Creativity — A Top Competence. How to Check if It’s a Feature of Your Organization? | by Kasia Koperniak | Aug, 2024

The WEF report, Future of Jobs Report 2023, highlights creativity as a top skill for the future. This is probably not shocking to anyone, considering the exceptionally volatile and surprising reality we’ve been facing in various fields in recent years. However, I believe it’s worth examining this competence from both an individual and organizational perspective and managing it consciously. Personally, creativity has always been particularly close to me because my parents graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, and doing things differently than everyone else was ingrained in our family code. 🙃

Professionally, I’ve functioned in various environments — some where creativity was considered crucial, others where it wasn’t managed but came naturally, and some where it was deemed unnecessary. I’d like to share my perspective based on these experiences.

Creativity is often associated with artists or companies introducing highly innovative products, or sometimes R&D departments. But in a fast-paced, ever-changing, and unpredictable economic, political, and technological world, it’s almost impossible to function without it. Change follows change, the pace of development is incredible, and working in a routine manner just won’t cut it.

In organizations, creativity offers an advantage because it allows for:

• Creating tailored processes
• Developing business models suited to the situation
• Solving problems quickly and creatively
• Increasing adaptability to changes, which are abundant around us
• Enhancing competitiveness through innovation

From an employee’s perspective:

• It increases job satisfaction and unleashes a higher level of employee engagement. It gives the feeling that their ideas are valued, which in turn boosts motivation and loyalty to the company.
• Creative work environments encourage openness, collaboration, and knowledge exchange, where people inspire each other. So, the pleasant combines with the useful.

First, it’s worth realizing that everyone is born creative, but only a few of us manage to maintain this skill at a high level in adulthood. Subjected to education systems and evaluation from a young age, we unfortunately lose much of it along the way. But the good news is that we can rebuild, stimulate, and develop it, and the environment in which we operate has a huge influence! This environment includes the organization we work for.

To illustrate this, I’ll use the popular Competing Values Framework (CVF). While analysis often shows that cultures are a mix of two types, I’ll simplify by focusing on monolithic examples.

• Clan Culture: The focus here is on collaboration, trust, and supporting employees, with strong and positive relationships being crucial. Such a culture promotes creativity by fostering a safe environment where employees feel free to share their ideas. However, be cautious, as clan culture can also lead to conformity, which blocks constructive conflict, and the team may endorse not-so-great ideas to avoid disrupting harmony. In such a situation, creative processes must be consciously managed. A common phrase blocking change: “We can’t change this because others will get offended.”
• Adhocracy Culture: Characterized by innovation, flexibility, and a readiness to take risks. Companies with this culture are often leaders in their industries, constantly seeking new solutions. Here, creativity is fundamental, and innovation is in the company’s DNA. I had the pleasure of working in such a culture, where ideas were bubbling like a geyser. The challenge wasn’t continually generating ideas but effectively implementing them at the right time, and the temptation to keep inventing something cooler can be immense.
• Market Culture: Focused on results and competition. While this culture might be less conducive to creativity, companies that balance the emphasis on results with a focus on innovation achieve outstanding results. However, this requires thoughtful and conscious action, as the pressure for results and the pace of execution can completely stifle this competence.
• Hierarchical Culture: Focused on stability, procedures, and control. By nature, it’s less conducive to creativity, but proper management and the introduction of space for innovation can yield positive effects. Common blocking phrases include: “But we’ve been doing it this way for years, so why change?” or “We’ll have to change procedures, and that will take too much time.”

Hire only creative people? 🤔

I’m afraid it’s not that simple because, as WPP Founder Martin Sorrell (founder of the world’s largest advertising and PR group by revenue and number of employees) stated, “One of the biggest challenges is the fact that in organizations based on innovation, economies of scale don’t work. If we hire twice as many innovative employees, it doesn’t mean we’ll be twice as innovative.”

Team’s structure and norms, Fortress Teams vs Tent Teams

1. FORTRESS TEAMS

It’s worth first considering the structure of teams and how they function. If they’ve been stable for a long time, the relationships between members are usually very strong. These are so-called fortress teams. Such teams typically strive for harmony and avoid differences, which blocks creativity. We encountered this challenge with one leader who faced a creative block in his team. However, we successfully addressed this competency (which is especially crucial in an innovative product company) by working with the team to develop a code of values that included creativity and openness to new perspectives. Additionally, the leader, who was excellent in many other aspects, implemented stimulating facilitation techniques during meetings.

What else can a Leader do to continuously develop creativity in the Fortress Teams?

• Move people into the growth zone by assigning ambitious goals.
• Use creative thinking techniques and strive to create the phenomenon of collective mind, which, according to Prof. Edward Nęcka, is “the functioning of a group where the subject of thinking and the author of ideas is the entire team, not individual members. This manifests in the widespread and mutual picking up, developing, and complementing of ideas expressed by other group members.”

Examples of techniques: De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats; Design thinking; Perspective reversal

2. TENT TEAMS

A team structure that triggers greater creativity is the so-called tent team, project-based, temporary, where relationships are shallower. Such a team is more open to constructive conflict, and the result of the work is something greater than the sum of individual efforts — the synergy effect emerges.

Of course, it’s not always business-wise to constantly disrupt structures, but if leaders in the organization want to challenge the status quo or quickly develop an innovative solution, they might consider forming a temporary team focused on the goal, free from established team rules and habits.

• Ensure psychological safety, meaning the absence of fear, e.g., of consequences when proposing unconventional solutions and often resulting in failures. This also means taking care of relationships, mutual respect, partnership, kindness, and openness to others’ ideas. In such a safe environment, the team learns to draw conclusions from failures and share them, treating them as a form of learning rather than a cause for shame.
• Empowerment. If we don’t give teams autonomy, we block creativity. I believe that people have immense potential, but they need space and permission to show and use it.
• Diversity, which is a stimulant for creativity as it provides a source of different perspectives and experiences. Sometimes significant diversity leads to conflicts, but don’t be afraid of them — if they’re constructive and appropriately facilitated, they’re beneficial.
• I’d add one more very important thing that many organizations forget: time for experimentation. Simply put, we can expect creativity from employees, but if they’re so busy and focused on achieving goals under high time pressure, there’s little chance that even a highly creative person will use their potential.

The executive team has to make a choice — whether predictability or innovation is prioritized in the organization!

If we expect 100% predictability, unfortunately, there’s no room for innovation. The art lies in deciding what the business needs at a given stage of development and adjusting the slider accordingly. For example, if we implement a rigid framework focused on validating results within a specific timeframe, leaving no room for anything other than predefined tasks, and results are the primary basis for employee evaluation, there’s no room for innovation. This is okay in some situations, but in my opinion, temporarily. However, lacking awareness of the consequences of such decisions is always risky.

The creativity of an organization is closely linked to its culture and is the result of the creativity of its teams. Therefore, to build a creative and effective team, organizations must create an environment that encourages experimentation, supports collaboration, fosters learning from mistakes, and provides time for this. Because values like openness to new ideas, trust, and autonomy are the foundation of a creative culture. And the McKinsey & Company Report confirms that companies that focus on creativity win in the market and have more engaged employees.

If you want to delve deeper into the topic of creativity, I also recommend these books:

• Ed Catmull, “Creativity, Inc.”
• Adam Grant, “Originals”