If you look at some of the biggest business success stories of the last few decades – such as Apple, Virgin, Amazon, and so on.
One of the common themes that you will see emerging again and again is that those companies were able to really unlock and take advantage of a vast amount of professional creativity.
Creativity is often treated as something of a mysterious magical force in business. Something that’s either there or isn’t, or even as something that has to be brought into the company by outside consultants.
There are, however, things that you can do in order to unlock the professional creativity and potential that is already latent within your business. Here are a few tips for doing that.
Delegate technical work that falls outside your areas of core competence
As an entrepreneur and business owner, there will always be certain areas that fall within your sphere of “core competence,” and there will also be a large number of things that fall outside of that sphere but which nonetheless need to be handled in order to move your business forward.
The same thing that’s true for entrepreneurs and business owners is generally also true for whole businesses.
A company will typically have an area that they are especially dynamic with regards to, and where there’s a lot of creative potential that remains locked up.
But if the employees of that company are spending an inordinate amount of their time doing unrelated technical work, that creative potential may well not have the opportunity to manifest itself.
Delegating technical work such as Structural Engineering to third party contractors and partners can free you and your team up to look at the big picture, and to innovate more within the domains that you thrive in.
Allow yourself and your team open and free brainstorming sessions
Creativity is essentially a process of open and comfortable brainstorming, without judgement and conflict.
That is to say, if you have ideation meetings in your company and you demand “good ideas,” and then ruthlessly shoot down any suggestions that get made which don’t live up to your standards, you are naturally stifling the creative process.
Because “good ideas” are almost only ever arrived at as part of an ongoing discourse which includes plenty of “bad ideas” being thrown into the mix.
Allowing yourself and your team open and free brainstorming sessions, without judgement or expectation, is a great way of nurturing additional creativity within your company.
Cultivate a general sense of curiosity, and have many interests in different areas of your life
A big part of creativity is being able to draw connections between things that seem, at first, to be unrelated – and to imagine ways of doing things that haven’t yet been explored.
One of the best overall ways of nurturing your own innate creativity, therefore, is to cultivate a general sense of curiosity and to constantly strive to learn new things.
Maintaining many different interests, in different areas of your life, can likewise help to increase the potential “connections” you will see down the line, and can give you “fuel” for your creative fires.
- DISCLOSURE – This post has been written by an outside source
