Following the rules all the time and never skipping the line won’t help you to work and live more creatively. As a German - don’t get me wrong - I love rules, processes and being organised, but I also love to break and ignore these altogether, because sometimes it’s the only way I can get to the solutions I need. Of course, a practical balance needs to be applied here. We can’t just do whatever we want. Nevertheless, remember that confidence and fearlessness in creativity we all had as children?
One of LinkedIn’s recent daily rundown topics made me think about how myself and the teams collaborate with work. Do we work creatively enough to achieve our company’s goals?
Whitney Johnsons asked in one of her posts: “Have you noticed how much we can get caught up in reports and presentations rather than focusing on being curious and discovering new perspectives or approaches for better opportunities?”
When I read the word “curious”, I immediately made the connection. If you’re a creative person, guess what? You are also a very curious person. So, how curious are we at work? Do we think three steps ahead in order to get something done? Or do we only focus on the next task we’ve been told to do? Have you ever asked “why”, “how” or “why not” when someone tasked you with a job, questioned the status quo and shared your past experience? Do you engage other colleagues in your thinking and ask them for their opinion and experience?
Working creatively means solving problems differently and together. That’s why we are here. We are part of one team, department or division, but we’re collaborating on something bigger. So how do we approach those challenges? These days, we work on a multitude of projects, with lots of different teams, and we don’t always spend enough time thinking and figuring out what it is that doesn’t work or is blocking us from progressing. We easily get very busy. However, becoming less reactive and taking more time to think things through can have its advantages:
You get more perspectives on the problem by talking to more people and getting more opinions
You learn not only from their perspective and suggestions but can also tap into their knowledge
You evaluate your problem by talking it through and determine if it's really necessary to find a solution for it and why
“CREATIVITY IS INVENTING, EXPERIMENTING, GROWING, TAKING RISKS, BREAKING RULES, MAKING MISTAKES, AND HAVING FUN.”
– Mary Lou Cook
Some of the very first organisations I worked for made me spend several months in almost every department across the company. This gave me an understanding of how different teams work together and helped me to see the bigger picture.
I gained insights from the purchase and material management team, to the technical drawing and documentation department, the project manager, after sales, HR, the accounting and training department to the subsidiary in France where I spent several weeks and came up with a plan on “How To Improve International Customer Services”.
In how many cross-functional teams have you been working in lately? How much did you learn from a person in another team that you would never have talked to otherwise? See, that’s where creativity starts and it’s not that difficult to form some agile team work here and there. If it doesn’t exist in your company, create it! Dare to be the one who asks his/her colleagues to join a team and work on solving a problem or achieving a certain goal together.
In one of my marketing roles, I’ve been put into an agile team consisting of sales and project managers, consultants and coaches. Our goal was to hit the sales revenue target of 2 regions by leveraging ideas and experiences from other departments. As a result, we hit the target by 99% and the company established a new approach for sales meetings/presentations by bringing people from different departments to this first pitch meeting.
An old friend and CEO from Germany used to say “you’re wrong!”, actually he loved to comment with just “wrong” on my thoughts and ideas. Very annoying, I know. So what is wrong with sharing your opinion, doing things your way and learning from your experience? Nothing. You can’t tell people that they are wrong. You have to let them do their things and learn from their failures. Be there when they fail and support them to learn the lesson and keep going. That will encourage them to do a better job next time and not to give up. You will negatively influence someone’s ability to work creatively if you don’t let them make mistakes, because they will rely on you from now on and lose their ability to think and work independently.
This could also prohibit your colleagues and teams to take ownership for either their successes or failures. We all know that letting children make mistakes can be an opportunity to build resilience, confidence and develop important skills for later in life, so why do we protect our colleagues?
All in all, creativity is and will remain one of the hottest commodities in the workplace. You should find a way to share and develop your ideas, view them as valuable input, play with possible solutions and try out your ideas in practice. That’s how we improve businesses and keep growing.
