Creativity and innovation provide competitive advantage, therefore hire creative people, suggests a pull-out section of Inc. Magazine called “How To: Hire For Creativity.” You may have many creative people in your organization but if its culture is resistant to change, many great ideas may not see the light of day. If you’d like to achieve a balance between fostering new ideas and sustaining performance, you need to build the conditions that allow creativity to flourish. Paul Williams offers 6 tips for building a culture for creative thinking:
- Recognize and reward change makers. Let it be known that it literally pays to make a difference.
- Allow mistakes. Build awareness and encourage learning from mistakes. Making mistakes means you’re learning faster.
- Be assumption intolerant. Just because something is the way it is, does it mean it has to be that way?
- Admit when something is broken, and do something about it. “It has always been done that way” isn’t justification for broken.
- Allow constructive critique of any part of the business. At the same time, encourage solution suggestions, not just pointing-out the problem.
- Encourage mingling between departments. We learn best practices from others as well as understand the bigger picture of how different gears of the company fit together.
To establish an environment that fosters new ideas, does your organization need to integrate official business processes to help you and its employees to cultivate creativity in a way that leads to actual results?
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