How to build a creative team

The Harvard Business Review reports that creativity is “at the heart of business”. The review highlighted the benefits of creativity to entrepreneurship and argued that creativity helps to sustain business development.

However, recognising and cultivating is harder and it is not something that all companies have done well at. There’s no doubt, knowing how to build a creative team is a tough one. This is because creativity is not entirely tangible. It can be difficult for leaders to know what they should do to develop it in their teams. Nonetheless, develop it they must. Creativity is essential in a business environment of continual and accelerating change. To outdo competitors, businesses need Creative teams to develop exciting new ideas from a product or service development perspective. This is essential in outwitting competing firms. However, you also need creative minds to devise ways to do tasks more efficiently, increase productivity and thus introduce competitive advantage. Creativity helps produce a vision that is exciting. A vision that everyone can buy into and develop new solutions to old business problems. One of the problems is that despite its importance to organisational success, organisations don’t always value creativity. Creative suggestions may be seen as inconvenient, or a diversion from the task at hand. When you discourage creative ideas or when creative suggestions fall on seemingly deaf ears, employees may give up being creative. Instead of always saying no, instead ask the employee how they might implement their suggestion. The perhaps brainstorm it further with the team. This leads to an environment where your team is more likely to suggest new ideas, and importantly where the business does not automatically reject new ideas.

How to build a creative team

Developing a team that is diverse is another important step in increasing creativity in the business. As Stanford Business reports, having a completely homogenous team can kill creativity. When everyone thinks the same way it is difficult to generate new ideas. Diversity is core to creativity. This could be diversity of age, gender, race or other differences. Hiring people that are different from one another and who can bring something new to the team will encourage creativity. While this level of diversity may not seem to encourage conflict, it ultimately creates fewer fresh ideas. It’s better to have some conflict and manage this through effective facilitation skills, than to not have any creative ideas. This is one reason why facilitation is important: to encourage creativity through conflict. Psychometric assessment is helpful for understanding where creative skills exist already and where they may need to be built. The McQuaig Psychometric System offers tools that help identify these skills. Once you know where the gaps are it is possible to find ways to develop creativity in individuals. This may include business coaching to increase creativity. Consider taking a Creative Teams course to help teams work together effectively, building competence and confidence in this area. Take the approaches recommended here and your team will soon be performing at a high creative standard, increasing your chances of business success.  ]]>

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