There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about how to nurture and grow creativity. If your team is in the midst of solving a problem or generating a new idea, you might be killing their creativity without even realizing it. Three common mistakes:
- Spending too much time on brainstorming. Brainstorming represents just one step in the creative process, a step often referred to as divergent thinking. Before such thinking can be beneficial, your team needs to research the problem thoroughly to be sure that their brainstorming answers the right question. The next step is convergent thinking, where ideas are combined and sorted out to find the best answers to be prototyped, tested and refined.
- Fostering too much cohesion in the creative process. The best teams fight a little (or even a lot). Structured, task-oriented conflict can signal that truly new ideas are being submitted. Too much agreement might suggest that people are self-censoring their ideas, or worse, not generating new ideas at all. As a leader, don’t be afraid to act as a referee —allowing the fight over ideas to unfold, but making sure that it stays fair and doesn’t get personal.
- Judging ideas before they’ve been tested. How new ideas are treated can dramatically affect creativity. Research shows that we tend to favor ideas that reinforce the status quo and that managers often reject ideas that customers say they want. Once an idea is rejected, the likelihood that an individual or team will continue to think creatively is diminished. The result is the safe, stale ideas that our biases favor. The best leaders find ways to test ideas in the marketplace first and defer judgment until they have early results.
A growing body of research suggests that these accidental creativity killers are causing more harm than good. So try the inverse and see how it affects your team’s creativity. David Burkus
David Burkus is founder of LDRLB and assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University, and author of The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas.