5 Steps to Boost Innovation and Creativity Without Breaking the Bank
Are you looking to level up innovation and creativity in your business to produce a competitive advantage? Maybe you're skeptical of whether it is possible to develop your team and believe you should hire for it. It's the debate of nature versus nurture. A common argument presented in support of team development is that if people were born with creativity, we would observe more consistency in creativity among team members. Evidence suggests an individual's behavioral drives and abilities activate creativity within a positive company culture. Cognitive skills, personality traits, work habits, and social and environmental variables affect innovation and creativity. Here are five low-cost and high-impact steps leaders can take to improve their team's innovation and creativity.
Why talent development matters
As the world changes, people and businesses must change too. Your team's development needs to keep pace with workplace changes, or you risk falling behind.
Evidence from a large-scale study revealed that training and development positively affected innovative performance by building employee competence and organizational commitment. Leaders need to consider the employee's desired knowledge, skills, and abilities, the desired organizational culture, and the workplace climate.
However, evidence has also revealed that the training program does not produce the desired competitive advantage if employee capability development becomes the goal. Leaders seeking to develop innovative and creative teams should take a results-based focus versus an activity-based approach.
What are the right innovation behaviors to hire for and develop?
Enhancing an employee's self-leadership capability improves self-awareness, inspiring experimentation with new ways to solve existing challenges.
The following behaviors are linked to activating workplace creativity and innovation and are ideal to look for when hiring and reinforcing in training programs:
Idea generation: The desire to try new things, a preference for original thinking, and finding solutions for existing problems.
Idea search: Collaborating with others for new ideas and an interest in how things are done in other organizations.
Idea communication: Persuading others toward new ideas and showing others the positive sides of new thinking.
Implementation starting activities: Developing project plans to launch new ideas, secure funding for innovation, and search for new technologies to support implementation.
Involving others: Seeking others to find solutions to problems and involve decision-makers.
Overcoming obstacles: Not giving up on new ways of doing things and persistence.
Innovation outputs: Being successful with implementing new ideas and improving processes valuable to the organization
What are low-cost and high-impact steps leaders can take to foster innovation and creativity?
Organizations searching for efficiency tend to hire and promote employees who conform to group norms and encourage unity. According to US Department of Labor statistics from 2017, 47% of the workforce in the United States is women. Yet, only 22% are in c-suite positions. Companies have historically viewed differences as detrimental. But, the benefits of leveraging diversity within organizations include more viewpoints, new ideas, and reimagined solutions.
“A homogenous workforce limits the range of a company's innovation capabilities." Gary Oster
Organizational culture consists of artifacts, values, and underlying assumptions:
Artifacts: These are the things you can see, feel, or hear in the workplace. Examples include what is displayed, office layouts, uniforms, identification badges, and what is discussed and not discussed.
Espoused Values: What you are told and beliefs that you can use to make decisions. Examples include a company's vision and values or mission statement. They are explicitly stated official philosophies about the company.
Basic Assumptions: These things go without saying or are taken for granted. Examples could include speaking up in meetings, holding a door for someone, smiling, or greeting someone by name when walking down the hall.
High Impact Step #1: Recruit and Retain
Who gets hired, promoted, and fired, and for what, creates and reinforces your organization's culture. Talent management decisions can be viewed as a more subtle nuance to culture change because they are influenced by explicitly stated criteria and unstated value priorities.
A job candidate is more than just a list of experiences, education, and references presented on paper. To better understand their suitability for a position, it's essential to evaluate their behavioral drives and cognitive abilities (the head), as well as their values and interests (the heart), alongside their knowledge, skills, and experience (the briefcase).
We typically examine a resume to determine a person's knowledge, skills, and experience. The information you can gain from the Predictive Index Behavioral Assessment provides the rest of the picture.
Care to see how this might work in your context with a 5-minute assessment? We can unpack the results together, and I’ll show you how it reduces unwanted attrition and mis-hires and helps leadership. Worse case, you learn something about yourself.
High Impact Step #2: Leadership Style
Several well-researched employee and company benefits, such as creativity, are associated with servant leadership. Evidence suggests that a servant leadership style improves employee productivity and creativity. Employees are more likely to provide constructive criticism and engage in productive conflict without fear of exclusion or retaliation, which is an environment in which employees can be creative.
High Impact Step #3: Define Desired Results
This is one of the most potent mechanisms leaders have available. What leaders choose to systematically measure, reward, and control matters, and the opposite is also true. Define desired results in terms of explicit business goals and innovative behaviors.
High Impact Step #4: Leverage Data
Leverage data analytics and empirical testing to discover and communicate what works quickly. Rewards and recognition come in many different forms. Also, what is considered a reward varies from person to person. Both what gets rewarded and how it gets rewarded and what does not get rewarded reinforces organizational culture. There are tangible rewards and social rewards. Simply saying thank you for presenting a decision using data analytics is a social reward.
High Impact Step #5: Embrace Interesting Failure
Much can be revealed when a business or a leader faces a significant challenge. These crucible moments are like a refining fire. It is the heightened emotional intensity that increases individual and organizational learning. Innovation and creativity will challenge the status quo, which is risky in most organizations. How a leader responds to interesting failure will reinforce if the team will take risks in the future.
References:
Amabile, T. M. (1983). The social psychology of creativity: A componential conceptualization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45(2), 357-376.
DeWolf, M. (2017). 12 Stats about working women. U.S. Department of Labor.
Doolittle, J. (2023). Life-changing leadership habits: 10 Proven principles that will elevate people, profit, and purpose. Organizational Talent Consulting.
Ghosh, K. (2015). Developing organizational creativity and innovation: Toward a model of self-leadership, employee creativity, creativity climate, and workplace innovative orientation. Management Research Review, 38(11), 1126-1148.
Lukes, M., & Stephan, U. (2017). Measuring employee innovation: A review of existing scales and the development of the innovative behavior and innovation support inventories across cultures. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research, 23(1), 136-158.
Oster, G. W. (2011). The light prize: Perspectives on Christian innovation. Positive Signs Media.
Schaffer, R. H., & Thomson, H. A. (1992). Successful change programs begin with results. Harvard Business Review, 70(1), 80-89.
