Stress the importance of creativity. Ensure all your staff know that you want to hear their ideas. Unless they understand how innovating your business processes can keep your firm competitive, your efforts at encouraging creative thinking risk falling flat.
Tolerate mistakes. A certain amount of risk-taking is inevitable with creative thinking. Allow people to learn from their mistakes. Never put off the creative flow by penalising those whose ideas don’t work out.
Act on ideas. Creative thinking is only worthwhile if it results in action. Provide the time and resources to develop and implement those ideas worth acting upon. Failure to do so not only means your firm will fail to benefit from innovation, but flow of ideas may well dry up if staff feel the process is pointless.
My view? Grow up. Business is not about creative self-actualization for its own sake. And marketing, in particular, is not about “fonts and colors.” Don’t get me wrong, creativity is perhaps the key attribute most needed and desired to address our 21st century business challenges.
Indeed, it’s what drives my job function and motivates me daily as an owner of my Creative agency
It’s my job to take your business and transform it into visible business value. But this attitude of: “it” (advertising and marketing) is just not fun anymore or it’s not worth my creative genius is short-sighted. In my opinion, this attitude is why a lot of people in marketing don’t get the respect they need or deserve.
It seems to me what matters most in the business world is “applied creativity”: in other words, what makes the process of buying, using and getting value from our products as simple and productive as possible?
But how do we become creative leaders? Truly creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks. They are open-minded and inventive in expanding their management and communication styles, particularly to engage with a new generation of employees, partners and customers
Creative leadership isn’t about whining or taking your ball and going home when you don’t like things. Creativity begins with an invitation and the problems we face have given marketers an invitation to lead like never before. I hope we embrace this opportunity.
