ENCOURAGING CREATIVITY

ENCOURAGING CREATIVITY

Creativity in business drives ideas and provides the platform for constant development and improvement to maximize overall performance

The idea of creativity should not be confined to the creative industries, such as advertising or part of a research and development team where the act of creativity is understood as a necessary function of the business, and is seen to have a direct effect on the company’s profitability.

Managers in other filed often believe that creativity is a working practice that is irrelevant to them with little direct effect on their bottom line, let alone their team performance. What those managers are thinking about is an individual creativity. Corporate creativity is not the same as individual creativity. The goal of creativity in the workplace is to make the act of creativity a normal part of everyday business life, that will reach across the company from product development to managerial development

The power of including creativity in the manager’s skill base should not be underestimated and, on the whole, many managers practice some form of creativity while resolving daily issues on a subconscious level. The key to creative management is to make this process more successful, to identify strengths and develop areas of weakness.

The creative manager needs to sustain an open and creative environment where all team members have a forum for discussion of ideas without reprisals. Moreover, the creative manager should possess the courage to reassess current working methods and question the unthinkable whilst remaining realistic about the idea’s development and implementation. One further point to bear in mind is that the creative managers must accept full responsibility for their decisions and be accountable for ongoing assessment during the development of a project.

The business world is changing at a speed unknown to previous generations and, with the advent of the World Wide Web, email, ecommerce and m-commerce, business is now global.

Whether the business you manager is a one man bank or an FT 100 company, global events can affect you directly or indirectly. For example a sudden plummet in exchange rates would exert an external influence over business that called for creative spontaneous strategies to counter adverse effects. However, creativity should also be proactively applied to the more controlled or routine tasks such as marketing plans and staff retention.

Every human being has an innate sense of creativity. Not to explore this conscious creativity within the workspace will cause problems in the longer run.



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