You're Being Creative When We Pay You To Execute? You're Fired...

Think about the workgroups you support as a HR Pro or Manager.  Do you talk about innovation and creativity a lot?  Of course you don't, usually because of the following two reasons:

1.  Our culture is all about execution, and we just kind of let the "soft stuff" happen, if it happens at all; and

2.  We'd love to provide more time to let employees innovate, but let's face it - only 5 or 10% of our employee base has the ability and willingness to think about things in that context.  As a result, we're not going to sponsor the innovation/creativity side, because we don't want to treat those people in a noticeably different way.

The problem with creativity is that it doesn't fit neatly into the normal model.  Creativity, or the ability to create something novel and appropriate, is essential to the entrepreneurship that gets new businesses started and that sustains the best companies after they have reached global scale. But because creativity seems too elusive and intangible to pin down—or because concentrating on it produced a less immediate payoff than improving execution, it hasn’t been the focus of most managers’ attention.

So, if you want innovation and creativity, you have to work at it.  From Harvard Business Review:

"Intuit cofounder Scott Cook, for example, wondered whether management was “a net positive or a net negative” for creativity. “If there is a bottleneck in organizational creativity,” he asked, “might it be at the top of the bottle?”

The first priority of leadership is to engage the right people, at the right times, to the right degree in creative work. That engagement starts when the leader recasts the role of employees. Rather than simply roll up their sleeves and execute top-down strategy, employees must contribute imagination. As Cook put it, “Traditional management prioritizes projects and assigns people to them. But increasingly, managers are not the source of the idea.”

More keys to create an environment that generates creativity and innovation from HBR.

...remember that you are not the sole fount of ideas. Be the appreciative audience.
...enable collaboration. Combat the lone inventor myth.  Define “superstar” as someone who helps others succeed.
...enhance diversity.  Get people with different backgrounds and expertise to work together. Open up the organization to outside creative contributors.
...map the stages of creativity and tend to their different needs. Avoid process management in the fuzzy front end. Provide sufficient time and resources for exploration
....accept the inevitability and utility of failure. Create psychological safety to maximize learning from failure.
...motivate with intellectual challenge. Protect the front end from commercial pressure. Show the higher purpose of projects whenever possible.

Here's my Jack Handy "Deep Thought" for the post.  If you set up an environment to encourage innovation and creativity and allow all to have access to time and tools, make them put some skin in the game via this handy Employee Engagement test.  The test I pitched a while back basically asks the employee to be more productive to free up time for them to chase creative and innovative work, and you score an employee's willingness like this:   

-Associates who have taken advantage of your offer and are aggressively moving forward with a project - ENGAGED

-Associates who have developed some thoughts about what they might do, but have not taken action yet - NOT ENGAGED, BUT POSSIBLY COULD BECOME ENGAGED WITH THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENTAL TWEAKS FROM YOU

-Associates who have done nothing, or have excuses for why they didn't take advantage of the offer - NOT ENGAGED AND NOT PROBABLE TO BECOME ENGAGED, regardless of your efforts.

Set it up so your employees get creative time by being more productive, and also by taking advantage of an offer.  That way you'll never worry about treating the engaged employee who wants to chase a project differently - because they were more than willing to put skin in the game.

Comments

[Melanie]

Nice post! Employee engagement is the key to fostering creativity and encouraging innovation in the workplace.

Since creative thinking requires taking a risk, it's more likely to occur in a safe environment that supports innovation. Organizations need to realize that this will ultimately positively affect their bottom line.