What will you do today to rethink and encourage creativity?

You want to foster creativity at your organization to fuel big ideas, spark innovations and open new doors to success. You put your teams through empathy and creativity trainings and try to enhance brainstorming sessions by planting more whiteboards in the office. Meanwhile, your employees feel that they are stuck and lack a creative outlet. In fact, 87 per cent of the global workforce feels the same. Employees feel that the leadership doesn’t support or encourage people to come up with creative ideas. So what are you going to do to eliminate the discrepancy between what you want and how your employees feel?

First of all, you have to rethink creativity. To get started on it, ask yourself the following questions. What is your own definition of creativity? Can you really expect your team to think and do things differently if they are being limited to your own definition of creativity? Are you limiting creativity at your organization by using it interchangeably for design thinking, improv or product development? How do you respond when your team brings up fresh and novel ideas that fall outside of what's considered normal?

Creating and communicating clear boundaries within which your team can feel safe to experiment will also enhance employees’ willingness to be creative, and you also have to think about how you can add clear incentives and rewards to make your people feel they have more space and time to be creative. You have to celebrate your team members who step up to share creative ideas or lead such efforts.

If you want your people to dare to be creative and explore unknown terrains, you have to stop using ‘creativity’ as a buzzword and should integrate it into your organization’s culture.

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