Fostering Creativity as a Business Owner

No matter what industry your business is in, creativity is crucial to its survival and profitability. Creativity is the ability to produce new ideas, and innovation is the process of implementing them. Creativity is the driving force behind innovation, encouraging business owners to look at things from a different perspective without restrictions of rules and written norms.

Is creativity crucial to you in your business?

Creativity is imperative to achieving a competitive edge over your competitors. It produces activity, encouraging employees to think out of the box and explore new areas for unique ideas. As a business owner, you may choose to make creativity present in all business activities — most importantly, business meetings and workshops.

Businesses that do not invite creativity, like Sears, struggle to survive. On the other hand, companies like Amazon and Google, which incorporate creativity at all levels of the organization, bring in a fresh perspective and cost-effective business solutions. Google and Amazon outperform their rivals in revenue growth, market share, and competitive leadership by incorporating creative approach to traditional strategies and processes.

Creativity does more than produce marketing campaigns that increase your brand’s appeal. It becomes a part of a company’s culture and reflects creativity across each department. It is the role of a business owner to encourage and nurture a creative work environment and welcome ideas from all ends of the organization.

What is a creative team?

As a business owner, you choose to promote an environment where new ideas are respected, and forming a creative team may become a regular approach to tackling issues.  As a leader you can build creative teams by doing the following:

• Observe which employees have the skills for a specific project, and what they can contribute.
• Ask open-ended questions.
• Taking a collective approach to brainstorming ideas, and welcoming suggestions from anyone.
• Ensuring brainstorming ideas is within the realm of time and budget.
• Giving employees the freedom and space to find inspiration.
• Being aware of what’s going on in your industry. Ask yourself, “What if I had this tech / tool /, etc.” and use that as a way guide creativity.
• Practicing overcoming problems when the solution is not immediately obvious, by embracing the new situation.

Building teams with diverse backgrounds and strengths will facilitate new connections and creative solutions, which are imperative to building a creative culture.

The role of creativity in business

Creativity is not bound by logic and reason. Instead, it generates a new idea or insight through imagination. It not only lays the foundation for a successful business, but also sets the bar higher for the next idea. Becoming a creative company sets your business apart from the others, especially when a market is dependent on innovation to thrive.

Creativity brings opportunity

Creativity inspires ideas that are unique to your business and allow you to stay ahead of the game. Brainstorming allows employees to come up with solutions that best use resources and yield optimum results. By opening up opportunities to your team and trusting them, you will find constant opportunities to grow your business.

Creativity gives perspective

There are many approaches to encourage creative thinking among employees. As an example, three of the approaches used by Google are discussed below:

• Lateral thinking is a step-by-step process for using your imagination to view problems from unexpected perspectives. Essentially, it is thinking through puzzles. Lateral thinking is a skill that is highly valued across a range of different industries including IT, law, media, publishing, retail, and management consultancy because it provides creative solutions.
• Blue sky thinking is another concept for thinking creatively. In a blue sky brainstorm session, the group suggest as many ideas as they can, and no idea is rejected as unfeasible, unrealistic, or silly.
• Deliberate thinking is also another thinking technique for sparking unique ideas. It encourages individuals to imagine putting on different thinking hats to approach and tackle problems. For example, black hat thinking looks at drawbacks, and white hat thinking looks at facts.

As an owner it is up to you to decide which of these approaches to apply in your business. To start, creative approaches like these can be introduced in business meetings to help your employees think out of the box.

Utilization of time

In a business, there are issues that require immediate attention. Thinking creatively can help a decision maker or team find solutions, without compromising the effectiveness of results.

How you use your limited time is also a form of creativity. For example, launching a new product is time-sensitive  because you wish to enter the market before your competitors and attract the biggest possible market share. By creatively using the resources available, you can guide your employees to come up with a unique way to beat the competition. You may find that just by using time efficiently, creativity is inspired.

Health and wellness

The long-term health and wellness of your company can be affected by the presence of creativity in corporate culture. Companies that stick to traditional approaches and avoid creativity in business are left behind, while those who were quick to be creative and innovate flourish. Fostering a creative environment ensures a business is able to constantly innovate — and thus compete and thrive — in an evolving market.

Creativity through diversity

Diversity breeds opportunity for creativity. In a diverse team, where employees come from a myriad of backgrounds, they contribute their own experiences and individual skill sets. When working together, the diverse skills sets and experiences meld to produce new connections between issues, and new answers to old questions. The result is a creative team with fresh perspectives, as opposed to the traditional team who all share the same background.

Are you fostering creativity in your business?

As a leader, your role is not only to build a diverse team but also to facilitate creativity and bring opportunity. A single creative solution is sometimes all it takes to get ahead of your competitors. By promoting a culture where creativity can flourish, you can lead your company to greater success.

Marcus Coaching is here to help. Keep an eye out as we will be setting up workshops on creativity very soon.