Team Creativity: Strategies for Innovative Thinking

Throughout my career, I have heard many leaders complain that their teams needed to be more creative and pursue innovative approaches. The conversations usually quickly turned to the shortcomings of team members and how they could be encouraged to innovate more.

It was only when I worked for someone who excellently fostered the creativity of their team that I recognized the core of the problem (one that leaders with low-innovation teams usually ignore): it's not the team's behavior that is the problem, but the behavior of the leader, which stifles creativity and innovation.

So if you are faced with the challenge of leading a team tasked with approaching business processes more innovatively, you should first focus on yourself and work on these 15 points to improve your own performance!

1. Get to know the individual talents of each team member – the areas (professional or personal) where someone excels and releases enormous energy. People are often particularly creative in these areas, even if the skills themselves are not necessarily considered "creative."
2. Enable everyone to contribute their individual talents to the company's success, regardless of how these talents relate to their respective positions. View business life like a game, in which you are clearly the cheerleader for your team, not the referee.
3. Offer your team training on tools that can enhance their creativity.  
4. When presenting a project, you should spend 90% of your time describing the intended goal and only 10% on describing the implementation.  
5. Do not answer all of your team's questions. Instead, ask counter-questions to stimulate creative and strategic thinking.  
6. Give your team more freedom than they expect. Make it clear to them how much leeway they actually have.
7. Find the most likely solution for a project and pay attention to when your team is on the right track to encourage them. This way, team members feel connected to the ideas that have been developed.  
8. Start every brainstorming session with a clear goal and a list of well-founded, in-depth questions. Even better: have the session moderated by someone else to allow maximum creative freedom.  
9. Hold a 'Plagiarism Friday,' where team members bring in great ideas from other industries and explain what makes these ideas innovative and creative. (And yes, I 'borrowed' this idea.)
10. Listen to new ideas before you speak yourself or even think about what you want to say.  
11. Let your team members present their new ideas and recommendations to you and then also to your supervisor.  
12. Be willing to accept ideas and solutions that work, even if they differ from your original concepts.  
13. Give your team members full credit for all of the group's successes.  
14. When a team member makes a mistake, direct their attention to making amends (e,g. solving the problem for external or internal customers) and to figuring out what can be learned from it for future improvements.  
15. If you consistently and systematically apply these practices over a longer period, you will be amazed at how creative your team becomes.

Fostering a creative and innovative team environment is a direct function of conscious, supportive leadership. The 15 practices outlined—from understanding individual talents to granting freedom and giving full credit—demonstrate that the leader's role is not to dictate solutions but to enable and amplify the team's potential. This emphasis on recognizing and utilizing employee strengths is perfectly aligned with modern HR strategy. Organizations using IceHrm can operationalize this by leveraging the system's Skill Management and Performance Appraisal modules. By systematically identifying the unique, often "non-traditional" talents of each team member and incorporating rewards for learning from mistakes, IceHrm helps formalize the supportive, non-punitive culture necessary for creativity to flourish, transforming a leader's positive intent into measurable, sustained organizational innovation.