How Leaders Learn to Boost Creativity in Teams

Innovation Catalysts

Rob Sheffield

• Publisher: WSPC (EUROPE)
• ISBN:
  9781786346223
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Desarrollo organizacional

The book focuses on how leaders are learning to develop the creative capabilities of their team members and themselves. Through this learning, teams are developing original approaches to their work, benefitting their customers, patients, employees and

How Leaders Learn to Boost Creativity in Teams: Innovation Catalysts

Chapter 1

The Creativity Convergence — A Meeting of Need, Means and Want

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Ray Bradbury

This is an optimistic book, arguing that leaders are playing a key role, in bringing diverse people together, to develop novel solutions that fit the needs of the people they serve, and make those people’s lives better. Many are doing this, through their focus, determination, skills and collaboration with others, and in ways that rarely make headlines. Mostly, these leaders are not interested in making headlines, but they’re doing the work anyway. And this is timely, because, as we’ll see, the need for, means of and motivation for creativity are converging.

The ideas in this book have evolved at the boundary of organisational research and practice in working with leaders and teams. The work has covered 30 years, and spanned the UK, Continental Europe, USA, China and India, working with global companies and smaller, vibrant ones across healthcare, professional and legal services, education and technology. It’s been a fascinating and fortunate time to be involved in this work, because the paradigm of leadership has altered, away from the taken-for-granted focus on the leader as a heroic individual, to one of leadership as a more distributed and relational process.

My colleagues and I work with many leaders who are learning and applying lessons in their teams, organisations and collaborating beyond their organisational boundaries. Part of the motivation for writing this book is fuelled by the dissonance experienced between our everyday work with leaders, and the news-grabbing headlines around leadership:

We now observe a huge divide between the modest trust in institutions of business and government and a pitifully low level of confidence in their leaders. Over two-thirds of the general population do not have confidence that current leaders can address their country’s challenges. The credibility of CEOs fell by 12 points this year to 37 percent globally; in Japan, it is 18 percent.¹

Much of this distrust is driven by an increasing sense that current systems of wealth creation and redistribution are perceived to be meeting the needs of only a small minority. At more local levels, corrupt leaders damage the reputation of their organisations, and leaders elsewhere, as officers of organisations, are tarred by association.

But there are also grounds for hope from this report. Around 75% of the survey respondents believed that business could both increase profits and improve the conditions in communities where it operates. And, of those unsure as to whether the system works for them, 58% trust business the most. Many people want business to do more social good.

We know how easy it is for leaders to stimulate cynicism, anger and suspicion. And, once freed, these genies are not easily contained. Hope, optimism and pride in results take longer to cultivate, but are present in the lives of many leaders who are currently doing good work. And we encounter many examples of leaders who work hard to serve their customers, clients, patients, service users and wider communities.

This book is an attempt to give those learning leaders a voice. I want to point out that much good work is being done by mature leaders, who are learning to use their power, to energise the people around them, making things better for the people they serve.

That’s about the ‘why’. As for the ‘what’, the focus of this book is on creativity as it feeds into a wider innovation process. I have tried to integrate previously separate strands of research and practice from the fields of creativity, innovation and leadership, into a coherent framework. The emphasis is on informing leadership practice, illustrating principles through the real-life experiences of organisational leaders.

The intended audience is people in leadership roles, who are being challenged to develop innovative approaches to work, delivered through the teams they lead.

Some of the stories in the book are illustrations of work done well, and, sometimes, not so well. The cases in Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 come from interviews with people with whom my colleagues and I have worked in recent years. All of these people have delivered noteworthy change in their organisations. Other interviews through the book provide contextual examples of what’s changing in this growing area of work. These people are engaged in developing substantial, often leading-edge, work, applying human and/or machine technologies which are often based on solid research. In total, I interviewed 15 people, 12 in recorded interviews and 3 by email. Some of their names and organisations’ names are changed to meet their organisational policies on anonymity and confidentiality; some are shared in straightforward interview formats; some are retrospective accounts, co-written by me and verified with others; some are written-up interviewee accounts, responding to questions asked by me.

Relevance for the Reader

You will find the book useful and inspiring, if you

•are a leader, at frontline, middle or senior level, in business, the public sector, government or community organisations;

•are curious about how to develop ideas with your team, from first insights to proven concept;

•are studying creativity and innovation and want both an overview of research and practical examples of real people applying learning in their work;

•want to grow your own capacity for creativity and innovation, but don’t know where to start. Have faith! There are well-tested ways to do this, developed through decades of research and practice;

•intuit that the importance of creativity and innovation is growing, but don’t know why. You’re right! Read on...

You’ll also know that you can’t deliver innovation by yourself. Other people probably have better ideas — there are more of them than you! The energetic commitment of your team to introducing new ways of working is crucial to seeing things through and delivering value. The work is simply too complex for any one person to solve.

You will know that your people demand a certain degree of challenge and want to keep learning, partly for the ‘buzz’, but also to safeguard their future employability. You feel responsible to help them with that.

Moreover, for yourself, you have a life outside of work, and you value it. Working 14-hour days does not appeal. Perhaps you belong to the so-called sandwich generation — looking after your children and your parent(s). Either way, work is vitally important but it’s not everything.

Equally, your team needs you, in your leadership role. How you conceive your role, and think about using your power and authority, will have a clear and sustained impact on others’ commitment and performance.

The Topicality of Creativity and Innovation

Innovation is today’s equivalent of the holy grail. Rich-world governments see it as a way of staving off stagnation. Poor governments see it as a way of speeding up growth. And business people everywhere see it as the key to survival.²

But as the terms innovation and creativity have become more commonplace, their meanings have become a little foggy. Exploring the academic literature, creativity is most commonly described as the generation of novel and useful ideas,³ while innovation involves the successful implementation of creative ideas by the organisation, leading to value creation for stakeholders.⁴

In this view, creativity is an essential early stage of the innovation process. Our experience suggests that, in many organisations, creativity is not really trusted. It’s the black sheep of innovation, which sounds more business-like, solid and incontestable. But, as Isaksen et al. put it:

Our position is simple. You can have creativity without innovation, but you cannot have innovation without creativity.⁵ (p. 14)

Thinking of creativity as a necessary sub-set of the more complex innovation process is useful. As a broad simplification, being able to conceptualise novel and useful ideas at an early stage is an essential precondition for innovation. And novelty needn’t mean new to the whole world. The consensus is that new-in-context is novel enough. And think of ‘useful’ as having the potential to bring value to relevant stakeholders.

In this book, when I’m referring to the early stages of the development of novel and useful ideas, I’m talking about creativity; when we’re referring to the whole process, or to value realisation through implementation and spread of ideas, I call it innovation.

At this point, let’s review Rhodes’ model which has had an enduring impact on the field of human creativity. In reviewing the creativity literature, Rhodes collected 56 definitions of creativity and synthesised them into 4 main themes of Product, Process, Press and Person.⁶

•The creative product: How creative is the outcome produced? Whether that is a product, service, process, business model, market and so on. And what are the qualities or attributes of creative outcomes that make them ‘creative’?

•The creative process: This looks at how ideas develop, as well as the development of thinking tools, rules, tips and practices to nurture ideas through phases of development. This is where much training and consultancy work focuses, and with good reason, since this is most closely connected with explicit idea development.

•The creative press: Work context makes a difference. Sometimes, ably-skilled individuals and groups just don’t apply their talents because of factors in the local environment.

•The creative person: What are the traits and styles of people that seem to influence the number, variety, originality and detail of their ideas?

Rhodes was interested in the integrative nature of his framework. He believed that these themes, in combination, could provide a useful governing structure for creativity that could be helpful for the deliberate and meaningful application of creativity in our everyday work.

The Demand for Innovation is Growing

However, it works and whatever we can learn about it, the demand for innovative solutions is growing, and several factors are driving the need. First, of course, organisations need ideas. Anyone working can barely spend a week without confronting the need for idea development. This is a widespread phenomenon, driven by strong, sometimes, global, market competition.

Innovation may also be demanded by other stakeholders in our work. A 2015 poll for Lithium Technologies showed that 65% of the US large-corporate executives report that consumers have higher expectations for them to innovate. Approximately 42% of respondents noted that consumers use social media to shame their company into doing what the consumer wants! ‘The consumer is forever changed’ asserts Rob Tarkoff, CEO and President.⁷

Also, the widespread and rapid proliferation of digital platforms has boosted change. Most organisations report that their digital initiatives are aimed at strengthening the existing business, rather than driving growth through new businesses. But don’t doubt the short-term potential for digital becoming a source of value. In McKinsey’s 2015 survey, their high-performing organisations are more than twice as likely to dedicate their best people and resources to their digital initiatives.⁸

And work problems seem to be growing in complexity. In their 2013 survey of 821 respondents across 14 countries, EY note that:

Almost 9 out of 10 companies surveyed for this report agree that the problems confronting them are now so complex that teams are essential to provide effective solutions. To achieve superior performance, companies need to tap into the full range of skills and expertise at their disposal. More than 6 out of 10 respondents say that their companies’ teams have become more diverse in the past three years and 55% say that their teams are more geographically distributed.⁹

One of the effects of this increased demand for ideas in organisations is that the search for ideas has broadened. Previously, innovation seemed to be the domain of people working in research, development, probably marketing and perhaps, sales. Now, ideas are needed from all the workforce, to develop new products and services, process efficiencies, start-up business models, new strategies and markets and more. This was foreseen:

In the 21^st-century world of electronically connected organizations, everyone will have a part to play as the creator and implementer of new ideas. In this respect, older notions of the exceptional individual as a creative genius…will become obsolete.¹⁰ (p. 55)

We’re moving from creatively being a mysterious, even sacred, process, in the province of the few, to one which is becoming more widespread and more democratised.

As the conversational volume of organisational demand for innovation has increased, so is the demand from individuals. There is emerging a ‘ground-up’ drive from employees who want to learn the skills of idea development. This is disorganised and fragmented, and sometimes missed by their learning and development functions. But, what was a weak signal 10 years ago, ...