Guest article by Steven Kowalski, Ph.D.
Are you leading a team that’s pioneering and pushing the boundaries? Maybe you’re developing a new service or product feature, debugging a glitch, improving an existing process, evolving your customer engagement strategy, or reinventing your approach in light of some disruption. When we think about it, most of us are challenging the status quo in some way through our work.
Now, more than ever, teams need to look beyond the usual answers in search of new value. But fostering creativity in a team is rarely a straight-forward endeavor. Any number of pitfalls can slow down—or derail—your team’s potential to activate creativity for innovative results.
You can change these odds. With both “intention” and “attention,” you can enhance the probability of your team’s success, support the natural creativity of each team member, and generate unique-in-class solutions.
Leading a creative team is challenging work.
It’s not about being the smartest one in the room, the one with the best ideas, or even the one with decision-authority. It’s about learning to leverage the wisdom and creativity of the team you lead.
A team leader in the sales division of a pharmaceutical company once told me about a powerful lesson he learned. Typically, as the team would come up with solutions, he would compare any ideas with his own and evaluate who was “most right.” He had concluded that in most cases, his ideas were about 90% right and his team’s ideas were about 80% right. And most of the time, he would insist that the team execute his idea.
But repeatedly, his ideas did not produce the value they promised. Why? He realized that there is a difference between “% right” and “% executed successfully.” Yes, his ideas might be smarter in theory, but the team—through their collective wisdom—had better insights into the “desirability” and “viability” of ideas as they played out through implementation. And that impacted whether ideas were adopted and sustained.
It turned out the team’s ideas were more successful over time. He recommitted himself to helping make the team’s ideas better instead of promoting his own ideas. By shaping others’ ideas, providing additional context, making connections with allies up and down the value chain, and providing cover–when needed–he had a significantly greater impact.
As this sales-team leader learned, being a creative individual and being a creative team leader are two different things.
Leading a creative team requires navigation through tricky waters.
Over the years, I’ve coached team leaders from across multiple industries. Common struggles have emerged, such as mitigating the impact of positional power on others’ creativity, balancing the achievement of outcomes for ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow,’ and being both creative oneself, and fostering creativity in others. Digging deeper, these challenges include:
- Loosening up a team that’s “fixed” and locked into a way of thinking or operating
- Turning resistance into commitment and accountability
- Turning “devils advocates” into allies
- Following regulations (standard process and procedures) while challenging the rules
- Balancing reflection with action to allow ideas to emerge and percolate
- Communicating direction amid ambiguity and uncertainty
- Stopping activities that don’t yield value while keeping people motivated and inspired
- Knowing when to back off – and when to drive forward.
These are just some of the many dilemmas creative leaders face on a day-to-day basis. And there aren’t many channels to help learn how to lead through these challenges.
Here are a few practices you can enact to bring greater intention and attention to your team leadership:
Identify clear criteria for decision-making. Generating possibilities can be challenging in-and-of itself. But cutting options—especially when there may be disagreement within the team about which direction to go—is often more difficult for team leads. Set your target criteria for advancing options early. Ask for evidence of factors like “desirability,” “feasibility,” and “viability” of ideas and facilitate a healthy debate based on data and a strong business case.
Ask powerful questions. So many team leaders fall into the trap of giving answers. But your role is primarily about asking great questions. In fact, different questions yield different types of answers. Become a “student” of questions so you can ask questions like, “What if…?” “Why not…?” “How might we…?” and “Who else…?” with greater impact.
Develop shared purpose. To spark and focus creativity, your team needs a clear, meaningful purpose—the reason why you need to seek solutions beyond the familiar. Too often, team leads seek input from stakeholders and governance bodies and leave the team out. Instead, develop your purpose together in the team, so that it is shared. Ask how outcomes are inspiring to each team member, and check-in often.
Manage your own “tolerance for ambiguity.” Creative work requires stepping in the unknown. And your comfort or discomfort with uncertainty and ambiguity can have a powerful influence on your team’s creative potential. Let the team know when you’re starting to feel pressure to deliver or confusion about how to move forward. Refer to your criteria for decision-making and delegate decision rights to team members, when appropriate.
Conclusion
In today’s hyper-connected, interdependent world of work, we will all be called to apply our creativity and resourcefulness like no other generations before us. Scalable and sustainable progress will be made by getting creative together. And that means a new kind of team leader is needed—one who knows how to navigate the process of co-creating new value. Now is the time to consciously and intentionally strengthen your skills as a creative team lead—and use what you are learning to change and shape the future.
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Steven Kowalski is a team coach, organization development consultant, speaker, executive coach, and the author of “Creative Together: Sparking Innovation in the New World of Work.”
He has more than 25 years’ experience facilitating the creativity of scientists, engineers, business leaders, and professionals to deliver bold solutions that are scalable and sustainable through his firm, Creative License™ Consulting Services. Steven holds a Ph.D. in adult learning and organizational creativity from UCLA and works for biopharma pioneer Genentech.
Find him at stevenkowalski.com.
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