Help your team be more creative: 4 ways to foster creativity

Regardless of whether you lead a startup, small business or large corporation, creative thinking can add significant value to whatever is being done at the workplace.

One obvious helpful element in creativity is diversity: use it to compose teams and groups of employees with various opinions and perspectives. Homogenous groups tend not to be so creative.

The same concepts we have used over and over again may one day not be good enough. New problems are appearing and we are expected to solve them. Ideas coming from only one person, the leader, are often not sufficient; therefore, you need to foster and cultivate creativity in your team.

Turn your team into creative thinkers and then innovative solutions will help bring success to both your team and the organisation as a whole.

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Here are the best ways to encourage creativity among your colleagues, as proposed by the addicted2success.com website.

Offer freedom

Give your team the freedom to work towards a specific goal using methods of their choice. If you always tell them exactly what to do, creativity is stifled. It would be better if you were to assign a fixed working goal but then leave the choice of method to your colleagues.

Provide enough resources

Time and money are important when it comes to optimising creativity.  Strict deadlines might either suppress or heighten creativity but a limited budget can result in compromised quality. So provide your team with enough resources to achieve their working goal.

Don’t let politics hinder creativity

Select the best ideas – in other words, the most useful and appropriate ones. Don’t take hierarchy into account: the positions of your employees should play no role. A fair approach towards everyone will mean people are much more willing to contribute ideas often.

Welcome new ideas

Creative thinking is useless if you don’t really want new ideas. Establish a creative environment where everyone feels free to share their ideas at any time. You can also set up a suggestion box, where colleagues can submit ideas.

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Article source Addicted2Success - web focused on personal development and reaching success in business and life
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