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Want to Lead Teams Bursting with Creativity? Here’s What You Need to Do

How would you describe highly successful teams?

Most business leaders would use terms like productive, efficient, and top performers to answer this question. But one study shows that creativity inspires employees to be innovative and act upon their ideas and deliver stellar results.

How to make your teams creative?

Here are four simple strategies you can use to motivate your teams to fulfill their creative potential.

Build Strong Interpersonal Relations

Your team’s success depends on the success of every employee in it. Building a tight-knit team is a crucial but demanding task.

If you want your employees to be innovative and creative, you need to create an atmosphere based on trust and psychological safety where everyone will share their ideas openly without the fear of being judged.

Of course, creating trustworthy interpersonal relationships in a hybrid workplace may seem challenging. But it’s doable.

Here’s what you can do to achieve this goal:

  • Dedicate a Slack channel where your employees can get to know each other and talk about their interests or share funny cat memes, i.e., all things non-work-related.
  • Allow your employees to share their feelings. You can check on them before every team meeting to see how they are and what’s new in their lives.
  • Give your employees frequent and honest feedback, and listen to their suggestions and complaints carefully.

Encourage Spontaneous Brainstorming Sessions

The tricky thing about ideas is that they can appear out of nowhere at any time. If you want to get the most out of your employee’s creativity, make room for some spontaneous brainstorming sessions.

Here’s what you can do:

  • Use an online whiteboard so that your employees can write down their ideas on the go and store inspirational resources.
  • Encourage your employees to use this board and write down their ideas. Numerous study shows that visualizing ideas may lead to realization more often than when you just vocalize them.
  • Set up some signals that all your team members will use when they are ready or available for spontaneous brainstorming sessions.

Make Time for Quiet Thinkers

While numerous brilliant ideas may be the result of group effort and creativity, many employees prefer working on their ideas in solitude. So you need to make some space and time for those who like to work alone.

A Yale study showed that people working alone were two times more successful in solving puzzles than those working in groups.

Here’s what you can do to make your quiet thinkers shine:

  • Together with your employees, determine the time of the day when they are the most productive and dedicate this time to focused, meaningful work.
  • Use a shared digital platform to store all the resources needed to inspire employees’ creativity and innovation.
  • Inform your employees about the upcoming brainstorming session, so they have enough time to prepare for it alone.
  • Besides encouraging frequent breaks, you should also let your employees take a walk on their breaks. It’s a well-known fact that even a short walk can clear the mind and sharpen focus.