The Magic of Fostering Creativity in the Workplace

June 11th, 2009 |

After a long years of attempting to figure out what it takes for leaders to foster creativity, I figured the “key” must be something hidden and magical that leaders had yet to discover.

Places like IDEO and Apple know the secret, but aren’t telling the rest of us, I thought. Surely, there is a secret about what a leader needs to know and do that the vast legions of managers in the workplace don’t know about that releases creativity in employees!

After years of leading, reading, discussing, coaching, and teaching, I can now reveal what I’ve discovered: there is no secret.

The key is that leaders foster creativity when they do what they should do: lead well.

All of the things that you’ve learned about what it means to be a leader go into the magic hat of leadership. You must:

promote risk taking;

accept (and sometimes celebrate) failure; become comfortable with “not knowing”;

suspend judgment of early ideas;

encourage diversity of backgrounds beliefs and thought;

encourage employees to work in the areas of their strengths;

(and the big one that we rarely talk about) provide time, materials and leeway.

Abracadabra. Wave your magic leadership wand and you’ve set the stage for creativity to occur (which doesn’t mean it actually will; by practicing the points above, you’ve simply “set the stage” for creativity to happen).

Whew. Surely there is some magic that I, and all the “creativity in the workplace” gurus and consultants have missed?

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The Magic of Fostering Creativity in the Workplace

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