Storytelling: And Bang!

“And Bang! I hit my face on the computer”, my two-year old niece said as she told me the story about how she got a large bruise on her cheek.

I looked over at my brother, and he explained that she had added the Bang! into her story the other day. She kept it because people loved it.

Leaders use stories to transmit values, share knowledge, foster team work, express vision initiate action, and to model behaviour.  They are important tools for leaders, as they enable us to provide concrete expressions of very abstract ideas.  Stories also allow us to engage with the members of our group in a more personal way.

Stories need to have a purpose.  We don’t tell stories in a leadership context for fun or entertainment. We can’t be self-centred when telling stories. If the story is just about you and doesn’t add anything to the organization, then it’s just about having an audience.  

Great stories have peaks and valleys, highs and lows.  Great stories get the audience to go along for the ride. And hopefully, they will go along for your organizational ride. Great stories have a “Bang” somewhere along the way.  Something that makes you laugh, gasp or cry. That gets you to believe in the purpose of the story.

The Anti-Creative Corporate Culture

Most organizations are bad at creating a culture of innovation. Why?  Because most managers don’t have a creative bone in their bodies, and the environment that they create is not conducive to creativity.

Creativity depends on an individuals skills, both expertise in their area of endeavour and creativity skills.  However, creativity also depends on an organization’s work environment, which impacts our intrinsic motivation.  (Amabile, 1989)

According to Amabile and Gryskiewicz (1989), there are four factors that restrain creativity.  1) too much time pressure; 2) too much evaluation; 3) a strong pre-disposition for the status quo; and, 4) a strong emphasis on organizational politics.

Many of the chuckleheads running today’s organizations are so wrapped up in urgency and in organizational politics that they kill the motivation to innovate. There is just too much risk for the average employee to be creative.  Especially if their direct boss is not creative. 

So step one in creating an innovative culture? Eliminate the people and processes that are restraining creativity.  Catch someone doing something creative, and reward them for it.  Clean house, get rid of those who are limiting your innovation potential.  Stop evaluating creative ideas before their time. 

CEOs need to walk the talk.  Are you the person limiting the creative motivation of your organization?  If so, you need to change your ways, or stop talking about innovation.

Sources:

Amablile, Teresa. How work environments affect creativity. (1989). Proceedings of the IEEE Interantional Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. 1. pp. 50 –55.

Amabile, Teresa and Gryskiewicz, Nur. Creative Environment Scales. Creativity Research Journal. Vol. 2:4. p. 231-253 (1989).

The Four Personalities of Creativity

I recently wrote a post on creativity and openness to experience.  One of my friends, we’ll call him the Captain, commented that he didn’t think that there was anything wrong with people who liked familiarity, simplicity, closure, predictability and clear answers (that is, those who were lower in openness to experience).  And I agree with him.

Which started me thinking about the different personality traits of people who are necessary to the successful introduction of any new idea. Many years ago a professor of mine introduced me to a typology of personalities.  I can’t honestly remember who created this typology so my apologies for the lack of citation.  But here it goes.  There are four basic personality types necessary to create and implement a new idea:  The Artist, the Judge, the Warrior and the Accountant.

The Artist is the visionary, the person who can put together odd facts or impressions and come up with something new. The artist is all about the novel idea. The artist is open to experiences, and unafraid of what others think of her. She is comfortable being different. She loves exploring new ideas.

The Judge is the person who is willing to think critically about an idea, to assess whether it will work, and to pass judgement on whether or not to implement the idea.  The judge has strong critical thinking skills, and is willing to walk away from a cool idea if it isn’t practicable.  The judge will kill someone’s dream if it doesn’t make sense.

The Warrior makes it happen.  He can take an idea and develop it to a point that it can be executed with the resources available. His creativity is all about making something useful.  The warrior commercializes the idea, delivers it from a wisp of an idea to something that is real and ready to use.

Finally, we have the Accountant. The accountant’s job is to assess the success of the idea once it has been implemented.  She is careful, detailed oriented and good at using numbers to determine the success or failure of an idea. She isn’t necessarily open to experience, but she delivers important information.  Was an idea good?  Was it well executed? What can we learn from our creative process? What can we do better next time? The accountant creates closure.

I don’t know about you, but I think that there are important roles for people who are lower in openness to experience.  Openness to experience entails risk taking.  And I wouldn’t want my doctor, a civil engineer or my accountant to be too high on openness to experience, as there is just too high a likelihood of failure.  While creativity and openness to experience aren’t the only skills and traits necessary to effectively implementing an innovation.

Leadership and It’s Impact on Creativity

Does effective leadership improve creativity of employees in the workplace? A recent study from Susan Strickland (University of Colorado at Denver) and Annette Towler (DePaul University) suggests that higher levels of charismatic leadership tend to occur with higher levels of creative behaviour among certain employees.

Charismatic leaders are those who are visionaries, those who inspire us and those who have a strong, positive belief in themselves. It makes sense that people who inspire us, might also inspire us to be more creative and to take more risks. 

Strickland and Towler looked at pairs of supervisors and employees.  They asked the employees to rate the supervisors’ charismatic leadership, while the supervisors rated the employees’ creative behaviour. 

What they found was that charismatic leadership increased creative behaviours among some employees.  Employees who were low in openness to experience were more creative when paired with a charismatic leader, than when not paired with a charismatic leader.  Employees who were high in openness to experience appeared to have no meaningful change in their creative behaviour when working with a charismatic leader.

We know from research that as openness to experience increases, so does creative behaviour.  As well, as openness to experience increases, so does an individual’s belief that they have creative abilities, in other words, they would say, “I am creative”.  So if you already believe that you are creative, having a charismatic leader to inspire you isn’t likely going to increase your creative output, because you are already creative.

But, for those who are not open to experience, a charismatic leader who inspires you, may encourage you to take creative risks, because you believe in the cause, because you are excited or motivated by the purpose. 

So if you are looking to increase creativity in your workforce, and you think your employees are low in openness to experience,  you might want to consider your leadership approach. How inspirational, visionary is your organization’s mission?  Does it inspire your employees? How can you create a purpose for them that will inspire them to take creative risks? 

(Source: Strickland, Susan and Towler, Annette.  “Correlates of Creative Behaviour: The Role of Leadership and Personal Factors”. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences. 28: 41 — 51 (2011) Published 3 August 2010.