Looking to add someone to a key management position? Many manufacturing companies don’t consider people with top creative skills as the ideal candidate. But when you look at someone like Steve Jobs or Brian Chesky, the current CEO of Airbnb, creative types may be able to consider what will drive sales, create deeper brand loyalty and bring creative problem solving to C-suite issues.
Shavaun Christian, writing for the website www.entrepreneur.com, suggested that balancing business expertise and creativity is a ‘superpower’ that can set your company apart. For example, Brian Chesky of Airbnb comes from the creative side, having studied industrial design, and views himself as a designer, not necessarily a businessperson.
Creative types think differently and can bring a unique perspective to common challenges. Shavaun Christian wrote, “By hiring entrepreneurial creatives, you bake creativity into the DNA of your organization and open up a world of quantifiable advantages that yield innovation and growth.” They tend to be dreamers and visionaries who will challenge norms and take risks. They understand the emotional side of business and what can drive people to create a connection with a company or product. A company also needs numbers-driven leaders who can cast vision and identify operational problems. That’s why you need a wide variety of skill sets and personalities in your top leadership team.
Consulting firm McKinsey & Company studied the relationship between creativity and business performance. The study found that creativity has a strong correlation with strong business performance growth and innovation. This research discovered that over a 15-year period, 67% of the companies ranked highest for creativity had above-average organic revenue growth, and 70% of those quantifiably creative companies had above-average total returns to shareholders.
Christian noted, “The study also revealed that creativity ‘is at the heart of business innovation, and innovation is the engine of growth.’”
So, how do you get more creative talent on your leadership team? The reality is that you may already have people with some of these talents within your company, but they may not feel released to share or use these talents. Also, there are different types of creative talent.
Adobe, the software company behind the popular photo and layout software, offers a free online Creative Test at https://mycreativetype.com/. This test lets you know what your creative style is and how you can best utilize it. This may be a tool that you should use with your staff to help them identify their creative talents. Creativity is more than the ability to draw, take pictures or write a poem. “At Adobe, we believe there is creativity in all of us, and everyone has a story to tell – not just professional artists,” explained Simon Morris, senior director, campaign marketing at Adobe.
Morri added, “The Creative Types quiz is a fun way to help people from all walks of life think about their own special brand of creativity.”
So, the first step is to tap into the creativity in your company, encourage and reward creative thinking and get your employees to look past their own creative limitations to their potential. The next step is to prioritize creativity in your hiring practices. You can make sure that each team has creative types in their leadership pipeline. It can be good to ask interview questions that showcase a person’s creative potential or ask him/her to take the Creative Types quiz described above. Some good interview questions that invite a creative response are the following:
1.) What is the most creative gift you have ever given someone? How did you feel while you were buying or making that gift?
2.) If you were a character from a book, movie or TV show, who would you be? Why do you seem to identify so much with this real-life or fictional person?
3.) What is the biggest risk you have ever taken at a job? What made you go for it?
4.) What brand are you most loyal to, and why?
5.) How many soccer balls could fit in this room?
6.) If you could have any superpower, what would you choose and why? There are no limitations; think about a superpower beyond the traditional comic book characters.
You can also provide creative resources to team members and use these tools in your training and coaching approaches within your company. A great resource is the Daily Creative podcast by creativity guru, Todd Henry, who wrote the Accidental Creative. You can find out more at https://www.toddhenry.com/podcasts/.
So, what can you do to identify, empower and promote more creative people in your organization? If this is something you haven’t really considered, take some time to brainstorm and try new approaches to find and reward creative leaders in your organization.
When you hire and embed creative people into top leadership roles – and let them exercise their creativity – you embed creativity into your company’s DNA. And this may just lead to your next big thing.
