How to Kill Creativity

1. How to Kill Creativity Harvard Business Review Teresa Amabile

2. Three Components of Creativity • Expertise • Creative Thinking Skills • Motivation

3. Managerial Practices • Challenge • Freedom • Resources • Work-Group Features • Supervisory Encouragement • Organizational Support

4. Challenge • Matching people to the right tasks • Play to their expertise and skills in creative thinking • Stretch employees’ abilities • Detailed information about employees • Not trying to obtain the information necessary to make good connections between people and jobs

5. Freedom • More freedom leads to better creativity • Change in goals or not clearly defined • Not truly granting independence

6. Resources • Time and money • Fake deadlines kill creativity • Keep resources tight

7. Work-Group Features • Pay careful attention to the design of a team • Teams need to show excitement, willingness, and the recognition of what other team members bring to the table • Assembling homogeneous teams

8. Supervisory Encouragement • Make sure the employee feels valued • Failing to acknowledge innovative efforts or by greeting them with skepticism leads to killing creativity

9. Organizational Support • The entire organization needs to support creativity • Reward employees who are creative • Mandate information sharing and collaboration • Fighting and gossip in an organization can lead to the damage of creativity

10. Rewards and Risks • Fostering creativity is in the hands of the managers • Creativity often requires managers to radically change the ways in which they build and interact with work groups. • When creativity is killed, there is a lose of new ideas, energy, and commitment from the employees

11. Questions or Comments