by letting them
work with customer-facing departments for several days.

Working on different
tasks can give your team members a different outlook on their jobs which again,
brings tons of benefits to your organization’s creativity.

Invest
in the Right Tools and Resources

Aside from
empowering your team members, providing
the right tools and resources
is another integral part of enhancing
creativity.

Businesses of the
past had to rely on pen and paper to collaborate. Technology, however, has
changed that for the better.

Collaborative tools
like Trello and Jira are now staples in organizations as they are an effective
outlet for team members to store and share their creative work.

For example, you can
use an online drag-and-drop prototyping
tool to assist your organization’s marketing department.

Not only does the
tool make it easy for team members to visualize their designs, but staff from
other departments can also use it to share ideas even if they have zero
experience in the field.

Think of these tools as the engine for your organization’s creative
vehicle.The vehicle is the final
product but without the engine, it won’t be able to get to its destination—your
organization’s creative outcome.

Even prominent
companies are using creativity tools to help them with innovation.

Google champions the
Design Sprint ideology to power their creative processes while IDEO practices
its famous 7 Rules for Brainstorming to empower its employees.

All of this is only
possible thanks to technology, with one of it being cloud computing.

Collaborating with
teams inside and outside of the office all over the world, generating key
insights, bringing productivity levels to all-time highs—these are just some
benefits your organization stands to gain from using the cloud.

Training must also be included as part of your
investment.

While cloud-based
tools are designed to be user-friendly, you should still educate your team
members to minimize errors and ensure they use the tools as efficiently as
possible.

Your
Role as a Leader in Boosting Your Team’s Creativity

Boosting creativity
among your team members is just a matter of establishing the right company
culture and providing the necessary tools and resources.

When done right, you
will skyrocket your team’s innovation
levels
beyond your expectations—and that spells nothing but good news for
your organization.

Ashley Wilson is working remotely as a content creator, writing mostly about business and tech. She has been known to reference movies in casual conversation and enjoys baking homemade treats for her husband and their two felines, Lady and Gaga. You can get in touch with Ashley via Twitter.

Irene Becker | Just Coach | irene@justcoachit.com