03/29/2023

Boost Creativity on Your Team

Here are five ways to do so

For all the hype around innovation and creativity — one recent survey of 1,500 CEOs pegged creativity as the top skill for business leaders – these muscles remain some of the most underdeveloped in organizations. Even with the best innovation strategy in place, companies can’t develop new ideas and products until their teams become more creative. And the reason teams aren’t creative is because leaders have failed to understand how creativity really works.

In our work with companies and as design professors, we’ve found that most leaders who are frustrated with a lack of employee creativity have day-to-day systems and processes in place that don’t reflect their innovation goals. They’ve stifled nascent creativity with busy work and bureaucracy — think boring, in-office whiteboarding sessions, remote workdays packed with meetings, or advanced software that monitors worker “productivity.” In fact, one study found “the single largest behavioral shift among employees (during the pandemic) was a statistically significant decline in curiosity.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Our time in meetings has tripled since before the pandemic. Managers use time tracking software to ensure that workers are doing something — anything — that seems useful.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.