How to get your team´s creativity to shine

The thing is that you people needs to work with people to get their own job done and to make things better then before. And we also need to find time to work without being disturbed by your team mates and that is a tricky one to solve for the most of us. But I wont concentrate on that one in this post, it´s more a fact and the solution is  planning I guess. No, I want to find better ways to work together to make good work excellent and sometimes even just fantastic.

This is what I see we need to re-think to be able to make more out of our working hours.

1. Working is thinking! There are just to many people that gets this wrong, working is not about the hours you spend in front of your laptop and it´s not about how many hours you spend at work. So what you need to do as a leader of a marketing team is to create a place where your team want to be when it comes to think and re-think and think together. It is so very important to create an environment where it´s okey to have ideas and to let them go off just as they happens. Cause maybe, your working mate can add on more to that idea and take it even further. That´s what it is all about. Co-creation. If you are a leader of a team, do you feel this power in the air? If not, start to think about how you could get there.

2. Working is doing stuff! Sometimes I am actually amazed about people I meet that spends so much time on planning what they are going to do that I doubt they ever get it done. Okey, there is necessary to have a plan, but make a road map instead of a detailed plan. Then you plan the details when it´s time to make it happen. That´s a much better approach and it gives you time to do stuff that matters! Doing is the only way to make things happen! Get out there and make a change.

3. Working is talking! How many times have you found your self in the situation where you would like to talk to people around you, but you don´t cause you think you´re disturbing? In many cases people tends to be way to reserved, don´t be that. Your supposed to work together not go to the same place every day. If someone needs silence, they should get it by closing them self in to a room or work from somewhere else. As a leader you should encourage communication cause that´s the only thing that can bring out the most important thing – energy!

4. Working is laughing a lot! There is nothing as important as having fun together! If you have a climate at your work where you laugh a lot you´re lucky. Everything gets more easily done if you are having fun while your doing it. Having fun and laughing is proven to be very important for our wellness overall, so do spread your positive vibrations among your working mates! Laugh at your own mistakes and your colleagues will laugh with you. If you´re the boss, show the way and do all this and make sure your employees have good reasons to have fun on office hours and beyond. 

5. Working is meeting new people! Completely new kind of people that you don´t usually meet in your job. Set up a meeting with someone you have admired from outside your business reach, someone who has done things in a different way. Why not, he or she might even learn something from you. Take a walk with your old uncle (or any other relative for that sake) and ask him what his biggest lessons has been. By meeting people we normally don´t meet our mind opens up i brand new way and that´s means a lot for staying creative and “fresh minded”. Try it, you´ll get amazed of how much you learn. 

6. Working is doing things in brand new ways! Perhaps routines could be helpful at work sometimes when it comes to getting things done, but nothing else. But it is a killer to all kind of creative thinking, that´s for sure. People often hide themselves and their work in established ways because it´s easy and no one will question that. This is deadly serious for a company that need creative thoughts from their employees. If you “smell it”, you have to get rid of this illness. This one is tough, cause it challenges sometimes a whole company or a department. Pick one “small” task that is not that loaded to start with, make that one work and go on. You know the drill…

Finally, working is creating something that matters for people. Why should we work at all if it was not for that? What I mean is that you have to have your heart with you in your work. If you don´t, forget that you read this post. It does not matter if you think that work is just have a job where you hang out (but you would prefer not to…) to get a salary.

Spending time, energy, love, frustration, happiness, successes and failures is working and the result of it makes a difference. At the end of the day, that is what makes us feel good about ourselves.

Keep the creative glow shine! Keep on working.