What do you mean by “Creative Management?”
Creative management starts with a leader developing his or her own point of view on their industry, their business, and their organizational role. Once this important front-end work is accomplished, creativity must become part of the organizational DNA, built into the strategy, and made ubiquitous throughout all organizational functions, systems, and especially communications. Art-cm specializes in delivering creative management interventions from leadership coaching to team building to workplace design and action learning initiatives that build creative thinking skills as teams solve real-time organizational challenges.
What’s the difference between creativity and innovation?
Creativity is human skill set. It’s a personal, internal process in which previously unrelated knowledge and associations are connected to spark new ideas. Innovation is an organizational output that results when creative ideas are developed and made marketable.
What’s so important about creativity?
Creativity is the raw material of innovative products, services, systems, and processes. While innovation is a buzzword in today’s workplace, few organizations take the time to develop the creative capacity to spark innovative outcomes. Knowledge, skills, and abilities around creativity are the most important qualifications your employees need to keep your organization competitive.
But I’m not creative…
Hmmm… not sure we believe that you’re not creative, but… the good news is that creative workforce management relieves leaders of the burden of having to come up with all the ideas themselves. A leader who manages creatively facilitates two essential workplace components: 1) a creative climate and 2) an innovation culture. A creative climate is a work atmosphere in which ideas and knowledge are freely shared, communication is king, and leadership looks for and encourages associative thinking at all levels of the organization. An innovation culture exists in organizations where good ideas are recognized and developed, and where informed risks are taken regularly in the pursuit of great results. Innovative cultures use current assets to leverage future breakthroughs. You don’t need to be personally creative to recognize the value of a creative climate and an innovative culture, but your role is to facilitate and champion both.
One of our senior managers is very valuable to the company, but is having a hard time getting on board with recent changes to promote a more creative environment. What should we do?
Your manager would benefit from one-on-one executive coaching that specifically addresses leadership skills in creativity and innovation championing. Knowing how to manage to bring out the creative best in one’s direct reports and teams is an essential skill set in today’s economy, yet it’s overlooked in on-the-job trainings and most MBA curricula.
We want our annual offsite to be more engaging – to yield more great ideas, and to feel more energized than it has in the past. Can art-cm help?
Yes. We can lead an array of half and full day workshops that develop individual creative capacity through team processes that are challenging, inspiring, and fun. All of these offerings can be plugged into larger conferences, off-sites and strategic planning initiatives.
Last year we hired a consultant to help us write a five-year strategic plan. It’s already obsolete. How do we know art-cm can deliver lasting value?
Today’s competitive environment changes too quickly for five-year plans to remain relevant. All of art-cm’s offerings change how you think about managing, strategy and delivering value to your customers. The change we’re talking about is agility, the ability to respond to — indeed anticipate – changes and opportunities on the horizon. In this exciting and dynamic economy, successful businesses need two ingredients: a fully differentiated and ubiquitous identity (vision) and a fully engaged and participative workforce. That’s what art-cm delivers, and these ingredients are the bedrock of sustainable competitive advantage.
You promote the art of creative management – does this mean that you defy all kinds of performance metrics?
Not at all. It’s just that we believe that if you only manage what you measure, you may not be managing what has meaning – your organization’s vision, innovation capacity and creative human capital. This is an integrative approach to managing that allows leaders to rely not only on metrics for performance evaluation, but also appraise the intangible, softer skills of their employees, promote creativity and innovation, and maintain the highest level of motivation in their workforce.
Will my employees buy-in to this creativity approach?
Watch the 10-minute video we posted on this site under “Viewpoints.” Not only will they buy in to this approach, but they’ll become more motivated, energized and engaged.
How will my company benefit from hiring you exactly? How are you different from other management consultants?
In addition to clear strategic differentiation and increased workforce engagement and productivity, your biggest benefit will be improved innovation capacity.
There are quite a few innovation consultants around right now. We differ from the “innovation pack” because we know that, without creativity, innovation is a fruitless pursuit. Creativity leads to breakthrough ideas. Innovation is simply the marketable implementation of such ideas. If you start working on innovation without developing the knowledge, skills, and abilities of creativity, well, you’re wasting your money. Our specific experience lies in the intersection of human capital and creativity. In other words, we make leaders, employees, teams, and processes more creative.
If we decide to hire you, how will we know which of your offerings is right for our company?
We’ll conduct a comprehensive assessment of your organization’s creativity and innovation capacity, including leadership 360s, internal scans and company-wide surveys. The resulting data will be compiled to reveal your organizational creativity strengths and challenges. If you decide to move forward, we’ll use the data to create a customized program to meet your needs.