Whether your business is small or large, whether it has three employees or 3000, creativity is an important seed to organizational growth. It is one thing having creative individuals working for you and another thing entirely to have groups of people working creatively not as individuals, but as the group collective. Often thought to be an individual expression, creativity by a group can be even more dynamic. A Harvard Business Review article explores the topic.

Resolving the Paradox of Group Creativity

by Andre Walton

Researchers have been studying creativity for more than 150 years, yet it still remains elusive. We’re not much closer to understanding what it is exactly that sparks unique ideas. One reason for this lack of insight may be that so much research has looked at the wrong things. Until quite recently, creativity has been studied from the assumption that it is a function of particular individuals and their characteristics.

Researchers have asked, “What is it about certain people that causes unique ideas to emerge from their minds?” But some students of creativity are now beginning to realize that this question ignores other critical factors that can promote or inhibit novel thought patterns that lead to unique, creative works.

One of the fundamental drives that motivates people in their careers and personal pursuits is the need to be distinctive — to leave a mark on the world through personal achievements. In Art and Artist, psychoanalyst Otto Rank suggests that people’s desire to be creative stems from their need to feel immortal, symbolically at least, and to leave their indelible mark on future generations in the form of artworks. If Rank is to be believed, this drive to be unique may be the primary motivation for many of us to follow a path of creativity.

On the other hand, we humans are a mass of contradictions, and there’s another drive that has the potential to undermine our motivation to seek uniqueness: our need for connection with others. As psychologist Abraham Maslow suggested, we all need to belong to groups, to feel, to be seen, and to have things in common with others. Those who do not fulfill this need to belong may have considerably less resilience in terms of emotional stability; the link between creativity and “poor mental health” has been well documented and may stem from this underlying sense of being an “outlier.”

When we’re group-oriented, enjoying the safety and sense of companionship that group membership provides, it is our similarity to others that is salient. And when we’re indulging in our need for individuality, enjoying a sense of uniqueness, it’s our dissimilarity from others that is critical. As my own research has shown, this dissimilar condition is what helps us explore cognitive paths that are different from those trodden before — either by us or by those around us.

These two intrinsic, human drives operate in opposite directions, with our sense of group membership encouraging cognitive processes similar to other group members and undermining the motivation to think uniquely — that is, undermining creativity itself.

Several studies lend practical support to this theoretical notion. In times of trauma or potential stress, we tend to gravitate toward being with others, identifying closely with our in-groups, by flying the national flag or going to church more often. But creativity seems to decrease under these circumstances.

So when you’re managing a team or working in a group, what can you do to help foster creative thinking?

In team settings, the “group vs. individuality” dynamic depends on whether the team has a collectivist orientation, where the good of the group is expected to prevail, or an individualist orientation, when it is expected that individuals will strive for their own benefit and that of their immediate families. It’s no coincidence that the U.S., arguably one of the most individualist countries in the world, is also the most creative in terms of patents generated, innovation, and scientific research publications. The result of individualists working within an individualist culture, then, is likely to be a high level of innovation.

However, let’s consider a Portuguese or Asian culture — both highly collectivist, compared to the U.S. — such as a Portuguese subsidiary of a U.S. multinational. It’s not uncommon for the parent company to “import” its underlying corporate modus operandi into the environment of its subsidiaries, sometimes as a matter of policy but sometimes simply because management teams from the central office have set up the structure and practices of the subsidiary. Under these circumstances, employees drawn from the local community can find themselves in a collectivist environment at home but in an individualist workplace.

The implications for creativity become difficult to predict under circumstances like these. While more research is needed to determine how these “hybrid” circumstances affect creativity, it’s reasonable to assume that people will adapt to different cultural norms in different circumstances.

A further example of how the group-versus-individual dynamic affects creativity is the act of brainstorming. During the last half of the 20th century, companies that wanted to encourage creative thinking relied on brainstorming and team building as important tools in their toolkit. But in both situations it’s the group that becomes important, which is perhaps the reason why brainstorming has never fulfilled its original promise.

When advertising executive Alex Osborn popularized brainstorming in the 1953 book Applied Imagination, he predicted that it would double the number of ideas that a group of people would generate in response to a problem or challenge. However, it proved not to live up to his expectations. As later research showed, brainstorming actually reduces the number of ideas a group produces when compared with the number of ideas that can be generated by those same individuals on their own.
So if you can’t rely on brainstorming and teamwork to elicit more creative ideas, what can you do?

One remedy is to make sure that individuals have plenty of space for individual contemplation and input. In a brainstorming situation, this might mean having group members take time to generate ideas on their own (not in the immediate environment of other group members). Individuals can then come back together to share their ideas and discuss how their individual contributions relate to the task at hand. They may diverge one or more times to generate ideas that build upon the original contributions. In our everyday work environments, this ability to find personal time and space to think is crucial to enabling creative thought.

But even when given the space and freedom to flourish, creativity can be an elusive and fragile phenomenon, which can be affected by factors such as leadership style, stress, and organizational culture. A corporate philosophy that lets people know it’s OK to be creative is critical, as is leadership that promotes the notion that everyone’s creative contribution will be taken seriously. Given the importance of innovation in contemporary organizations, isn’t it time we all started taking creativity more seriously?

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Andre Walton is a visiting professor of creativity and entrepreneurship at the University of South Wales. He’s also the author of Embracing the New Era: Managing oneself and others into the era of creativity.

Often, new organizational leadership comes in and feels a need to "shake things up" in an effort to make what they believe to be positive changes. But there needs to be sense to the change management equal to the development of those new leaders charged with enacting it. A new Harvard Business Review article discusses why they need to mesh.

 

 

Change Management and Leadership Development Have to Mesh

 

By Ryan W. Quinn & Robert E. Quinn

January 07, 2016

 

Leadership development and change management tend to be top priorities for many organizations. In spite of this, a majority of organizations tend to fall far short of their goals for both. One major reason organizations struggle is because they treat both leadership development and change management as separate rather than interrelated challenges. Cultural changes cannot happen without leadership, and efforts to change culture are the crucible in which leadership is developed.

For better results, organizations should coordinate their leadership development and change management efforts, approaching them as one and the same. True leadership involves deviating from cultural expectations in ways that inspire others to choose to follow. What’s more, leadership is not the sole responsibility of the C-suite. Managers at all levels of an organization must overcome resistance if genuine cultural change is to occur. Thus, change initiatives—which require a deviation from a dominant set of norms and behaviors—are the best learning environments for star managers to develop leadership skills, as well as a necessary component of a successful culture-change initiative.

How then, should organizations go about integrating their change management and leadership development initiatives? We recommend an approach that is both top-down and bottom-up.
The bottom-up part of the integrated development and change process requires potential leaders throughout the organization to engage in a process of learning how to enact a desired change in an organization’s culture in the everyday experiences of organizational life.

For example, one company suddenly found itself audited at the request of their largest client and were told that they needed to change their accounting procedures. In response, many employees insisted that the changes could not be made by the demanded deadline. They were impeded by cultural beliefs around how quickly the organization could mobilize and complete complex tasks. Janet, a member of the task force assigned to handle the requirements of the audit, was participating in leadership development training at the time.

 Using a leadership tool we developed called  the fundamental state of leadership, she decided to reach out to employees who had a stake in the new requirements to understand their perspectives (rather than wait for others with more authority to tell her what to do). She gathered new information and discovered their fears, while simultaneously coming to the realization that the deadline could be met.

With this new understanding, she was able to help other employees question their beliefs and come up with creative ways to streamline the accounting procedures so as to meet the deadlines.

As part of a class assignment from her leadership training, she also reflected on the experience and used her own (and others’) reflections to inform her subsequent plans and actions. Eventually, more and more of her colleagues began to accept the importance of the accounting changes and their accompanying deadlines, and were participating in creative action.

Their actions led to bottom-up change: the emerging culture and accounting policies could not have been planned in advance, but came from the ideas and actions of motivated employees and were uniquely suited to the local challenges they faced. Janet, however, was more than just a change agent in this one situation. Her planning, acting, reflecting—and planning again—demonstrated true leadership.

But a bottom-up process is unlikely to work unless it is also embedded in a top-down learning process. A top-down process creates structure and motivation for employees to maintain engagement in the change/leadership development process. If done well, it also provides emotional and social support potential leaders, because deviating from cultural expectations can be a lonely endeavor.

A successful top-down process begins with executives clarifying desired results for change management/leadership programs. For example, executives may want to change accounting procedures or inspire creativity in order to become more efficient, as in Janet’s company. Or they may want to lower barriers between departments or create financial stewardship throughout the organization. The goal depends on the organization and its situation, but what is important is that it is specific (ideally, with a measurable outcome) and accepted by all members of the executive team.

Once the goal is clear and accepted, executives can identify potential leaders throughout the organization to engage in the leadership development/change management process. These may be executive team members, people in key positions, people who have shown a passion for this specific change, people who are deemed to be “high potential,” or some combination of these characteristics.

 Many variables about the type of change program could drive the decision about which potential leaders to include, such as strategic, the number needed for a critical mass, the need to stage the change process, the amount of support that can be provided, geographical dispersion, the diversity of expertise or demographics involved, and so on.

Selected leaders should be given structure, accountability, support, and motivation as they engage this process—but also the freedom to create their own solutions, as Janet did with the help of the accounting team. The objectives of the change and development effort, the scope of initiative, the time frame, the type of support to be given, and the rewards for success should be made clear when invitations are extended.

 Classes can offer advice but the key is to instill a plan-act-reflect cycle—and then support managers as they learn on the go. The attention of senior executives and the needed financial support should be guaranteed; a worse-case scenario is for a fledging leader to have the rug pulled out from under them partway through the change and development process.

Once the structure and motivation is secured and outlined, potential leaders can launch their repeated efforts at creating experiences that enact the new objectives using the plan-act-reflect cycle. Ideally, reflections could be shared so that potential leaders learn from each other as well as from their own efforts.

Change management and leadership development programs have a woeful record at most organizations. In large part that’s because they come up against a common challenge—deviating from a dominant culture (the true test of leadership) is very difficult. Tasking managers with driving bottom-up cultural change will provide leadership training in itself. They will require top-down support to succeed.

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Ryan W. Quinn is an associate professor of management at the University of Louisville College of Business.

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Robert E. Quinn is the Margaret Elliott Tracy Collegiate Professor of Business Administration in the organization and management group at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor.