Recent surveys indicate that workers have reached an epidemic level of anxiety, stress, and have more work than hours necessary to do it. They are worried about demands placed on them, the accelerating pace of business and the effects of competition. Deluged with more information that is brought to them at ever greater speed by TV news, magazines, books, e mails and the Internet, they struggle to make it all useful. Today’s business environment has become like a fog covering a region leading to unclear vision, cloudy thinking and confusion as to the safest route. These are issues DCG is hearing from its clients and it echoing a growing trend.
So how are DCG’s clients meeting these challenges? By teaching leaders how to clearly communicate the direction they want their company to take, which brings about a sustained momentum of change in the workplace. Employees who hear, understand, and integrate that message into their thinking (buy in) then have a compelling reason to use their own remarkable creativity to generate actions that improve business performance.
What are some of the things today's leaders do to improve communications and foster creativity? By taking these five steps:
- Provide direction and ensure buy in.
- Avoid premature judgments.
- Create an environment where communications have integrity.
- Build on little successes.
- Learn the techniques for absorbing information and organizing it for creativity.
1. We spoke of the importance of providing direction. DCG’s workshops have illustrated that without buy in there will be no sustained movement towards any goal. Buy in is the fuel that causes the brain to persist in its thinking of how to reach the goal. Recently a client remarked, “When employees feel good about the direction the company is going and are confident their ideas count there is no limit or barrier to their innovation. They will continue delivering solutions to customer problems that have quality and value as their signature. Doing this the quickest with the most creative solutions is what gets your next contract and satisfying customers quickly leads to new contracts and revenue growth.”
A lesson in creativity — 1 + 1 is not 2. Research has shown that the human brain has unlimited capacity to create pathways of thoughts if unimpeded. It synergizes information so that one thought triggers another, and so on. This is divergent thinking: the ability to start from one central idea and move onto many ideas. Creativity occurs when you start with a thought and the brain’s synergistic ability makes new associations and connections to that thought. Diversity and listening to what each person has to say facilitates this process, which has created a boom for the Internet/e-commerce industry and will continue to allow it to flourish. Imagine Internet users who leverage this unlimited power to communicate with people who will listen to them. The recipient of these ideas integrates them which influences their thinking. The answer is simple but the end result is powerful - - 1 + 1 equals infinite possibility.
2. Premature judgments can fatally stifle creativity. Leaders need to nurture team members to be receptive to different perspectives, suggestions, and ideas. When someone responds to a suggestion with an impatient, “We've heard all that before,” a great opportunity may be lost.
Listen to ALL suggestions first. Judgments on the best course of action can be made later. However, if one wants to immediately stop this natural flow of thinking -- shut off our computers, refuse to participate in communication, or begin making judgments.
What might be new is one piece of information that could send this amazing mechanism in a totally different direction. However, we have stopped it with a premature judgment.
3. Rich Bannon, winner of CFO Magazine’s Best Practice Award while a corporate executive at IBM, knows the value of dialogue between management and employees. No news is NOT good news, he says flatly. If people are not talking to the management team or to each other, there is a problem. If today's leaders do not provide an environment in which people can share information, problems, ideas, and feedback, then they have seriously diminished their chances of maximizing creative resources. They will not know where to make adjustments and may be focused on the wrong priorities.
4. The human brain thrives on success; the magnitude is not of the utmost importance. What matters is that it has been achieved. The wise leader recognizes this by providing himself and his employees with priorities that build on little successes. Creativity is a cumulative process and the more success the brain has, the more energy it expends to search for additional creative solutions and to tackle bigger problems. The small successes are the stepping stones to building the belief that, "we can do anything."
5. How we store, organize and retrieve information is critical to creativity. It provides the means by which new information links and associates with other ideas. DCG specializes in several techniques aimed at improving the brain's ability to process information, such as Memory Systems and Mind Mapping.
What is inherent about what all DCG clients are saying about leadership and creativity is that every idea from every person counts. Diversity, teamwork and valuing different perspectives on a situation encourages creativity. How we build on little successes by themselves may not seem important but it sparks other ideas that make bigger goals possible. It’s like golf: everyone wants to hit the 250 yard drive, but the putting will kill your score.
No wonder the yardsticks used to measure a company's value now include employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, organizational learning, innovation and culture. Satisfied employees who have faith in their company’s direction are not only the happiest but they are the most creative and most likely to remain. And that's to everyone's benefit.‡
