There Is No “I” in “Creativity”

OK, actually, there are two of them. But the reality is that your creative employees will usually be stronger together than they will be individually.

Creativity often tends to be a very individualized characteristic. Your Creatives have their own talents that are not mass produced, they each have their own view of the world, they know what feels right and what doesn’t, and it is sometimes hard to bring those different perceptions together into a cohesive whole. Your job as a leader is to make that happen when it’s needed.

For some Creatives, working solo is the way they do business. Hairstylists who do both cuts and color, for instance, may be the only Creative working on a client. Even within such seemingly individualized fields, though, there is a growing need to be able to collaborate. Many salons, for instance, have stylists who specialize in cuts, while others are colorists, and if the two cannot work together, then someone is going home ugly.

You have a challenge ahead of you. You need to nurture the individual talents that make your Creatives unique and help you stand out from your competitors, while at the same time encouraging a culture of collaboration. Since many Creatives tend to be pretty individualistic, you need to be careful how you do that; forced collaboration is rarely as successful as employee-initiated cooperation, so your task is really to create an environment that encourages collaboration, rather than issuing pronouncements about how “this will happen…or else.”

If your employees work in a common space, you need to find a configuration that allows people to work on their own when they want to, but enables cooperation when it becomes necessary. It is hard these days to justify the cost of individual offices for everyone, but if you are going to use cubicles, at least try to provide some privacy. The open concept might make people leery of experimenting with new ideas because they are never sure who is standing right behind them; people want to try to figure things out before showing them to others. At the same time, you need a space where people can come together…some kind of work room with a big table and dry-write boards and a coffee machine wouldn’t be a bad idea. Less formal places, like a cafeteria in your building, can encourage casual conversation that leads to not-so-casual innovation.

Of course, if you’re Steve Jobs, you simply design an entire building rather than just a cubicle farm. Some people have voiced their concern that the new building looks too much like the Pentagon. One of the great advantages of the Pentagon’s design, though, is that despite being one of the largest office buildings in the world, you can walk from any one point to any other in no more than 7 minutes. When it’s easy for people to get to each other, they are more likely to; it’s not rocket science.

You have extra challenges if your employees are scattered around the city or around the world, whether they are free agents or teleworkers or part of a global corporation. Without a physical space to bring them together you need a virtual space that facilitates cooperation. Sharepoint has been favorite of many organizations in the last decade, and cloud services have made it easier to share and collaborate in real-time. Blogs and wikis have been used for years to share information and encourage discussion, and many organizations have built on that to create in-house social networks and “communities of practice,” some of which include partners from outside the organization as well. Many of these can be useful even if all your Creatives are in one place, but such tools become essential when they are scattered all over.

What you ultimately need, though, for all of this to work, is a culture of collaboration. Technology does no good if the culture doesn’t support the things the technology is designed to facilitate. You cannot just impose a culture; it develops over time. The values and priorities you demonstrate as a leader create a foundation; if you only reward people for individual work, rather than recognizing teams, then people see pretty quickly that individualism is the way to go. But if you truly value collaboration as well as individual talent, then you need to design a structure that supports that (including physical space and technology for sharing, as well as assessment and rewards systems that recognize collaborative work).

If you really value cooperation and collaboration — and in most cases, you should — then take the steps to make it happen instead of waiting for it to happen on its own. Leadership is not about doing the work yourself; it’s about creating an environment where your people can do their best work.