Managing Creative People

Innovation: How Well Do You Support and Manage Creative People? 

There are ten key areas that you need to consider when assessing how well your organisation manages and encourages innovation. These areas include: your people, the culture of the organisation, rewards and recognition, performance management and competencies. Of these, the fundamental area is people. Unless you are supporting and managing creative and innovative people in your organisation effectively, none of the other areas will make any significant difference.

Here are the six “Must-Ask” questions which will enable you to determine how well your organisation is doing in this area. Depending on your job role and the size of your business, you will probably need to get the answers to at least some of these questions from HR staff, line managers and others. 

In each case, the follow-up questions that are suggested beneath the main question should be used for verification. This is not to suggest that people will deliberately answer dishonestly. However, when we are asked a question that looks for the answer “Yes”, it is human nature to give that answer if we possibly can. The follow-up questions challenge vague and potentially unreliable answers by looking for detail, examples and specific data.

1. Do you (i.e. does your organisation) know which employees are the most creative and innovative? How does it know? How does it store and use this information?
2. Do your most creative and innovative people consider that they receive appropriate recognition by the organisation? How do you know the answer to that question? How often do you ask them?
3. Do you distinguish between creative people and innovative people in your organisation? If so, how?
4. Do you distinguish between creative/innovative people, and the rest whose job it is to maintain stable conditions? If so, how? And what do people say about the distinction? (for example, are your creative people labelled ‘difficult’ or are the others labelled ‘boring’?)
5. When recruiting creative and innovative people, do you use specially designed selection methods? What are they? When were they last updated?
6. Do you ensure that your creative and innovative people are deployed in work that makes best use of their talents? Who ensures that happens? How do they do it?

Some of these questions touch on other areas of organisational innovation management like performance management and the organisational culture. However, they will all serve to give a very clear indication of your organisation’s overall approach to creativity and innovation. 

And if the answer to two or more of these questions is “No” or “Don’t know”, then your organisation will be falling behind in the innovation race.

These questions are derived from The Business Innovation Audit - a fully scoreable, self-assessment audit from Cambridge Strategy Publications.

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