Creativity allows individuals to explore their strengths and realize how they can make the most of it. Creativity inspires a team to work with each other. The creative process while finding a solution to a problem, encourages collaboration.
Introduction
People collaborate with each other in the form of ‘Teams’ in order to achieve a goal that could serve in their competitive advantage, creation of wealth, and other markers of success. Teams provide the ‘Social’ factor among the people and meld them together. An organization working in a collaborative effort towards a common goal, cannot function without teams.
Every team can benefit from more innovation and creativity in their problem solving. Teams need creativity and innovation to build products, just as artists need the tools of their work.
Teams might become incapable of achieving their goals if its members start facing barriers such as poor communication, which could foster teamwork and eventually create a toxic atmosphere. While each person is responsible for their own approach towards a problem, when they are in a team, the leaders of the team should incubate innovation with the processes that would empower the team to tackle challenges with creativity and energy.
Below are a series of strategies that would help a team accomplish their goals with creativity and innovation:
1. Cultivate Open Communication
Encourage people to voice their ideas and opinions. The team leader should make the team realise that the ideas of other team members are actually valued. Once the members are comfortable with sharing their ideas and thoughts with the team, it’s more likely to foster the kinds of discussions required to generate creative solutions.
2. Having the Right People in the Team
It’s crucial to have the right people on your team capable of contributing their skills to the project. A team works best when members have complementary skill sets required to complete the project.
To create the kind of innovation that your customers actually want, consider collaborating with experts from different domains within the organization, including tech, design, marketing, and finance. This will help in making informed decisions by the team.
3. Provide Diverse Ways of Working
People have their own ways of doing things. When we allow a team to choose how they work, as long as they do their jobs and do them properly, they will be happier and can prompt more creative output.
What’s more, adapting to different working styles helps us attract and retrain a greater variety of skills, perspectives and talents for the team. More diverse teams produce a broader range of ideas and insights.
This would also expose people to different work practices to help them see things differently. For example, one who is not adapted to work in a team and has hesitation in expressing their views, would benefit from such work culture.
Teams need creativity and innovation to build products, just as artists need the tools of their work.
4. Organise Guided Brainstorming Sessions
The key to an effective guided brainstorming session is to follow viable ideas through to a point where they can be fully visualized. An approach to a guided brainstorming session could be:
An initial round of suggestions and ideas
Discussing each idea with the team
Determine which ones to explore further
Select the best ideas and work with the team to create innovative and exciting solutions
The motive of the guided brainstorming sessions is to keep it productive, creative and innovative. If a session loses any of the above factors, conduct a feedback session and find out where the blockages occurred.
5. Choose a Great Leader
In an article by Business News Daily- ‘How to be a Good Leader’ , the writer suggests the importance of effective leadership. ‘Effective leaders have major impacts on not only the team members they manage, but also their company as a whole. Employees who work under great leaders tend to be happier, more productive and more connected to their organization – and this has a ripple effect that reaches your business's bottom line.’
A good leader nurtures the brilliance of the people working with them and does everything they can to remove barriers to high performance. They allow time for the team to weigh in on decisions and give due recognition to team performance as well as an individual member’s performance.
Conclusion
When implemented correctly and consistently, these strategies can greatly enhance the team’s creativity. And by valuing the opinions of the members, they’ll be more likely to trust the team and the leader with new thoughts, innovations, and ideas.