If you’re a leader or human resources manager, it’s important to think strategically about how you build and manage creative teams. The right combination of people will produce more disruptive ideas and solutions, and can significantly exceed the creativity of any one individual team member.
An example of this is the Renaissance—one of the most innovative eras in human history. In his book The Medici Effect, Swedish-American entrepreneur Frans Johansson posits that creativity blooms when people from different disciplines come together. According to him, the wealthy Medici family helped ignite the Renaissance by bringing poets, philosophers, scientists, architects and artists from all over Europe and beyond together under their patronage in Florence, Italy. So what three principles can we apply from the Renaissance era to optimize creative teams today?
1. Be inclusive.
Bringing different kinds of people together helps companies to thrive, makes products more innovative and creates the potential for goods and services that cater to everyone. According to a study by Boston Consulting Group, companies with more diverse leadership teams are more innovative and have 19% higher revenues. Diversity does not just make your company culture fairer and more socially inclusive; it makes good business sense.
Diverse teams are built by including people from different disciplines and areas of expertise, from information technology to marketing, as well as people of different genders, ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, beliefs, physical abilities, sexual orientations and age groups. Connecting different thinkers and viewpoints can reveal opportunities to innovate that you could never imagine on your own or with groups of similar-minded people.
2. Respect differences.
In my experience, when you bring a group of diverse people together, the “differences” between them can become a recipe for conflict and misunderstandings. Of course, an integral part of innovation and collaboration involves heated debates, but getting the balance right between confrontation and unity is key to the success of the team.
I believe it’s the leader’s role to facilitate a supportive, dynamic environment in which creativity can thrive, just like the Medici family did with their patronage. You can do this by promoting a culture of respect in which every team member is encouraged to actively listen and share their ideas without fear of judgment. In addition, greater unity can be achieved by aligning the group around a common process, such as design thinking.
Managing diverse creative teams isn’t always easy, but the benefits you gain are a richer range of ideas that can lead to more innovative solutions.
3. Cultivate cross-fertilization.
When you get a team with a wide range of perspectives brainstorming together, it really opens people’s minds to possibilities they hadn’t thought of before. This cultivates fresh thinking. Add to this the cross-fertilization that naturally occurs as one idea triggers another idea, and it can lead to the discovery of what Johansson calls the “intersection point,” where two diverse ideas meet to form a new and novel concept.
For example, when Lebanese entrepreneur Aheda Zanetti moved to Australia she created “the Burkini” range of swimwear. This combined the modesty of the traditional Muslim burka with fabrics used to create bikinis so that Muslim women could enjoy the beach.
In order to maximize the potential of cross-fertilization in teams, I recommend getting as many ideas on the table as possible—no idea should be deemed “stupid.” The next step is to use divergent thinking to find different ways to connect and combine them to reveal these hidden intersection points. Continuous cross-fertilization like this will often lead to disruptive and ground-breaking ideas.
Managing the success of creative teams can be quite challenging. Using these three strategies will help you to create an environment that can optimize your team’s potential to innovate and solve problems. If you get it right, it can feel like alchemy.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2020/02/19/how-to-optimize-diversity-and-creativity-in-teams/
