SEARCHING FOR CREATIVITY IN THE WORKPLACE
Creativity in the workplace begins with a well-developed understanding of your five senses, your intuitive nature, environmental awareness and an understanding about how your extensive emotional palate plays into making creative decisions.
Creativity means turning news ideas into reality. It starts from examining your extensive emotional palate. Your own vulnerability is the most important ingredient in creativity. Then we see, feel, smell, touch and listen in our environment. Then you create by examining opportunities, relationships and motivational practices. You ask yourself, “what if” and the world is at your disposal.
Creativity Can Be Learned
Sounds simple enough because the fundamental underlying value of creativity is that it can be learned, it can be sought out and supported by trusting ourselves. Yet, the other facet of creativity – its polar opposite – is that as we grow up we unlearn how to be uncreative. We seem to lose our ability or forget how to let your mind expand. That discipline that goes by the wayside with predictable and repetitive thinking.
Learning how to be creative is similar to learning a sport, using the right muscles, and, in the case of creativity, that means stretching the mind, mastering a way of thinking that is experimental, exploratory, questioning and synthesizing information. Often, we need a supportive environment to be creative and a mindset that tells us that being wrong is not the worst thing that ever happened to us.
We are all born artists. A child imagines without censoring thought. However, as you grow up and mature, you fear develop being wrong or out of step. Unfortunately, our schools aid and abet this diminishing capacity to imagine without limitations. We have to get the answers precisely correct on our tests. Creativity and diversity, dynamic and interactive interchanges are not valued in most schools. There is just not enough time.
If you want to be creative in the workplace,citing time constraints won’t work as an excuse. What will work is your willingness to be curious every day. Look for new ways of thinking so that you can find new solutions. Beware the mental gridlock of ideas. It leaves you bereft of creative skills.
Define A Powerful Vision
IBM weighed in with a massive study last year interviewing over 1,500 CEOs around the world to discover the most important talent they look for in an employee. Hands down it was employee creativity – the most important talent for the 21st century.
Management has considerable involvement in utilizing their creative people. Once creative types are identified, management can place them in special projects or give them leadership positions. However, before that can happen, management needs to define a powerful vision for the company, which in turn can create teams with focus that leads to high performing results. It isn’t just the creative employees that are given responsibility to innovate; management has the responsibility to be in lock step with those who generate new and exciting ideas. Everyone works together in the company to hone in and shepherd the final vision.
Open Up The Workplace
Every aspect of a business needs creative people from marketing, to customer service, to knowledge building, to design and to advertising. It is the responsibility of each and every member of entire company to share and reflect creative ideas in order for innovation to take place. Encouraging personal relationships, networking and down time (play time) is crucial to realizing a company’s vision. The day of the small cubicle and employee isolation is over. Meeting up several times a day in spaces where people can congregate, where music is played, where tools of the trade are displayed is a dynamic solution to clear and concise communication, which leads to creative interplay.
If businesses are truly interested in creativity in the workplace, that attitude will reflect a larger vision for the company and not just achieving a financial bottom line.