Creative people are often moody and arrogant. However, if you hire and promote only nice and obedient employees, your company will be no more than average. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, expert on personality profiling and psychometry and professor of organizational psychology at the University College London, writes about it in an interesting article on the Harvard Business Review website. He recommends the following steps to to manage creative employees.
Let them experience failures
If we know that something will work, it is not creative. Therefore, empower your people to experimentation even at the cost of failure.
Don't surround them by equally creative people
Equally creative people would only compete with each other or ignore each other. Even strong conservatives are, however, not ideal partners for creative people. You should surround the creative members of your team by conservatives who are less orthodox and thus able to cooperate with them.
Give them only meaningful work
Creative people well understand the wider context of their work and don't want to waste their time on trivial and meaningless tasks. They need a meaning so that they can get inspired.
Give them more freedom
An exactly given structure and predictability of work is certainly not a prerogative of creative people. Creative work arises spontaneously and unexpectedly. Therefore, don't force creative employees to follow strict procedures (working in one place, strict working hours, etc.).
Don't overpay them
Recent research confirms that high rewards for completed tasks reduce engagement. This is, however, not the case of positive feedback. Creative people don't work primarily for money but for recognition. Try to make them feel important.
Keep surprising them
Boredom is the worst thing for creative individuals. They want a constant change, they like to make simple things complicated. Just let them do it.
-kk-