MANAGING CREATIVE THINKING STYLES IMPACTS EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE
How leaders manage the differing creative thinking and problem solving styles has an effect on innovation performance.
All individuals, teams and organizations differ in their creative thinking and problem-solving styles. How leaders manage these styles can have a significant effect on innovation performance.
The most effective leaders of the 21st century will help individuals and teams to coordinate and integrate their differing styles to drive change through the innovation process that includes continuously discovering and defining new problems, solving those problems and implementing the new solutions.
Leaders must appreciate individuals’ differing preferences for various stages of this process. The Basadur Innovation Profile and the thinking tools it triggers encourage and enables people to think together in innovative ways. Top corporations involve employees at all levels in putting their knowledge to work by doing innovative thinking that is “on the money”.
BLENDING IMAGINATION AND PRACTICALITY FOR INNOVATIVE RESULTS
21st century leadership means getting good at thinking differently, and coaching others in overcoming “The Thinking Gap”; the transition between school and work that most employees encounter when they join the workforce.
In the world of work:
• Nobody defines your assignment
• Employees must live with not knowing what you’re “supposed to do”
• Employees have to find out what to do by themselves
• Employees have to function when the territory is uncharted with no signposts
Such emphasis is not taught in formal education. On the contrary, most students leave school totally immersed in the solutions they have learned, then find that in every day work these solutions don’t often match the ill-structured problems they encounter. Moreover, instead of finding solutions, the most important skill often needed is finding and defining the right problems in the first place.
This mismatch of school learning versus work requirements is found even in schools where problem solving is the key objective, such as engineering schools. Research confirms that in many engineering schools, students learn to solve textbook problems which:
- Are constrained, well structured
- Use established solutions
- Require finding the right answer
Whereas workplace problems tend to:
- Be ill-structured and often unanticipated
- Need unique unknown solutions
- Uncover additional unidentified problems
In corporations there really are only two kinds of problems people have to grapple with: programmed and non-programmed. Programmed problems are those we see all the time. We have developed routine procedures for handling them. For example, when a consumer complaint is received, it is sent directly to a unit that has the prescribed method of triggering a response.
On the other hand, non-programmed problems are ill structured and may have never been seen before and may never occur again. These problems are obscure, and half the battle is defining them, long before the solutions can be determined. There are no formulae to follow, they are complicated. For example, the business community and governments being totally unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic.
SYNERGIZE ANALYTICAL AND IMAGINATIVE THINKING
Non programmed problems require innovative thinking which includes anticipating problems as well as defining and solving them. For leaders to prepare their organization, they can start by taking the time to understand the different thinking styles of their employees. This can result in an environment that fosters innovation and becomes part of the corporate culture.
However, more than the right environment is needed. Successful Innovation also requires skills in a process that engages employees in collaborating and leveraging their diverse thinking styles and diverse knowledge. Successful leaders understand the power of this approach and the results that can be harnessed.
The Basadur Method combines imaginative and analytical thinking through the four stages of innovation, emphasizing imagination more in problem generation and conceptualization and emphasizing analytical thinking more in optimization and implementation.
LEARN HOW YOU THINK IN THE CREATIVE / COLLABORATIVE PROCESS CLICK HERE
