Unleashing your business potential with creativity

Unless you are in a traditionally creative industry like graphic design then “creativity” might seem like an odd way to unleash your potential. If, however, we view creativity as being about problem solving then the benefit of a creative mindset to all businesses becomes more obvious. If we can encourage all employees to be creative problem solvers for customers, suppliers and internally then you will have a far better business.

Whilst the benefits of this way of being are great it is, nonetheless, not easy to achieve. One of the main barriers to unleashing creative problem solving is actually senior management. Fostering creativity requires a lot of letting go of control and often ego’s get in the way. So, with that in mind, here are three ideas for how to help unleash the power of creative problem solving.

1 Eliminate blame culture.

Blame is the destroyer of creativity. It only takes a few instances of blame and punishment when things go wrong to batter creativity out of employees. Any creativity involves some risk, otherwise it’s not creative, and mistakes will happen. If mistakes are punished all that will happen is people will learn to play it safe and not bother to be creative.

2 Empower people …… but properly.

Empower people to make genuine decisions without having to “run it past the boss”. Often “empowerment” initiatives are merely fine words and little actual empowerment. Genuine empowerment means managers letting go. If creative decisions need to be “checked with the boss” then the person making the decision is the boss, not the employee. This is not empowerment. Genuine creativity is unleashed only when people make decisions without the boss having the final say. This takes courage and trust.

3 Develop critical thinking

Help develop critical thinking skills through personal development. Critical thinking is a skill that can be learned like any. Sadly, it is not taught in schools. You might get some education in critical thinking at university level, but even then it is sadly lacking. So, businesses need to set up and teach this.

If you help people to understand how to tackle problems systematically, get to the root cause of problems, and to see their own biases and blind spots then they we become far better creative problem solvers.

Conclusions and next steps

This article is one in our series on unleashing business potential through people power. We hope you found it useful. Please feel free to share it or,
better still, let us know what you think with a comment. If you want to know more about how to unleash potential through people power then check out our other articles in the series (see right).

And, if you want to know more about how our third-party logistics service can help you unleash your business potential by taking away all the hassle of logistics then please do give us a call.

Unleash your business potential series

1. CURIOSITY
2. COLLABORATION
3. CREATIVITY
4. CARING / COMPASSION
5. CALMNESS
6. ACCOUNTABILITY