Why Allowing For Creativity Among Your Team Leads to Success
Crativity #Crativity
What makes employees excited to come to work every day? While competitive salaries and benefits certainly help attract and retain talent, more and more people want to be a part of a team that plays a bigger role in the company. When you allow for creativity among your team, you’re not only creating an environment where employees feel motivated and appreciated; you’re also setting your entire company up for success. In fact, McKinsey found that 67% of companies that achieved above-average revenue growth were also companies featuring a high creativity index.
CONSTELLATION BRANDS, INC.
It’s beyond best practices to allow your team to be creative — it’s crucial. Promoting creativity is a tool that can be used to improve retention rates, maintain an innovative edge and uncover game-changing ideas. Leaders in any industry can establish a healthy work culture and encourage creativity within their own company using these basic principles.
Creativity Must Include Failure
Creativity fosters innovation, but no one has great ideas every single time. So the number one way to encourage creativity is to ensure your team knows it’s okay to fail. When you create an environment where creativity is celebrated and it’s safe to experience failure, your team will feel more confident in bringing forward new ideas and concepts, not just the safe, tired ones. The best way to make a team feel secure in failing is to present those innovative failures as a learning opportunity and ask your team relevant questions, like:
• Why didn’t it work?
• What can we learn?
• How can we do better?
Amazing ideas often come from unexpected places. A few years ago at Merchants Fleet, we were struggling to hire enough auto techs. We went to the people who knew the job the best, the ones with the most insight into what it would take to attract this type of talent. One of our auto techs came up with the idea of designing a sticker that fits on the oil filter and announced we were looking for great techs. Any time a client took their car to a different dealer, the auto tech who opened it up saw a perfectly targeted career ad. It was brilliant.
A really great idea is worth a few failures to get there. People want to work in an environment where their contributions are valued. A good leader always views failures as an opportunity to grow, not a chance to penalize. When leaders show empathy toward employee failures, it creates a healthy company culture that breeds determination and loyalty.
Good Now Doesn’t Mean Good Forever
An often overlooked form of failure is an idea that’s great at the moment but stops working after a certain amount of time. For example, we rolled out an incredibly effective program called Restore during COVID when our work-from-home employees were struggling with any combination of physical, emotional and mental well-being. This program gave them benefits directly related to these areas, and it was incredibly successful and loved. But as our employees came back, fewer and fewer of them were taking advantage of the program, and we’ll be switching to a different solution for 2023. Was Restore a failure? Of course not.
As a leader, you might be perfectly happy with the value of shorter-term successes, but it can be hard on the employee who had the initial idea. A great idea, like Restore, may work out well for a while, but priorities or interests change, so ideas need to shift. Leaders should be transparent about why things are changing and acknowledge when a valuable idea has run its course. Remind your employees that even though it might feel like a failure, it really isn’t.
Toolboxes and Rewards
Creativity and innovation don’t happen in a vacuum. Actions always speak louder than words, and rather than just saying creativity is encouraged, prove it to your team by offering tools and resources to foster that innovation. These tools might not be a physical thing — they can be something as simple as making sure your team has time in their schedule to brainstorm. A shared whiteboard in an open space can encourage group ideas to merge and bloom, and an open door (or inbox, if you’re remote) is a way you can show your team you’re open to their ideas rather than just saying so.
Maybe you want to go further. Merchants Fleet provides cross-departmental training and an Innovator Award that’s open to submissions from all departments. These types of recognition tools encourage team members to think outside the box and feel confident in bringing forward new ideas.
Creativity and Trust Go Hand in Hand
Creating a safe space with room for failure is key to fostering an innovative and supportive culture. It requires trust to let your employees take the reins enough to fail. But that’s also the only way you’ll get their very best ideas. Employees who work in the field know their area better than most, so letting them dig their hands in and be innovative is a win-win for everyone involved. At my company, we’ve seen employee-driven ideas and innovations that have saved us millions of dollars and hundreds of hours. If you put your trust in the hands of the people who work hard every day, your team and your company will reap benefits that far outweigh the occasional failures.
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