Enhance Team Creativity

Do you know how to bring out your team’s creativity? Your team could be a limitless source of fantastic ideas. Idea generation requires focus and a specific path to head down. In your leadership role, you can implement techniques that inspire your team members to share their best ideas, thoughts, and viewpoints.

Hosting your team for comradery and having them discuss idea generation will lead to new, timely, and cutting-edge projects. It can be a powerful team-building tool that emphasizes collaborative activity within your organization. Many techniques can work based on your team’s composition, and if all of them are open minded. When planning a creative session, plan to push limitations and explore uncommon ideas.

To help make this concept work to your benefit, here are three techniques you can use to help influence your team to think of and discuss ideas that they may not have otherwise thought of.

Brainstorming is a popular method to bring people together, build on a topic, get creative juices flowing, and encourage idea generation. Using an all-encompassing style of facilitating as a best practice to follow can make the session more effective.

While in the brainstorming session, don’t comment on or filter any ideas. If you’re the facilitator, record all ideas, or list them on a whiteboard. It does not matter how amateur, unrealistic, or absurd they may be. Do not tolerate criticism of any method. It’s critical to allow your team to purely convey their thoughts on the subject. If an idea does not make sense, it is unimportant.

Encouraging a continuous, natural, uninterrupted atmosphere is vital to eliminating any hurdles that may stand in the way of groundbreaking ideas.

Using open writing, or free writing, as a technique to stimulate business and idea generation has been around for quite some time. Whether performed by recording ideas on paper or typing on a computer screen, it is best done by setting a specific amount of time - five to ten minutes for shorter exercises or even thirty minutes for more complex ideas or issues.

This exercise is best when your co-workers begin writing at a set time and only stop when an alarm indicates to them to do so. Guide them with a topic, for example: “how do we better present our brand at industry conferences?” Ask your team to write without punctuation, edits, or even resting as they go.

Doing so will force them to continue new thoughts during the process even as they go. It forces your mind down a road that produces something innovative and appealing. Jumbled between random words and phrases that run on will be thought provoking and actionable ideas.

Many of us draw in our notebooks. We did so as kids in school and do so now as adults in a workplace environment. Those that do not doodle might think it as a waste or pointless. Though, for many it can be their method to solve problems.

If you can get your team, especially those that noticeably sketch, to doodle you may find rewarding solutions to complex problems. Encourage those employees that do not draw, to try as it may offer them an exercise that helps focus differently on a topic to generate ideas. This will have your team working together in a playful way to overcome problems with efficiency.

Having your team run through exercises that force them to be more creative can be an enjoyable connecting experience. The best creative ideas come from releasing your team free from the usual way of doing things. Get out of the office, rent a condo at the beach, take a day trip to a park, go bicycling together. Getting out of your environment refreshes the creative thought process. By brainstorming, writing, and sketching, you are providing your team with skills that can access thoughts and ideas that boost creativity and can carry forward into their personal lives as well.