Building Perfect Creative Team

One misconception around creativity is that creative act is essentially solitary. Most of the world's important inventions resulted not from the work of one lone genius, but from collaboration of a team with complementary skills. Managers should build teams with the ideal mix of traits to form a creative group and then establish the conditions that make creativity much more likely to occur.

Most of us have the misconception that creativity is like a genie that can't be bottled. It is almost impossible to determine who from your team will be involved in a creative act and secondly, you cannot predict what action will end up being creative, or precisely when or how it will occur. Further, the characteristics that are necessary for creative work seem contradictory, and they rarely exist in one person.

Most of the ideas in today’s organizations are actually a result in a cohesive and diverse team. Teams are increasingly important in today's businesses as they ensure a level of creative output that is greater than what individuals working alone are capable of achieving.

In order to achieve creative output from your teams, you have to carefully examine the composition of your group. You need to make sure that your group, as a whole, has all the requisite skills and attributes that help a group produce creative ideas. Recent research has shown that, as a manager, you can create the conditions that make creativity much more likely to occur. That is, you can increase the probability of innovation.

So what's involved in creating these conditions?

Carefully determining the composition of your group and ensuring it is a diverse group and allow flexibility. Flexibility is the individual's ability to produce not only a large number of responses, ideas, or solutions to a problem, but also a variety of responses, ideas, or solutions to a problem.
Enriching the workplace environment—the psychological and the physical environment to encourage innovation. The allow degree of psychological openness; based on the belief that creative behavior requires a person to consider a variety of information when processing information and to keep an "open mind."
Providing tools and techniques that enhance creativity and idea generation. Individuals and groups who make important discoveries pass through a number of stages. The stage of illumination, when a flash of insight occurs, is the next-to-last stage. Although this stage tends to get the entire glamor most innovations come about only after much hard work, many dead ends, and more than a few apparent breakthroughs that don't pan out.
Managing the process of innovation so that the best insights and ideas are translated into innovative products, services, and ideas.

Preferred Thinking Styles

Teams ensure a level of creative output that is greater than what any individual could achieve. The key ingredient here is intellectual diversity. You need people with different areas of expertise and deep knowledge in different disciplines, but you also need people with different thinking styles. To create a creative group one should focus on preferred thinking styles, functional specialties, and the particular skills that influence how a person approaches a problem. An intellectually diverse group thinks more creatively and is more likely to generate innovative solutions. You can't make people adopt a different thinking style, but you can orchestrate thinking styles in such a way that your group's output benefits from the different perspectives.

The preferred thinking style is the unconscious way a person looks at and interacts with the world. When faced with a problem or dilemma, a person will usually approach it by thinking in the way she is most comfortable. And although each style has particular advantages, no one style is better than another.

There are many different ways to describe how people think and make decisions. When different thinking styles rub against each other, creative sparks fly. That's the insight behind the phrase creative abrasion. For the purposes of ensuring that your group has all the characteristics necessary for creative work, given below are some different thinking styles.

1. People with Imagination Skills:

Being creative implies always being positive in the world; enabling us to convert any problem into an opportunity. Creativity enables us to engage ourselves to do new and better things and let us take one step closer to attain our full potential. Creative thinking starts with imagination as it brings about something that did not exist or was not known before, so it has to be imagined first. They show the capability to imagine or invent something new. It is not the only quality but also skills that are needed to do a particular task in a productive manner. These people are more comfortable with ideas and concepts, with the "big picture."

2. People with Conceptual Skills:

The creative imagination must have a purpose, an objective to serve the responsibilities of the business. Conceptual people define the problem by comparing it to a clear vision for the future. They have a novel, transformational ideas and get things started and able to paint a picture. Conceptual people tend to lose energy at implementation. These people prefer logical processes and orderly ways of approaching problems.

3. People with Analytical Skills:

They define the problem by developing a clear picture of the current situation and select the solution based on pros/cons analysis and will always emphasize on metrics. They will ensure that the product or result must be something that can be held in great esteem, i.e. having admirable qualities, especially of intrinsic value. These people tend to process information internally first before presenting the results to others. These people like things more open; they tend to be more comfortable with ambiguity and often want to collect still more data before reaching a decision.

4. People with Structural Skills:

They focus on process and procedure and have ideas on improving efficiency and effectiveness while retaining structure. They are generally energized by plans, initiative, and implementation and seek closure to items. These people tend to prefer hard data, concrete facts—information that is closely tied to the five senses. These people tend to prefer closure—they like having all the loose ends tied up.

5. People with Social Skills:

These folks are good at bringing people together to discuss and define the problem. They are attracted to problems involving interpersonal interaction and look to see what others are doing (best practices). They are the ones who is motivators and encourages group cohesion. These people look to other people as the primary means of processing information. These people are more attuned to emotional cues; they are more likely to make decisions based on the values or relationships involved.

Everyone exhibits all five of these tendencies, but they do it in varying degrees. For example, it's not that a feeling person is incapable of logical thought rather; it's that his or her thinking about a decision tends to be guided by the emotional impact of that decision on key relationships. Start with yourself: how would you characterize your own thinking style? Knowing your own preferences helps you appreciate other thinking styles—you begin to understand how different perspectives can complement or round out your own.