Modern business owners often face a problem with creativity. A lot of CEOs consider creativity to be the most important quality of a leader, but a lot of employees don’t feel as though as they’re living up to their creative potential. Creativity is all too easily lost in the daily grind of running a business, but innovative leaders need to bring creativity back to work.
A creative workforce can help to give your company an edge that it needs to keep ahead of the competition. If you want to have creativity at the center of what you do, like Paul Ognibene does with his company, then you need to encourage your team to pursue paths that interest them and reward unique solutions to problems.
Changing the way you work is easier said than done. Try some of these practical solutions to sparking more creativity in your business.
Put Down The Devices
Smartphones and computers are integral to the way work is done now, but they can also have some real drawbacks. While you’re working, the multitasking that technology enables can be a huge drain on your own creativity. If you want your workers to have a new perspective on problems, set aside an hour or two of company time without using any devices. By pushing people to work with only what they have at their disposal can inspire some more creative thinking.
Read As A Team
Long-form reading can do wonders for the creative mind to get new thoughts flowing. Reading a book together, as a workgroup, can be a very good way to get your whole team on the same page. Get everyone to read some of the best books on creativity to help everyone experience some great reads that inspire creative thinking in the office.
Organize Team Brainstorming
Modern offices are highly interconnected, but that doesn’t stop workers from feeling more and more isolated. A brainstorming session as a team can give people an opportunity to share their ideas, and they also give people in the office a chance to get a feel for what their colleagues are working on and thinking about. Sharing ideas is a great way to get people into a more creative mindset.
Encourage Failure
Everybody wants to be creative, but the fear of failing can hold people back from taking creative risks. Nobody wants an office that is always failing, but you can get a balance between a successful company and personal ingenuity by not discouraging failure.
Have Failure Postmortems
As difficult as it can sometimes be, the most valuable thing someone can do after a failure is to learn from it. If you encourage your team to take risks or develop a project that doesn’t work out, sit down together afterward. Talk about what went wrong, what could have been done differently, and what they plan to do next time. Failures are only true failures if you don’t use them to learn and inform your next move.
