A Manager's Guide to Increasing Innovation
If you're trying to enhance creativity...
...remember that you are not the sole fount of ideas.
* be the appreciative audience
* ask the inspiring questions
* allow ideas to bubble up from the workforce
...enable collaboration
* combat the lone inventor myth
* define "superstar" as someone who helps others succeed
* Use "coordination totems" - metaphors, analogies, and stories - to help teams conceptualize together
...enhance diversity
* get people with different backgrounds and expertise to work together
* encourage individuals to gain diverse experiences that will increase their creativity
* open up the organization to outside creative contributors
...map the stages of creativity and tend to their different needs
* avoid process management in the fuzzy front end
* provide sufficient time and resources for exploration
* manage the hand off to commercialization
...accept the inevitability and utility of failure
* create psychological safety to maximize learning from failure
* recognize the different kinds of failure and how they can be useful
* create good mechanisms for filtering ideas and killing dead-end projects
...motivate with intellectual challenge
* protect the front end from commercial pressure
* clear paths through the bureaucracy for creative ideas
* let people do "good work"
* show the higher purpose of projects whenever possible
* grant as much independence as possible
Harward Business Review, September, lk 100-109
"Creativity and the Role of the Leader"
Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire
If you're trying to enhance creativity...
...remember that you are not the sole fount of ideas.
* be the appreciative audience
* ask the inspiring questions
* allow ideas to bubble up from the workforce
...enable collaboration
* combat the lone inventor myth
* define "superstar" as someone who helps others succeed
* Use "coordination totems" - metaphors, analogies, and stories - to help teams conceptualize together
...enhance diversity
* get people with different backgrounds and expertise to work together
* encourage individuals to gain diverse experiences that will increase their creativity
* open up the organization to outside creative contributors
...map the stages of creativity and tend to their different needs
* avoid process management in the fuzzy front end
* provide sufficient time and resources for exploration
* manage the hand off to commercialization
...accept the inevitability and utility of failure
* create psychological safety to maximize learning from failure
* recognize the different kinds of failure and how they can be useful
* create good mechanisms for filtering ideas and killing dead-end projects
...motivate with intellectual challenge
* protect the front end from commercial pressure
* clear paths through the bureaucracy for creative ideas
* let people do "good work"
* show the higher purpose of projects whenever possible
* grant as much independence as possible
Harward Business Review, September, lk 100-109
"Creativity and the Role of the Leader"
Teresa M. Amabile and Mukti Khaire
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