Executive Coaching Secrets to Become More Innovative - How to Enhance Creativity in the Workplace

Are you working in an organization that values innovation and creativity? Are the leaders in your organization open to possibility?

One of the most powerful questions one can ask oneself in the present moment is “What new ideas can we put into action right now?” You need to continually change to be successful.

How effective are you at encouraging creativity?

Enhancing  Creativity in the Workplace

People will be most creative when they feel motivated by their work, in and of itself. When people are engaged because of their own natural interest and satisfaction in their work, they will be challenged to be creative through their own intrinsic motivation. External pressures or rewards are never as effective as internal motivation. In order to tap into that resource, people must be matched to jobs that tap into underlying values that motivate and excite them.

In addition to intrinsic motivation, two other components are necessary within an individual for creative resourcefulness, according to Theresa Amabile (Harvard Business Review, 1998).

1.  Expertise: a person must have the necessary technical, procedural and intellectual knowledge.
2.  Creative-thinking skills: a person must be able to use their thinking in flexible and imaginative ways.

Trying to develop someone’s expertise and creative-thinking skills can be time-consuming. It is far easier to enhance and tap into someone’s internal motivation.

Amabile writes about six managerial practices that enhance creativity. These categories emerged from more than two decades of research that focused on the links between environment and creativity.

1.  Challenge: Matching the right person with the right job in order to play into their expertise and creative thinking skills. Making a good match requires the manager to have access to important information about employees and their preferences. This may mean using information available through assessments such as DISC, PIAV, Meyers-Briggs or other instruments that indicate values and preferences. This also requires good listening and observing. People express what interests them and excites them all the time. Are you listening?

2.  Freedom: Intrinsic motivation and ownership is enhanced when people are free to approach their work the way they choose. Managers tend to mismanage freedom by changing goals frequently or failing to define them clearly. Worse, they grant freedom in name only, declaring employees to be “empowered” and then they delineate the process to be followed and give penalties for divergence.

3.  Resources: Time and money can either support or kill creativity. Some time pressures can heighten creativity. Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones. This creates distrust, or burnout. Creativity takes time. Incubation periods have to be scheduled in.

Project resources that are too limited can push people to use their creativity to finding additional resources, rather than actually developing new products or services.

4.  Work-Group Features: Managers must create teams with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. When people come together with diverse intellectual foundations and approaches to work, ideas often combine in exciting and useful ways.

Managers often make the mistake of putting similar people together. This may seem desirable because the people see eye to eye and get along, thus making decisions quicker. Their very homogeneity, however, does little to enhance expertise and creative thinking.

5.  Supervisory Encouragement: Managers neglect to praise creative successes and unsuccessful efforts and thereby inadvertently contribute to stifle creativity. To sustain passion, people need to feel their work matters and is important. A certain tolerance is required for mistakes and failures so that they can be used creatively.

Managers often look for reasons not to use a new idea. Research shows that an interesting psychological dynamic underlies this phenomenon. People believe that their bosses will perceive them as smarter if they demonstrate critical, analytical thinking.

This creates a bias that has severe consequences for the creative process. Such a culture of evaluation leads people to focus on external rewards and punishments instead of on being creative. It creates a climate of fear that undermines intrinsic motivation.

6.  Organizational Support: Creativity is truly enhanced when the entire organization supports it. Leaders can support creativity by ensuring that information sharing and collaboration is the norm. Political problems and gossip take people’s attention away from work. That sense of mutual purpose and excitement that is so central to tapping into the power of intrinsic motivation must be encouraged and supported. It can be killed by cliques and political factions.

Working with a seasoned executive coach trained in emotional intelligence and incorporating leadership assessments such as the Bar-On EQ-i and CPI 260 can help you become a more innovative and creative leader. You can become a leader who models emotional intelligence and self - management, and who inspires people to become happily engaged with the strategy and vision of the company.