A642.6.3.RB – Practicing Creative Thinking Skills
Notar & Padgett (2010) used “thinking outside the box” aligned with critical thinking and creativity. When organizations ask or empower their workforce to think outside the box, it means they are engaging their employees to be creative and utilize their critical thinking skills in defining and analyzing the problem to reach a logical solution. When employees conceived new ideas of products and services, organizations need to have an open mind of the possibilities to implement those new ideas into reality.
According to McKeown (2014), we can shape a better future if we understand how future tends to emerge and most especially, we need to be open to new possibilities and new opportunities. One of the process improvement that Delta implemented was to get their employees get invested. The leadership team reviewed their founder’s mission statement and developed a new set of core principles that outlined the unifying set of behaviors for their employees and stakeholders. Delta team members are inspired daily to be innovative thinkers. From the C-Suite down, challenges, and opportunities are approached as a group where every team members feel valued.
Process improvement and developing a strong leadership team was the reason behind Delta Airline’s emergence from bankruptcy. In 2004, Jerry Grinstein came out of retirement to lead the restructuring of Delta. Recognizing the power of a strong leadership team, he immediately hired Ed Bastian, now Delta’s president, and Glen Hauenstein, current executive VP of network planning and revenue management (Anderson, 2014). Delta’s leadership team were tasked to kick-start the consolidation of Delta and Northwest which was completed in less than a year. Grinstein’s acknowledgment that he does not have the skills to manage Delta’s complicated operations and he needed the expertise of great partners like Bastian and Hauenstein is a great characterization of an excellent leader, a great innovator, and a champion of innovation.
Strategies to Lead a Culture of Creativity and Leading Innovators
Opening the lines of communication. It is critical that members of our workforce have a convenient and safe avenue to raise rational and logical concerns about workplace issues. Once a trusting relationship environment has been developed, it is inevitable that the employees will openly share their innovative thinking knowing that their shared ideas are valued. As a leader, I have to be able to communicate with the workforce in a clear and concise manner without ambiguity.
Strong communication initiative is essential for building a collaborative team and trust within the team. With an open, clear or transparent communication channels, it opens a variety of directions leading to new ideas, creativity, and innovations. A team that consistently challenges each other positively, learning from each others’ ideas, culture, abilities, and skills is an excellent tool for planting the seed for future innovations in my organization.
Staying open to ideas while substituting punditry with constructive feedback. According to McKeown (2014), to shape a better future, we need to inspire a powerful, beautiful, and provocative ideas. Building a bigger brain is having an open mind to creativity or innovation even if the radical change is discomforting or cumbersome in the short term but eventually will be profitable in our organization’s future (McKinney, n.d.). Instead of criticizing innovative ideas, it is more to the advantage of leaders like me to ask questions that may stimulate or encourage more creative thinking at the thought or creativity that did not meet standards of expectations.
In the midst of failure, focus on productive leadership and examine your critical eye in the mirror. Developing teamwork is crucial for the success of any organization. It is to the advantage of my department and organization as a whole when every member of the team works cohesively to accomplish departmental and organizational goals. It is not only of utmost importance that team members had the autonomy and freedom to achieve assigned tasks and tapped into their creative and innovative minds, but it is also of importance that they have the capacity to work well with other members of the team.
Building bigger brain also means understanding what motivates or demotivates our team. As a leader, I need to take the hat of an innovator to understand our workforce innovator's perspective when their projects are not as successful as anticipated. Failure can also be a means of growth and success if handled with care and sensitivity. Evaluating the performance of my time is a critical part of my position where it requires to give a positive, constructive feedback. Leaders in my organizations need to avoid making comments that may be construed as negative criticisms, and it is crucial that we are transparent to our team members. Having self-awareness of my weaknesses and turns those weaknesses into my strengths to set an example to my team.
Renewing. McKeown (2014) described renewing as reinvigorating a new culture within the organization from the old way of thinking. When employees do the same thing every day for multiple years, there is a tendency that they will settle for less and will result in organizational stagnation. Reenergizing or reinvigorating can be accomplished by cultivating a culture of innovation.
A powerful way to encourage a culture of innovation is to focus or aim our direction to usefulness, today and in the future. Insight to Innovation pathway will be effective and efficient if leaders like me make their determination to new ideas based on potential usefulness. Innovation needs a rebellious innovator as its refuge for creativity that is practicable. But the challenge for leaders like me is how to influence or create a climate or culture of practical creativity. Organizational leaders will need for their workforce to care or conform to the overall success of the organization as a whole (McKeown, 2014).
In my current organization, we are ensuring that the cultural changes are embedded in our system taking a firmer root and making sure that there is no rebounding from previous thinking and expectations. The emphasis on making sure that our system is performing at a high level is crucial to attaining our new system-wide brand promise. Our executive leaders are guaranteeing that we are hitting a high-performance system and no one in the organization is allowed to blemish our brand promise of “Extending the Healing Ministry of Christ.”
All new ideas and products in our group are reviewed and assessed by our Strategy and Innovation team. Once the quality of the product or the usefulness of the new idea pass our Strategy and Innovation team, a focus group is created to brainstorm and make appropriate recommendations on how to improve and implement the new idea. What makes us stand out is that for every innovation or changes in our organization, it is always tied to our company mission of “Extending the Healing Ministry of Christ.”
“Prime” critical thinking. Priming is activating or sparking a thought that affects an individual’s behavior or options. Research shows that in a group decision-making, giving members of the group the task of “getting along,” members often shut up or silenced. If organizations want to encourage creativity and innovative thinking, members of the team should be given a “critical thinking” task. Critical thinking is learning to think things through, clearly defining the problem or issue at hand, finding authentic resolutions to solve the problem or issue and lastly believing that the acquired resolution will solve the problem or issue at hand. In short, critical thinking is developing our intellectual traits of perseverance, courage, humility and faith. Training and developing our workforce on critical thinking is also essential if we are to get the root of our departmental and organizational issues and problems and develop reasonable and sustainable solutions.
Trust Me Enough to Trust Others. Innovation necessitates the breaking down of thoughts that are old and replacing them with new ones (Llopis, 2014). It is of importance that every member of my group works and communicates with transparency trusting in each other's strengths and supportive and willing to develop each other’ weaknesses. Trusting each other gives us the ability to be a better listener, more patient, and more grateful for new experiences and newly formed relationships.
Reframe challenges and continue to ask questions. When faced with problems that are in need of resolution, stepping back and asking appropriate questions like “why,” or “why not,” before finding and developing solutions is more beneficial. Asking the question “why” enables as to see the different frames of a situation when approaching different types and levels of challenges. Developing my skills in reframing the challenges I face daily can be a valuable tool for increasing my creativity and innovative thinking since it will unlock an array of determinations.
Building a better brain allows enabling of our employees to showcase their creative and innovative ideas becoming the cornerstone of our organizational sustainability empowering innovation and reenergizing individual growth. Innovation is the adaptation of anything new that represents an interactive application embraced and used by the collective. Change and innovation when appropriately applied can modify and influence the workplace and the globe (Llopis, 2014).
As a human resources professional, I have developed excellent skills in coaching, identifying talented individuals that fit the culture of my organization and their future business units, and I have developed a new way to align a current employee or candidates talent, skills, abilities, and interests to their position in the company. Although my new idea of tailoring the “job description” to the individual's skills, talents, strengths, and abilities is getting good feedback and acceptance from the group of our leadership team, there is still a presence of resistance from a handful group of leaders. Developing and sustaining the type of cultural transformation required for organizations like mine to achieve our innovation objective is an excellent opportunity for me as an HR expert to bring in this kind of change.
Process innovation brings value to the internal and external customers, inclusive of employees or the organization itself. The benefits resulting from process innovation encompasses time and cost reduction to produce a product or implement a service. The strategies introduced from the past readings translates to a meaningful growth in the quality of a product or a service. Although process innovation is geared towards increasing efficiency and reducing the cost for the customers, employees, and the organization itself, we also have to keep in mind that innovation is a result of the creativity of the human minds. Incentivising employees for their creative work is not enough to boost advancement in technology and employee morale, retention, and development. Open communication that is built on trust and acknowledging the employee’s creativity and contribution is of utmost importance to continually promote and encourage innovative and creative thinking within the organization.
References
Anderson, R. (2014). Delta's CEO on using innovative thinking to revive a
bankrupt airline. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/12/deltas-ceo-on-using-innovative-thinking-to-revive-a-bankrupt-airline
Canfield, J., & Smith, G. (2011). Imagine: Ideation skills for improvement and innovation today.
Holland, MI: Black Lake Press.
Llopis, G. (2014). 5 Ways leaders enable innovation in their teams. Forbes. Retrieved from
McKeown, M. (2014), Shaping the future together. Retrieved from
McKeown, M. (2014). The innovation book: How to manage ideas and execution for outstanding
results. Harlow, England: Pearson.
McKinney, P. (n.d.). The innovative CEO: how to lead innovation from the top. [Web log
comment]. Retrieved from http://philmckinney.com/the-innovative-ceo-how-to-lead-innovation-from-the-top/
Notar, C. E., & Padgett, S. (2010). Is think outside the box 21st century code for imagination,
innovation, creativity, critical thinking, intuition? College Student Journal, 44(2), 294+. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=embry&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA228428416&sid=summon&asid=e79e7bc243e2ff973e3937429ead7102
Sunstein, C., and Hastie, R. (2015). Making smart groups. Harvard Business Review.
Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/12/making-dumb-groups-smarter
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