Leave a Comment / Communication, Creativity / By admin

Today’s business challenges almost feel like they’ve had a lot of practice. They’re more defying, come in different forms and are relentless. Whether it’s the macroeconomic influences such as inflation, staff turnover and new threats from either home or abroad which are rolled in at a pace of evolving technologies; you’re unfortunately spoilt for choice.

Your ability as an organization to weather the storms and thrive is as good as your team. Many executives now appreciate what creative problem solvers bring to the table and are increasingly on the hunt for “creatives” in their recruitment efforts. 

However, the reality is we can’t all hire and fire when we like. Fortunately, creativity is a natural ability to few but a skill to many. It’s a muscle that can grow through exercise. In this piece, we’ll look at seven ways to improve your team’s creativity and overall ability to solve everyday business challenges which I’ve grouped into three categories, value-based, process-based and structural based methods.

VALUE BASED

Schedule some downtime

You probably do this by yourself for your mental health and burnout recovery, if you don’t, you must. Regularly unplugging as a team will facilitate real-time brainstorming and problem solving.

During a downtime or some divergent activity from the normal work routine, your brain will more efficiently process information and identify gaps and connections. In fact, I once referenced a study that revealed taking breaks from work increases creativity and productivity in a previous piece. Try undertaking a brainstorming activity after a cocktail party with your team as opposed to immediately after a case briefing. You’ll observe the stark difference.

Whether it’s watching movies, playing sports, going to live matches or hosting internal weekly cocktails; start with one consistent activity and watch your team’s creative problem-solving ability grow.

Regularly undertake team building activities

Instill a pack mentality within your team by periodically conducting bonding sessions. A strong team spirit will mean they’ll naturally seek to build up on each other’s ideas and thus fight for a common goal as opposed to individually wanting to be right.

During your next brainstorming session, use the snow balling method as an example. Prohibit your team members from coming up with new ideas but strictly build up on the ones initially suggested. The resulting solutions will be more rounded.

This will be achieved more naturally in the presence of a strong team spirit. Even when they criticize each other, it’ll be respectful, constructive and centered around the team’s goals.

PROCESS BASED

Increase exposure

Instead of passively encouraging your team members to seek new knowledge and ideas during your ‘inspirational’ moments, lead by example.

Be the leader who takes their team to conventions and conferences where industry knowledge is shared and dissected. If not all, at least some of them. 

Be the leader who regularly shares news of ground-breaking inventions in the team chat and steers conversations.

Cultivate a culture of asking questions

The solutions you have are only as good as the questions you ask. Studies show that children develop faster and are more creative than adults because they ask a lot of questions.

Ensure it’s a celebrated team practice to continuously question what, why and how you do what you do. Start by introducing tools and methods such as the 7 WHYs framework into your brainstorming activities. This entails asking seven why questions when investigating a problem or proving the validity of a solution. When you do, you’ll surely address the root cause of any problem, and not the symptoms.

Go further by actively teaching your team to not only ask questions but effective ones. We’ll talk more about that in the next discussions.

Give more autonomy

We must do more than lip service and seriously give our subordinates power and opportunity to act. More often than not when you hear, “my team is not proactive enough, they look to me for everything,” it’s because you’ve never empowered them enough to act independently.

Get comfortable with them doing things in different ways. When they make mistakes, give them time for fixing. By making your team feel like they own the project, product, process or idea, you’ll have them fully invested in the team’s overall success.

STRUCTURAL BASED

Develop interactive workspaces

Your workspaces reflect your organizational culture and likewise ability to be agile and collaboratively solve problems.

The old approach of team members’ offices being located as per hierarchy (the higher the rank, the higher the floor) is yesterday’s news. This came about on the presupposition that top management knows it all and only instructs while the rest execute.

Creative problem solving is a team sport where the goalie is just as important as the goal scoring forward. Inspiration can come from anywhere and the solutions you seek may best be known by people outside your rank or hierarchy. Embrace humility and develop co-creation and collaborative spaces at your workplace. 

Encourage horizontal communication

Cementing the importance of the previously mentioned interactions, your organization’s communication channels should reflect the same. Departmental communication will always have a place of its own but team-wide communication must be the mother of all.

With the advent of technology, it’s now easier to put the top executive in the same room with the newest intern. We must utilize those possibilities. There’s arguably nothing more powerful in creative problem solving than having people with diverse backgrounds, experiences and knowledge directly communicating with each other. The breadth of your solutions will be all encompassing and far reaching.

Furthermore, it will make everyone feel involved and give them incentives to proactively come up with new ideas and maintain top attitudes in their work flow.

Putting it all together

We may never accurately predict tomorrow’s business challenges or be ahead of every new invention that threatens or empower our businesses’ long-term success. We can however prepare ourselves for the future by encountering change with resilience and creative problem solving.

One key point of note from the above discussion is that collaboration and consistency ought to be pillars in the process of growing our teams’ creative muscles.

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