3 Keys To Unlock Employee Creativity

Try these ideas to exercise your teams’ creativity muscles for more innovative results.

Is creativity what you want? What you really, really want?

Leaders say we want creativity, but do we really? The World Economic Forum says Creativity is the #2 skill we need in 2025, yet investment in creativity training is exceptionally low. What’s up with that?

Leaders and decision-makers can suffer from a bias against creativity, otherwise known as the leadership dilemma. P.S. leaders can be in an organization or in your own family (shout out to my Women in Ag friends!)

But why do we shy away from diving head-first into innovation?

Decision makers tend to define creativity in terms of feasibility, profitability, and ease of implementation, whereas employees might define it in terms of risk, unproven, and uniqueness.

At Google, they found that ideas that were implemented without support from management actually had a better success rate than those that were supported.

Opting for creative solutions is uncomfortable. It requires us to be vulnerable and open to critique if things don’t go as planned. There are often no metrics to judge our success. It’s a bit like playing tennis with a pool – the feedback is lacking. Or,  like trying out a new recipe, where you have to expect a few hiccups along the way.

The 3 Factors of a Creative Organization

What if I told you that Gallup cracked the code when they discovered the three game-changing factors that make your organization creative? In the process, they increased employee engagement to innovate by 50%.  

Now that’s a metric worth looking into!

Gallup’s research shows that the number of employees who feel empowered to innovate increased from 20% to 70% in the organizations that met these three criteria with their teams:

  • Time to be creative
  • Expectation to be creative
  • Freedom to take risks

How Can Leaders Nurture Creativity?

Start with yourself. Show your team that you can take small risks, have some fun, and show your humanity. You don’t have to share that awkward story of your teenage blind date gone wrong, but find ways to connect on a personal level with your team, share your journey to leadership, and help them learn from your experience.

Find one way to take a risk on a project or consciously let one of your team members take a risk.

A QUICK PERSONAL STORY:

I remember being involved in planning an important sales initiative for our department. We were launching a new product and the team wanted to stick with the status quo and hire an expert in continuing education to share information.

Despite some budgetary constraints, my manager let me take some risks and we hired a comedian to make the evening more fun. With a relaxed atmosphere, we could get to know our customers on a more personal level. To add to the fun, we implemented a “choose your own adventure” to let them know about the product while being part of the story.

The night was a huge success, and we stood out to our customers as a company that was willing to take a risk and do something different and innovative.  

Taking risks at work is scary, but if you truly value innovation then it’s time to nurture your own creative potential and ignite unique perspectives lying dormant in your office.

FACTOR 1: Time to be creative.

Creativity takes time, but it doesn’t have to take all day.

Here are some quick ideas to start:

  • 30-minute creativity break on Fridays.
  • A five minute brainstorming session at the beginning of a team meeting
  • Create a Mad Libs story about a problem, challenge or competitor!
  • Play a few “Remote Word Associates” puzzles. Find hundreds here.
  • Take the time to learn and try a new tool to manage a project – an online Miro or Mural board
  • Daydream for 10 minutes; consider a fictional or fantastical scenario. Bonus points if you can go for a walk!

Allow time for the mess of the creative project. Create an open environment where there is time for people to ruminate and wonder. Allow time to share experiences, cultural practices, or facts that might seem irrelevant to the problems at hand, but might catalyze a solution. Diversity is critical for innovation, so make sure to allow your team members to share and express their unique points of view and experiences.  

FACTOR 2: Expectation to be creative

One way to mitigate the leadership dilemma is by finding metrics to measure creativity. This might look like including a target for performance reviews

  • How many ideas did they share?
  • Did they participate in creative initiatives?

Other ways to promote the expectation for creativity:

  • Asking your team to come prepared to share one idea per meeting (even if it’s a bad idea).
  • A good old-fashioned suggestion box
  • Using apps for anonymous comments (check out this app talkadot I used to collect some feedback at a recent event below!)

For ideas, it’s important to go for quantity not quality, at the beginning at least

Here are some fun prompts to get you started:

  • Share the responsibility of crafting the meeting agenda with each team member
  • Ask each team member to lead a creative thinking activity in a meeting.  
  • Create a new logo for the  company if  the management team were replaced by aliens.
  • Instead of pizza, challenge team members to find an ethnic food that nobody has ever tried.
  • Have a wall of ideas – then flip those ideas on their heads, and choose the WORST ideas possible – ideas that would end in catastrophe, or at least get you fired. These ideas won’t be the best but you might be surprised at the ideas that result from those ideas!

Talk in analogies and metaphors – a uniquely human approach to creative thinking. I often use the analogy of the universe of our brain to explain divergent thinking and the default mode network.

FACTOR 3: Freedom to take risks

Giving your employees not only the freedom to take risks, but the confidence to take risks is the real key to unlocking the creative potential of your organization.

Consider incorporating this with a metric – How many times did they try and fail?

Yes, some companies celebrate failure. Because if you’re not failing, you’re not trying.

Merck offers a “kill fee”, which rewards scientists who give up on an idea with stock options to encourage them to take risks but also know when to give up on the ideas that don’t pan out.

How can you get creative with the way you ask for creativity? Take some risks, of course!

  • Consider a crowdsourcing platform to send out bids for new ideas
  • Ask your team members to try a new app or system to get their work done.
  • Encourage cross-functional pollination – reach out to a manager in a different department and build collaboration.

Encourage your team members to find the edges of their comfort zone without instilling panic.

If someone resists speaking out, or for the extreme introverts, don’t ask them to sing a song in a meeting. Could they present their idea as a poster, an AI-generated video, in mime?

Each of us has a different comfort zone, and as leaders, it is our job to help find and push the edge of that for our team.

The goal is to amplify each person’s zone of genius and find their way of moving the needle with their own creativity.

Many creative experts talk about the need for leaders to “shepherd” their team through bureaucracy if they want creativity to shine.

If you want a creative team? Remember to focus on how you can develop your own creativity.

Choose to take a tiny, insignificant risk today. Then, imagine what you could do if you were comfortable taking many tiny risks that together could add up to a bold, substantial impact on your family, your industry, your life!?

Yes, each tiny risk may seem inconsequential. Yet, each tiny risk helps you build strength and personal creative resilience.

With all 3 of these conditions in place, you’ll find increased creativity and higher levels of team, personal, and organizational performance.

Leading with creativity builds cohesive teams who want to stay, because they are making a difference, feeling heard, and having fun.

Learn the ground rules for a creative meeting and how to use your divergent and convergent creativity to skyrocket your idea generation and evaluation processes: GET THE FREE PDF