Brady Gilliam is the founder of the Gilliam Writers Group, a Brooklyn-based firm that specializes in improving people’s writing.
When it comes to skills that employers look for in potential employees, I believe one of the most vital qualities that defines a strong worker is creativity. Studies have found that “creative organizations are more likely to keep ahead of their competitors and adapt better to changes in the environment, and creativity has been identified as one of the significant elements that help an organization achieve success.”
Yet creativity is a difficult trait to define. I think this is because it involves a combination of skills, including deep thinking, openness and the capacity for problem-solving and innovation. The ephemeral nature of the creative impulse means that it can be difficult to quantify and study, let alone promote in your employees. However, our understanding of how inventiveness and imagination operate in the workplace has deepened significantly in recent years.
Research On The Nature Of Creativity
A number of researchers have focused their studies on a more diverse set of factors that serve as antecedents to creativity. These factors exist on both the individual level (e.g., personality traits like proactiveness and optimism, behaviors like creative process engagement) and the contextual level (e.g., physical and social environments, rewards, the impact of transformational leadership).
In total, organizational research shows that even when creative workers are hired, their originality is less likely to be realized if their work environment is unsupportive of creativity. On the other hand, workers who have less natural inclination toward imagination and inventiveness may act more creatively when their managers place them in contexts that support ingenuity. This suggests that we can maximize the creativity of our teams by focusing not only on hiring creative individuals but also on creating a workplace environment that supports creativity.
How To Generate Creative Environments For Clients And Teams
I find this question is especially important for businesses like my own that operate at the intersection of education and the creative arts. Tutoring firms, workshop providers, advertising and marketing companies and more should be doubly invested in understanding and cultivating creativity because they need creative employees who can teach their students habits of inventiveness and imagination.
I’ve found that it’s important to support a symbiotic relationship between teacher and learner, coach and client, above all else, because fostering this relationship can give your clients the best possible outcomes, whatever skills or habits they seek to learn. For example, studies show that teachers, regardless of the subject they’re teaching, tend to be more effective at engaging students when they use creative teaching. Consider training your team members on how to utilize creative teaching techniques such as planning student-centered activities, making connections between content and real life, effectively managing skills in class, asking open-ended questions, encouraging creative thinking and effectively using technology and multimedia within the classroom.
And these strategies aren’t just good for helping clients learn. Any business can apply similar strategies to their training exercises to help their employees learn more effectively and efficiently. I’ve found that when employees feel their own individual inventiveness rising, they are better able to collaborate with and instruct their clients in the creative arts. And this instruction can take place at both the individual and group levels, whether you’re offering individual coaching or group workshops and community-building experiences.
Building Community Despite Geographical Distance
In our increasingly segmented business world, where more and more people communicate primarily online and work from home to avoid long commutes, many employers are confronting the question of how to cultivate creativity in the people they hire. This is certainly true at my company; much of our work is conducted online, and many of our faculty members, who live across the U.S. and internationally, have never met in person.
But I believe it is important for business leaders in this space to seek opportunities for collaboration and community-building, as these can foster creativity for your coaches. You can have some of these opportunities take place in person, such as company-sponsored writing retreats and dinners to help your faculty feel a sense of support and belonging. Others, such as open office hours with company leadership and a pooling of teaching resources, can be done online to overcome geographical distance between your team members.
Conclusion
Although research studies commonly define creativity in terms of outputs—how many novel ideas or practical solutions a person can reach in a given time—I find that developing creative habits is a contextual process. By “fostering a culture of openness, risk-taking and continuous improvement,” you can encourage your employees to undertake this process.
For firms whose bread and butter is offering services in education and the creative arts, the process of creating a creative environment for employees can not only be good business practice but also a way of ensuring that your clients receive the best possible learning experiences.
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