Your team is solving an important problem or launching a new product and you, as the manager, want to encourage maximum creativity from your people. Good intentions, however, are not enough. In an effort to maximize creativity, managers often undermine the creativity of their teams. Generally, they do not even realize it. Harvard Business Review highlighted the most common mistakes.
1. Brainstorming without preparation
Brainstorming is just one step in the whole creative process. It is also called divergent thinking and its goal is to find many possible solutions to a problem. To have any effect, brainstorming must be preceded by a thorough examination of the problem which needs to be solved. Then comes convergent thinking. i.e. finding a correct conclusion, along with testing. If you think creative thinking is meeting in one room and waiting for somebody to say something, that has nothing to do with creativity.
2. Too much togetherness on your team
From the perspective of creativity, it is not good when a team is too cohesive. Creative ideas are best developed when conflicts occur with the different opinions on how to solve the task. If your people always agree, it is quite possible that they are hiding their real opinions or have no new ideas. Your mission is not to prevent conflicts and try to avoid them. You should rather take the role of the referee who lets people fight with each other, but also protects the fairness of the game.
3. Judging ideas before trying them out
We all tend to support ideas that support the status quo. Then there are paradoxical situations when managers reject proposals customers say they would welcome. First, managers accept the idea and then test it in practice. However, the best thing to do is vice versa. Look for ways to test the idea first and then judge whether it is good or not.
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