4 Steps for Increasing Your Employees' Creativity
4 Steps for Increasing Your Employees' Creativity
Boosting a company's creative output is a difficult task for any manager, but these techniques will yield results.
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Driving your employees' creativity while keeping them productive is an ongoing battle.
Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American
Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, offers a solution to
the often-vexing problem. He writes in Harvard Business Review about how you can train your employees to be more creative by teaching core creative competencies.
Epstein says that after he trained employees of a small California
city, managers reported that they were receiving 55 percent more new
ideas. City officials attributed $600,000 in new revenue and $3.5
million in savings to the training.
So what makes this kind of training so effective? From his studies of more than 1,300 managers in 19 countries, Epstein
came up with eight core creative competencies you can use with your
staff. See below and start training your employees to tap their best
ideas.
1. Institute ongoing education and development
You should be constantly training employees in skills that are
outside of their expertise and job title. You want versatile
professionals who are not confined to a box. Help them expand their
knowledge and skill set by offering weekly training sessions on various
topics.
2. Record all ideas
You and your employees should keep a daily record of unedited,
off-the-cuff ideas. Keep a document open and add to it every day. Do not
censor any ideas, within reason. Then each month dig through and see if
you can make something out of them.
3. Manage your surroundings
This may sound trivial, but you should surround yourself and your
employees with "diverse and novel physical and social stimuli," Epstein
says. The right environment will drive creativity.
4. Seek out challenges
Epstein says you need to give your employees "difficult problems to
solve and ambitious goals to reach," but you also have to help them
manage the stress. Deliberately seek hard projects and "manage failure
constructively." Do not yell at your employees for trying and failing.
You should help them find the lesson and thank them for trying something
new. Eventually, this approach will create a fertile, creative
environment where employees are trying new things and creating new
business.
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