 |
[excerpts from December 2004 - Fast Company] Where do reakthrough ideas come from? What kind of work environment allows them to flourish? What can leaders do to sustain the stimulants to creativity -- and break through the barriers? Teresa Amabile …heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School …is one of the country's foremost explorers of business innovation. [….In an interview with Fast Company , she busted six cherished myths about creativity. Here they are, in her own words…
- Creativity Comes From Creative Types
...there's this common perception among managers that some people are creative, and most aren't. That's just not true…anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work… many companies still have a long way to go to remove the barriers to creativity.
- Money Is a Creativity Motivator
…money isn't everything. … People are most creative when they care about their work and they're stretching their skills. If the challenge is far beyond their skill level, they tend to get frustrated; if it's far below their skill level, they tend to get bored. Leaders need to strike the right balance.
- Time Pressure Fuels Creativity
… Time pressure stifles creativity because people can't deeply engage with the problem. Creativity requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up…They must be protected from distractions, and they must know that the work is important and that everyone is committed to it.
- Fear Forces Breakthroughs
There's this widespread notion that fear and sadness somehow spur creativity.We found that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety…When people are excited about their work, there's a better chance that they'll make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day's happiness often predicts the next day's creativity.
- Competition Beats Collaboration
There's a widespread belief…that internal competition fosters innovation. ..The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that's destructive because nobody in an organization has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
- A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization
…Creativity suffers greatly during a downsizing….Every single one of the stimulants to creativity in the work environment went down significantly. Anticipation of the downsizing was even worse than the downsizing itself -- people's fear of the unknown led them to basically disengage from the work. …even five months after the downsizing, creativity was still down significantly…Leaders will have to work hard and fast to stabilize the work environment so ideas can flourish.
Taken together, these operating principles for fostering creativity in the workplace might lead you to think that I'm advocating a soft management style. Not true. I'm pushing for a smart management style. My 30 years of research and these 12,000 journal entries suggest that when people are doing work that they love and they're allowed to deeply engage in it -- and when the work itself is valued and recognized -- then creativity will flourish. Even in tough times.
 View as a printable PDF
|
