Title: Want Creative Workers? Loosen the Reins, Boss
Context: Creativity and productivity are hard to schedule between meetings.
Synopsis: Guess what? Deadlines and rigid scheduling of deliverables for knowledge workers responsible for developing and building “innovative” solutions to complex problems just doesn’t work. Shocking, right? Very often (read: almost always) the need to ship a new product and the effort it takes to come up with the ideas for that new product are diametrically opposed. Screaming and hollering about a lack of creativity is pointless unless you (read: managers responsible for the people tasked with having these ideas) also give them the time to consume, digest and assimilate all of the information necessary to reach a point where creativity is even possible. Rigidity is not the mother of creativity. Hell, it’s not even a distant cousin, yet we continue to run all business objectives through this prism. Either we upgrade our understanding of creative best practices in the enterprise or we continue to accept “good enough” work as a fact of life.
Best Bit: “When the researchers asked managers to name the most effective ways they could encourage creativity, the most frequent response was praising people for good work. When they asked the workers themselves, the No. 1 carrot turned out to be providing ongoing managerial support of their daily progress. Only 5 percent of managers got this right.”
via bloomberg.com
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