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9 Ways Senior Leaders Can Promote Creativity

by Amma Marfo

This piece from Amma may be nearly a decade old, but its lessons couldn't be more timely. In the years since she wrote it, our campus climates and cultures have changed for a number of reasons: COVID-19, funding challenges, political pressures, and the advent of AI. But navigating all of those changes requires teams to call on their creativity. And if you've got a team that's struggling to tap into theirs, you do have the power to uplift them. Amma talks about why - in this blog post, and in several of her on-campus or virtual sessions geared toward cultivating collaborative creativity.

I spend a lot of time thinking about creativity. How to encourage people to find their own, how to expand the definition of it, how to make the case for its utility in organizations. But what I also spend a lot of time on, is pondering what environments need to help people be creative. A lot of organizations have chosen to focus on the space in which people work – hence open offices, Ping Pong tables, whiteboards, and all those other “office perks” that companies put in place to set themselves apart.

But things don’t make an organizational culture. People do. And the people in that organization  – be it a student club, a nonprofit, or a corporation – should have philosophies about work that are congruent with the environment they build and attract prospective employees with.

This congruence came to mind again a few weeks ago when I read this report from the Center for Creative Leadership, about senior leadership behaviors that sabotage innovation. It’s one thing to say, “we love creative ideas,” but it is quite another to foster an environment that truly does that. As such, I want to turn around their findings, thus sharing nine ways that you can ensure your surroundings promote the innovative impulses of your team.

(1) Encouraging creativity.

And I mean really encouraging it. Not just saying “no idea is off-limits,” only to later poke holes in the ones that don’t match what’s previously been done or what solutions were expected. I wrote about the many ways that leadership can articulate dedication to creativity in Cultivating Creativity– and the way that’s most effective:

Leadership over creative individuals, or over individuals with whom you’d like to work creatively, requires a shift in thinking from the way we’ve typically conceived of supervising and managing. In the earliest waves of management, we believed that giving employees permission was the highest form of agency we could provide. Managers and supervisors are custodians of a work environment, and the manner in which people worked was up to them.

Then, leadership and management theory moved away from language of permission and into the language of support. “This individual has my support” was the new way of saying that someone was allowed to work in a different direction than they might have originally. While this change was welcome, this language is challenging because it still puts the onus of directing a project, a department, or an organization in the hands of the leader. The modern workforce is evolving to where having support still isn’t enough. So what comes next?

My answer: truly transformative creative work will come when individuals don’t have permission, or have support, but when they feel supported. While it may seem like a subtle semantic change, I believe it matters. It matters because it changes the responsibility of the manager or supervisor. Helping someone feel supported is a collaborative process. It requires the joint understanding of an employer and an employee, a patron and a protégé, a leader and a team member.

Leadership practices that help people feel supported, whether their idea goes well or poorly (more on that later) is more likely to foster further creativity. I speak often of how important collaboration is to creation; to help someone feel supported is far more collaborative than “you have my support,” and certainly more so than “do whatever you want.” As a creator, how can you articulate the importance of such support? And as a leader, how can you articulate or demonstrate that support to those under your employ?

(2) Evaluating ideas thoroughly, including resources and systems.

There is a time and place to prioritize ideas based on feasibility and resources. That time is not the very instant after the idea is presented. Perhaps the most precious resource that creativity needs to thrive and take hold is time; remember that when an unfamiliar idea is presented. Choosing to evaluate an idea for feasibility at that introduction point fails to truly examine the needs that idea addresses, the resources truly available (and what changes could be made if needed). In the Cultivating Creativity framework, the commitment to thoroughly evaluating an idea is a function of determination. Two traits of a workplace determined to be creative that I strongly recommend embracing and continually implementing:

A determined environment periodically assesses the resources of those dedicated to solving problems. Are they well equipped to address the issues at hand? Where are there gaps? How can those gaps be filled? And how can those in relatively higher positions of power assist in filling those gaps?

When assessing decisions, these environments encourage open-minded assessment of ideas and pitches. Go into negotiations or ideation sessions with a “how can we make this work?” orientation, rather than a “here’s why this won’t work” orientation.

(3) Pushing a Bottom-Up Approach.

After moving to an electronic system for ticketing at my last institution, we had a misfire on how tickets were distributed. I was embarrassed that a system I had championed had failed relatively early in its deployment and had disappointed students. One of those students, more agitated than many, came to see me. I asked her “what would you have me do?” and listened to her reply; the answer was a good one. Later in the day, we re-deployed the ticket acquisition process incorporating her suggestion. She was right.

Good ideas can come from anyone. This means that ideas can be acted on whether they come from the top of the organization, or from someone elsewhere in the pipeline – who sees challenges or problems from a wholly different perspective than those in leadership. As a leader, do you acknowledge the validity and truth in those perspectives, even (especially!) if they don’t align with what you’re seeing?

(4) De-Emphasizing Structure and Hierarchy

One challenge to allowing ideas to rise from wherever they originate, is finding the professional mechanism, or personal courage (or both!) to convey that idea upward in the organization. If we’re convinced people in power won’t listen or honor what we think, we hold ideas in- ideas that can make a difference if supported and funded.

So while it’s unlikely that most companies will dismantle their hierarchical structure simply to ensure the free sharing of information (and, as many learned from the lessons at Zappos, such a move isn’t necessarily productive), it is possible to lower the intimidation factor when it comes to voicing a problem or suggesting a solution. A few quick ideas:

• Anonymous idea submission
• Organizational mentorship programs
• Unconference-style professional development
• Recurring opportunities to get to know leadership

Continue the rest of Amma's article here!