How to Build a Creative Team (in 4 Simple Steps)

By Michael Barrell

Today's post is about workplace creativity. Or more specifically, the steps you need to take to grow creativity in your employees.

Most of us already know of the benefits of having a creative workplace – or creative people in that workplace. Let me name a few:

• Increased engagement;
• Increased interaction;
• staff morale;
• passion;
• motivation;
• problem solving; and
• Increased productivity.

But what you might not know is that there’s a damaging myth out there about creativity at work. And it’s this: there is a specific “creative personality” that some people have and others don’t. 

It’s a myth because, despite decades of creativity research, no such trait has ever been identified. The truth is that anybody can be creative, given the right opportunities and context. 

Don’t believe me? No worries – go and take the least creative person in your office out for lunch — you know the one I’m talking about. The one who doesn’t seem to have a creative bone in their body. My bet is that you’ll find some secret passion, pursued outside of office hours, that they pour their creative energies into. It’s just that they aren’t applying those energies to their day jobs. 

So how do you go about unlocking creativity for your team – whilst they do their day jobs? 

Well the secret to unlocking creativity is not to look for more creative people. The secret is to unlock more creativity from the people who already work for you. 

The thing is that the same body of creativity research that finds no distinct “creative personality” is also firm on what actually leads to creative work, and they are all things you can implement within your team – today, and without breaking the bank. 

Essentially, there are 4 things that you need to do. Let’s call them 4 steps to workplace creativity. 

1. Here’s step 1: Cultivate Expertise 

One of the things that creativity researchers have consistently found for decades is that expertise is critical for producing top-notch creative work — and the expertise needs to be specific to a particular field or domain. So the first step to being creative is to become an expert in a particular area. 

The reason expertise is so important is that you need to be an expert in a specific field to understand what the important problems are and what would constitute an important new solution. 

Take Einstein for instance - he studied physics intensely for years to understand the basic physical model for time and space before he understood that there was an inherent flaw in that model. 

So how do you cultivate expertise? Well luckily you don’t need to be Einstein for starters. 

There’s a performance expert, Anders Ericsson, who has studied the very problem of cultivating expertise for decades and found that the crucial element is deliberate practice. You need to identify the components of a skill, offer coaching, and encourage employees to work on weak areas. 

Now take note: this goes far beyond the intermittent training that most businesses do. 

Here’s an example. One skill that Amazon identified as crucial to their performance is writing. So Amazon employees need to constantly write six-page memos, even for introducing small product features throughout their careers at the company. They consistently receive coaching and feedback and need to write good memos in order to advance within the company. 

Now, any company can replicate Amazon’s memo-writing policy. What’s not so easily replicated is the intense commitment to cultivating writing expertise that the company has prioritized for years. 

1. Now for step 2: a leader must encourage Exploration

While deep expertise in a given field is critical for real creativity, it is not sufficient. Look at any great body of creative work and you’ll find a crucial insight that came from outside the original domain. It is often a seemingly random piece of insight that transforms ordinary work into something very different. For example, it was a random visit to a museum that inspired Picasso’s African period. Charles Darwin spent years studying fossils and thinking about evolution until he came across a 40 year-old economics essay by Thomas Malthus that led to his theory of natural selection. The philosophy of David Hume helped lead Einstein to special relativity. 

More recently, a team of researchers analyzing 17.9 million scientific papers found that the most highly cited work is far more likely to come from a team of experts in one field working with a specialist in something very different. It is that combination of expertise, exploration, and collaboration that leads to truly breakthrough ideas. 

That is how Google’s “20% time” policy is able to act as a human-powered search engine for new ideas. By allowing employees to work on projects unrelated to their formal job descriptions 20% of the time, people with varied experiences and expertise can combine their efforts in a way that would be extremely unlikely in a planned company initiative. 

1. Ok let’s move onto Step 3 - Empower Your People with Technology

In Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Leonardo da Vinci, he recounts how the medieval master would study nature, from anatomy to geological formations, to guide his art. Now Leonardo was clearly a genius of historical proportions, but think about how much more efficient he would have been with a decent search engine. 

One of the most overlooked aspects of innovation is how much technology can enhance productivity. Part of the reason is because it makes the two steps we have already talked about so far, acquiring domain expertise and exploring adjacencies, so much easier. However, another reason is because it frees up time to allow for more experimentation. 

You can see this at work at Pixar, which was originally a technology company that began shooting short films to demonstrate the capabilities of its original product, animation software. As they were experimenting with the technology, they also found themselves experimenting with storytelling, and those experiments led them to become one of the most highly acclaimed studios in history. 

As Pixar founder Ed Catmull put it in his memoir, Creativity Inc., “Every one of our films, when we start off, they suck…Our job is to take it from something that sucks to something that doesn’t suck. That’s the hard part.” It is that kind of continual iteration that technology makes possible, and that makes truly great creative work possible. 

1. Now for the final step to workplace creativity: Reward Persistence

Far too often, we think of creativity as an initial, brilliant spark followed by a straightforward period of execution, but as Catmull’s comments about work that initially sucks shows, that’s not true in the least. In his book, he calls early ideas “ugly babies” and stresses the need to protect them from being judged too quickly. Yet most businesses do just the opposite. Any idea that doesn’t show immediate promise is typically killed quickly and without remorse. 

IBM is one firm that has been able to buck this trend. Its research division routinely pursues seemingly outlandish ideas long before they are commercially viable. For example, a team at IBM successfully performed the first quantum teleportation in 1993, when the company was in dire financial straits, with absolutely no financial benefit. 

However, the research wasn’t particularly expensive, and the company has continued to support the work for the last 25 years. Today, it is a leader in quantum computing — a market potentially worth billions — because it stuck with it. That’s why IBM, despite its ups and downs, remains a highly profitable company while so many of its former rivals are long gone. 

Kevin Ashton, who first came up with the idea for RFID chips, wrote in his book, How to Fly a Horse, “Creation is a long journey, where most turns are wrong and most ends are dead. The most important thing creators do is work. The most important thing they don’t do is quit.” 

Yet all too often, organizations do quit. They expect their “babies” to be beautiful from the start. They see creation as an event rather than a process, don’t invest in expertise or exploration, and refuse to tolerate wrong turns and dead ends. Is it any wonder that so few are able to produce anything truly new and different? 

So that’s it – 4 steps to pursue for a creative workplace:

1. Cultivate Expertise
2. Encourage Exploration
3. Empower Your People with Technology
4. Reward Persistence

Wondering where these ideas came from? Well obviously not me – no, I’ve broken them down from Greg Satell’s 2018 article in the Harvard Business Review. 

If you want more, then head over here to download my free 11-Part Guide to Workplace Wellbeing (And Profit!)

It includes...

• 6 techniques to boost workforce wellbeing for a healthy and productive workforce
• 5 common pitfalls in workplace wellbeing that kill employee productivity

And a whole lot more.

These are proven easy-to-follow steps so you can stop flying blind on workplace wellbeing and productivity.

You can grab it, for free, right here.

Also, if you’d like to learn more, meet for like-minded people, or shoot me a question, then head over to my facebook group, the Workplace Wellbeing Made Easy Facebook Community.