Teresa Amabile in a her Harvard Business blog says there’s a crisis in corporate management. “While the basis of competition has shifted decisively to innovation, most management tools and approaches are still geared to exploit established ideas rather than explore new ones.”
The Creative Leadership Forum came to a similar conclusion from a research project it conducted to answer the question “Is management creative and innovative?”
- 82% of employees see themselves as being creative, whilst only
- 49% view their organisations as creative.
- 50% of the organisations with innovation objectives, have systems and processes which stifle or impede the employee’s abilities to deliver innovation.
In my experience as a coach and creativity consultant, middle management presents some of the biggest impediments to organizational creativity and innovation, unless there is a culture that supports creative endeavours.
Amabile says, “There’s no question that it would be better for a business to learn to work with the creative impulses of its own people. But what would that entail in a large organization? Is the whole notion of managerial discipline antithetical to creativity? Or, as Scott Cook of Intuit recently put it, “Is the end of management near?’ “
Industrial-age command-and-control style management is out of sync in a Creative Economy. I agree with Amabile who says we need to reinvent management in order to:
- Enable collaboration by people with diverse perspectives on a problem
- Respect the fact that creativity thrives in situations where there is slack and redundancy.
- Rethink job design and incentive systems in light of what really motivates creativity: intellectual challenge and public affirmation.
- Manage as though we expect creativity from everyone — not just isolated “lone geniuses”
The Management Innovation Index (MIX), designed to assist organisations in synchronizing leadership, management and strategy for innovative and measurable business outcomes.
MIX gives you a snapshot of your organisation’s management innovation capabilities and capacities at a given moment in time. It does this by surveying your organisational culture, environment, strategy and practice and your employees’ beliefs and attributes in relation to management and innovation. Find out how this assessment to can help you bring about management innovation.
In my opinion there are three things in play here that work against creativity in the workplace.
1. process – management’s firm and unwavering belief in the fact that only process matters and that if it can’t be mesured, it can’t be managed.
2. risk management – most middle and upper management have little ability to perform an in-depth, detailed risk analysis and no willingness or understanding of how to accept risk.
3. punishment – middle management in traditional process oriented companies wants others to take the risk of being creative. If it succeeds then they can take the credit and if it fails they can lay off they blame.
Thanks for your comment Drymocke. What do you suppose is the root cause of the management behaviour you describe?
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