Jumpstart Your Creativity (11 page)

GROUP AND ORGANIZATIONAL CREATIVITY

…1,541 CEOs and senior leaders cite
“creativity” as the most important leadership
quality for business success in the
next five years
.

—IBM G
LOBAL
CEO S
TUDY
,
“C
APITALIZING ON
C
OMPLEXITY
,” 2010

IN
2010, more than 60 percent of the CEOs interviewed in IBM's Global CEO Study believed industry transformation was the top factor contributing to uncertainty. This same study found “the biggest challenge facing enterprises from here on will be the accelerating complexity and the velocity of a world that is operating as a massively interconnected system.” What the heck does that all mean? It means in plain English, to quote Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin'.”

In this chapter we offer our list of leadership principles and practices to help you lead and enable your people to harness their creativity in the face of uncertainty and constant change…our new “normal.” Don't worry, you are completely
normal if you just saw yourself wrangling cats in a rainstorm (really you are…). Everyone today is doing more with less! You will also learn our “3D” approach to meetings, especially meetings with creative groups or projects requiring creativity and creative problem solving. We wrap up this chapter with tips on how to best reward or inspire your group to embrace and engage in the creative process.

Before you lead any group in a creative process, you must understand what ingredients are necessary to improve creativity, especially in business settings. The following are offered for your consideration:

•
Expertise
—including technical, organizational, procedural, operational, and intellectual knowledge with adequate viewpoints and perspectives represented

•
Trust and Safety
—healthy, effective, productive, positive team who genuinely wants the best for their fellow team members, values each other and cares enough to look out for one another consistently

•
Creative Thinking Skills
—open to possibilities, flexible, imaginative, divergent, and convergent thinking

•
Context
—clear understanding of the scope of the problem or opportunity, its history, “Why now?,” why it is important to the organization, group or
individuals, and the value a solution brings to the organization, its people and/or the people it serves

•
Motivation
—external factors and internal drivers to motivate and engage are keys for success, especially in terms of long-term buy-in and lasting motivation

•
Time Commitment
—serious understanding and support of the time required of participants to achieve meaningful, productive, profitable results

•
Value Appreciation
—genuine acknowledgment, acceptance, and appreciation for the results, outcomes, or value achieved as a result of the creative process…not lip service, but truly valuing the work, results, and their impact

Take a moment to think about each of these factors and how they are reflected within your current group or organization.

Shawn's book,
Jumpstart Your Motivation
, provides several powerful strategies for maintaining your motivation. To encourage and enable motivation within your group, be sure to focus on the following:

• Fit—right role for the right person at the right time

• Freedom—the autonomy for people to achieve the goals

• Resources—having the tools required to get the job done

• Team—support, caring, flexibility, trustworthiness, and recognize talents

• Encouragement—acknowledgment, praise, and positive challenging

• Organizational Support—collaboration, info sharing, communication

Now let's take a look at the leadership principles and practices that enable groups to be more creative. We offer you this list based on mountains of well-known research studies, surveys, and years and years of our own practical experience training leaders and team members alike.

A creative leader…

• adjusts to the winds of change with grace and flexibility.

• approaches strategy and planning frequently, nimble to adapt.

• listens to employees, partners, and customers to create great value.

• encourages the sharing of ideas among everyone, equally.

• embraces disruptive innovation and ambiguity that may linger.

• listens, decides, tests and tweaks, decides and corrects quickly.

• allows “failing fast and often” to discover the best solution.

• has the courage to challenge status quo in a healthy way.

• will adapt, invent, and create as a way of life.

• expects the future to be drastically different.

• loves to ask why, see the possibilities, yet take real action now.

• encourages confidence in creativity and a willingness to take risks.

• focuses on mastery and excellence.

The leadership lessons we have learned from the past twelve years of “Happiness Research” also help a leader more fully engage their team members in the creative process. Basically the four fundamental components of happiness for a person are: 1) self-perceived control of life, 2) self-perceived progress in life, 3) the quality of personal connections, and 4) the extent to which a person feels part of something bigger than him or herself with meaning and purpose well beyond surviving daily life. Most people want to know what they do matters.

Interestingly, much of what a creative leader practices positively contributes directly to “self-perceived control”
and “self-perceived progress,” while also impacting the quality of one's connections and the amount of meaningful work and purpose.

In
Chapter 7
, we offer several
Process Tools
that help individuals and groups manage their creative process. Our 3D Meeting Process is perfect right now as we discuss managing your creative process with groups. Basically this 3D Meeting Process came about, created by Steven, when he was consulting for healthcare companies and hospitals. His clients' biggest complaint was the dysfunction and time wasting of group meetings, especially project team meetings.

The most common reasons team meetings are so dreadfully painful or mind-numbing to attend are (aside from the fact they are boring!) (in no particular order):

• No agendas or ineffective agendas

• Poor use of time to discuss any issues in depth

• Involving too many people who otherwise could be doing something else

• No ownership of next steps or accountability to handle issues, and report back to the group in the future

• Avoiding, sometimes completely, the “real issues at hand”

• Practically never making a decision

• Booking way too many “bad” meetings

The 3D Meeting Process improves your meeting process, especially for creative projects, in many ways:

• Your meeting process has a distinct beginning, middle, and end

• Meetings can be far shorter in length (15-30 minutes)

• Participants tend to focus with far less distractions

• Meeting attendance is higher for lots of reasons

• More people become genuinely involved in the process and care more about the outcomes

• Often better decisions are made with far greater buy-in (novel thought, ay?)

• The success experienced by the team enables momentum and buy-in for future 3D Meetings (people want to come to your meetings—that's cool!)

The 3D Meeting Process consists of three distinct separate meetings that are always conducted in the order of
discovery
, then
distribution
, and finally,
decision
. Here's the 3D Meeting Process in a nutshell:

The first meeting solicits feedback from all participants; for example, brainstorming all the possible reasons xyz problem is happening at work. In
Chapter 7
, we share our proven
technique,
Idea Webbing
, which enables you to collect lots of information from your group quickly yet still collect it in an organized way that allows participants to take ownership of a specific topic, research it, and bring their findings to the next meeting. For example, the group is deciding whether or not to buy a pet dog for their team office, and using
Idea Webbing
, the group identifies the following topics that require further research—cost of a backyard fence, whether the office complex allows dogs, the best breed of dog to buy, comparable information for cats instead of dogs, grooming requirements, where to keep the dog when no one is in the office for extended periods of time, and so on. Basically once the brainstorming through
Idea Webbing
is done, the group would ask for individuals in the group to choose a topic they are willing to enthusiastically and adequately research and study in order to make a recommendation to the group at the next meeting, the Distribution meeting.

The Distribution meeting has a laser-focused agenda, which is for each person or team of people who agreed to research an item during the Discovery process, to report their findings orally to the entire meeting group. All meeting participants are instructed to take detailed notes as they listen to each “report out.” The facilitator of this meeting makes sure everyone is clear about the information that was shared, hosts a brief Q&A session for clarification purposes, and then instructs the group further. The facilitator asks each individual participant (or group) to turn in a written/typed copy
of the list of their findings. After the meeting, the facilitator can email to everyone the detailed notes from the discussion if a scribe captured the notes during the individual reports and/or use the list of items collected from each individual or group. Typically these meetings are scheduled one week apart, sometimes two weeks apart. The homework assignment for all attendees is to consider all of the information received during the presentations, because they will be asked to make a recommendation based on all of the presentations at the next meeting, the Decision meeting.

This final meeting is the opportunity for the group to reconvene, allow anyone to either present their information again, or provide new information gathered since the previous Distribution meeting. Using any one of a number of strategies for the group to decide on their final selections, the facilitator guides the group through a final decision-making round. The group then either concludes the meeting and a separate meeting to plan the execution of these decisions is held at a later date; or, the group conducts a final piece of business at the end of this Decision meeting, which is to strategize the execution plan, and then move forward from there.

If your group is much like the groups we have worked with in the past, don't be surprised when participants “can't believe how productive these meetings were” and how shocked they are “this group made those types of decisions.” The positive experience from this 3D Meeting Process should obviously be leveraged to continue forward progress with your group(s).

Feeling good about the meeting and decision-making process is great. Building momentum for more positive embrace of future meetings should naturally occur. But you may find your group still has people who need to be incentivized for engaging in creativity or creative projects, or your entire group wishes to be incentivized. Unfortunate but true. Sure it would be great if everybody just contributed because it was the right thing to do; but reality says, we will need some form of incentives for some groups. Let's take a look at what works and why.

We could spend the next 400 pages discussing the science, art, psychology, and legal aspects of employee incentives, so why don't you get comfortable, pour yourself a drink, pull up a blanket, and stay a while. No doubt you have more important things to do than read 400 pages, so we'll give you the most important tips you need to know. Ready?

As a college intern in the Disney College Program at the Walt Disney World Company, Steven worked as a front desk host at the front desk of the Grand Floridian Beach Resort. He fell in love with the hotel business and thought he had found his “perfect career.” One day his manager told him the company was offering a contest to all Cast Members (employees) at the Grand Floridian, to name one of the grand suites in the resort. The prize was something like dinner in the employee cafeteria and $100 cash. Steven read all the instructions, and he studied the theme of the hotel and the
idea behind the suite. Remember, Disney is huge about theming. Over the next week or so, he did his research at the local library, studied the décor and the names of the other suites on property, and spent hours thinking about the name for this new suite.

Two weeks later, at an employee meeting, the general manager announced the winner of the “Name the Suite” contest, “Congratulations go to Steven Rowell!” He was elated. To this day Steven can't remember what he ate in the cafeteria and he doesn't remember what he spent the $100 on either. The million dollar question of course is, “Why did Steven spend all that time and money to research the project?” Now think about some of the many possibilities for responses Steven could choose, “I need the $100,” “It's a fun contest,” “I want to impress my parents and my girlfriend,” and so on. Truth be told, Steven was willing to spend so much time on the contest because he knew the name would be on that suite forever and it was a great legacy memory from his college internship.

True story—and the grand suite is still named and themed exactly how Steven had designed it twenty-three years ago! Steven has told that story to whoever will listen, over and over again. The secret these companies—those voted “Best Company to Work For” or “Most Innovative Company” or otherwise have dominated their industries—know is that employees want to contribute in meaningful, lasting ways and simply be recognized for it. Believe it or not, it's not about money or gift certificates or Employee of the Month parking
spaces. Frankly, the best companies have figured out it isn't about money at all, most of the time. It's about recognition.