 Executives can be made to feel the squeeze in a company's quest for innovation. A leader is partly tasked with coming up with creative ideas and partly burdened with pulling new developments out of others. According to innovation leadership consultant and author Lina M. Echeverría, leaders need to take a new approach to collaborating to solve the complex issues with which a company has to contend. In this interview with Soundview, she discusses how to conquer the fear of conflict and be more creative. She also reveals why it's wrong to label certain employees as "the creative person" and how a leader can influence team dynamics to make different personalities be glad to work together.
Soundview: Conflict is a necessary part of the creative process, but how can people become more comfortable with it?
Lina M. Echeverría: Conflict is one of the things that scares most leaders because it doesn't feel good. We have always been conditioned from early childhood not to fight. Be good. Be nice. And it is not about encouraging fighting. It is about encouraging dialogue. It is about encouraging the ability to disagree, to give other viewpoints and engage in a dialogue. But as I say, it really feels in the pit of your stomach like, "Ugh, I don't want to be here." So, what it takes first is a lot of courage once you have come to the realization that that conflict is an essential part of the creative process.
It is an essential part because people that are creative that have a really good idea that others have not seen are driven by this vision. And this vision can be very, very powerful and they're not going to stop because of any barriers until they achieve the mission. Now, when you have several creative people in one team and nowadays, the difficulty in our technology, in our architectural processes, in our surgeries, whatever it is that you're dealing with makes it necessary to have more than one person and people with different viewpoints.
So, when those viewpoints come from a different angle, you could have a lot of passion, each person pulling in a different direction. So, what is needed is related to bring them to the team. Have them understand that theirs is not the only way and that they need to learn to respect others while at the same time, helping them understand how their behavior can impact the dynamics of the team and can push others down.
Soundview: Executives often try to tag certain employees with the label of "creative." How can they stop themselves from regulating creativity?
Echeverría: [Laughs] Isn't that wonderful? I call it institutionalizing creativity. It cannot be institutionalized. By the way, we are all creative in different ways. Some people have had much more experience than others at channeling that intuitive force that brings the good ideas.
Being themselves is allowing them to bring their whole selves in to work. What do I mean by bringing the whole self in to work? Well, the person that is lighthearted, that has a spring on her step should be able to feel that way at work and should to be able to wear whatever she wants and decorate her office whichever she wants. And we should be able to appreciate her style.
Whereas the person that is a little bit more somber should not be asked to be jolly all the time. They should feel that they can be themselves the same way they can be themselves in the confines of their homes where one is unabashedly one's self. So, bringing them all in to work is inviting them to bring the aspects that they have outside of work in to work.
Soundview: What about the notion that the highest levels of creativity are reserved for people who isolate themselves, a lone genius left to work in a remote lab?
Echeverría: What companies that do that are missing is the deep understanding of each one of their creative people to really know what that person needs. Yes, there are some that are most creative when left alone but not everybody is the most creative when left alone. There are others that really, really thrive from daily give-and-take.
So, what you really need to do is have leaders who have a deep interest in the people in their groups, who really understand how they operate the best and allow them to operate that way.
I have had teams that are working together where two of the key people could not communicate and what I have done is I have introduced a third person to work as the communicator between the two because of the third person's knowledge of who the other two are and how they relate to others and what their outside lives are like. Who's good friends with whom? You can do that and you can do it very effectively for the benefit of the organization and the happiness of the human being. |
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