We often hear it said that in order to be successful in the real world, blank begins at home. The most common things that “begin at home” are charity and education. However, I want to talk a little bit about creativity and success as it relates to business strategy. In the business world, our offices and corporate settings are our homes so to speak. With that being said, the question remains, how can we unleash creativity in those spaces and ultimately in our business strategy?
According to Harvard Business School Online, a business strategy is a foundational building block made up of strategic initiatives in order to create value for an organization and to gain a competitive edge in the market. This strategy will help leaders, namely women, set organizational goals.
In order to understand how to effectively tap into creativity in business, we must “start with why”. As you know, creativity helps businesses to stand out in a competitive market, it also allows owners to develop responsiveness to ever-evolving customer needs, and it has the ability to drive sustainable growth, which in most cases is the end game.
Once you prioritize creativity and understand how important it is to incorporate in your business strategy, you must then focus on applying it across your business. Ways to implement creativity can include: diversifying and empowering your team, developing a flexible work environment, fostering collaboration, and making room for experimentation and risk-taking.
Build a Colorful and Certified Team
Diversity and empowerment should be foundational characteristics of your team. Challenges arise, problems need solving, brainstorming is inevitable, and nothing is one size fits all, so your team should not be one dimensional. Your team should have different cultural backgrounds, ages, ranges of experience and education, and even varying personalities. The more diverse your team is, the more ideas and solutions will be birthed. The spectrum of perspectives could potentially resonate with a broader audience, extending your reach. Moreover, your team could have all the ideas in the world but unless they are empowered to use their voices and share said knowledge or ideas it is futile.
You can diversify and empower your team through various hiring practices to ensure that your company culture is not only made up of different people from different personal and professional backgrounds, but it is also an inclusive space, where diverse people feel heard and comfortable.
You can develop comfortability and openness that makes your team feel validated in sharing their thoughts, ideas, and findings by being the kind of leader who brings everyone to the table, listens, takes ideas into consideration, and then implements those ideas where appropriate throughout the company. Teams are essentially individuals coming together; so your team will only be as successful as the empowered, diverse individuals that are a part of it. Nurture your team into creativity.
Bend it Like Beckham
Introducing flexible work environments may be conducive to the creative process. People thrive in varying settings. Some people are most creative in a group setting or a place with heavy traffic such as a coffee shop. Such places could even help team members draw inspiration. Others may focus better in a quiet space such as a library. Giving your team the freedom and flexibility to choose the environment that allows them to be most productive is an approach that could help unleash creativity. When your team members are in their ideal creative environment, it makes room for them to be productive and offer innovative solutions that keep your customers happy and your business growing!
Two Heads Are Better Than One
In this day and age, collaborative efforts have proven to boost productivity. Innovation is often a byproduct of sharing, be it knowledge, products, services, screen time, etc. Collaboration comes in all shapes and sizes, there are endless examples of what this looks like. Back in the day concerts consisted of an opening act or two and then the main artist; nowadays concerts are a collaboration of a seemingly endless list of performers. This strategy creates more traction and allows for raised ticket prices and hopefully more sold out shows, more profit.
Not only should you create a collaborative environment internally, but making room for partnerships (even with so-called competitors), can have a positive impact on your business. Finding other businesses in similar fields who need you on their team could create a long lasting business relationship that expands your reach to a new audience and gives you social proof among your target audience.
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
Experimentation and risk taking are essential to the creative process as it relates to business strategy. According to womentech.net, innovation requires stepping out of the comfort zone. While this is an important part of the creative process, everything in moderation; take calculated risks. At the end of the day you are still running a business, so you never want to experiment or take a risk to your detriment. Use data such as customer feedback surveys, testimonials, performance metrics, and other analytics to help you determine where you can take a risk. For example, you may not want to take risks during low seasons, but if you have a particular quarter of every year where you’re thriving, that may be the time to launch something new! You can use a combination of risk assessment and intuition to innovate. It is also important to note that offerings are rarely, if ever, perfect on the first round. Trial and error are the name of the game. There may even be instances where you may have achieved a quality offering that you are satisfied with, but it continues evolving into something even better than the original. Creative experimentation and risk taking are necessary to achieve innovation. As the famous quote goes, “the only true failure is failure to try.”
What’s In It For Me (My Business)?
Some of the benefits of applying creativity in a business strategy are: innovation, a boost in productivity, adaptability, and growth. You will have come up with something that is new, the first of its kind, but useful. That is a recipe for creating demand, thus boosting productivity. You will have adaptability, as challenges call for creative solutions (i.e. creating/sustaining businesses during the pandemic). Finally, you will experience growth, once you understand there is more than one way to approach a challenge.
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