Managing Creative People - Essay Example

Managing Creative People The work of a manager these days is not easy, but it can be exciting especially if one works with creative people and the survival of the company depends on the output of creative people working with you. America competes with the rest of the world by selling high value-added products at the cutting edge of innovation, spurred on by the pressure of being the model of a free market where companies try to win the favor of fickle-minded customers who look for value in everything they buy, from organic cotton pillow covers with nifty designs at Wal-Mart to the latest model from car manufacturers. The companies that win the hearts of customers in the marketplace are those whose managers are best at doing one of the toughest jobs on earth: managing creativity (Edersheim, 2004). Creativity means many things to many people, and it is not only found in engineering, art, and design teams within the company. It can also be found in finance and in sales and marketing, even in seemingly mundane jobs as administration, records-keeping, and logistics, now called supply chain management, a creative way of describing a complex process that is fast becoming a source of competitiveness (Tan, 1998). Creativity can be useful in developing new products, but it also helps save costs (see those suggestion boxes scattered all over the office), time, and jobs, raise revenues, increase output, motivate people, discover new customers, and keep old ones. In fact, the problem really lies not in making people exercise creativity, because they are normally eager to exercise this power that most humans possess. The real problems are: first, how to ensure that they exercise useful creativity; second, how to choose which of the 'creative' solutions will work; third, how to 'manage' the creative process so that those whose ideas are not accepted do not stop being creative; and fourth, how to turn creative ideas into profits for the company and its stockholders (Lapierre and Giroux, 2003). In this paper, we attempt to suggest concrete strategies to solve the problems of managing employee creativity with a few basic rules based on several decades of experience of what works and what do not work. We will refer to articles in journals, periodicals, and management classics from authors who have proven themselves in the past as competent managers. But before we begin, we need to keep two points very clear in our minds. First, we consider only an organization filled with people like you and me who think, breathe, move, and have the minimum of intelligence to be employed. These pointers on managing creativity may not work, for example, in a penitentiary work detail, or in a firm where the workers are "challenged" in one way or another. For examples like those, we need different models of management. Second, the creative people we want to manage are human beings whom we assume to be motivated to do well and contribute to the world by earning a decent living. Therefore, we are not talking of criminals or cult members who exercise their creativity in ways that are not considered normal. In other words, we want to discuss how to manage a group of psychologically balanced people who are intelligent and highly motivated to exercise exceptional levels of creativity in their ordinary work, a task that by itself is tough enough and guaranteed to make any well-intentioned manager challenged and equally creative. The Rules of Creative Engagement How does an ordinary manager handle creative workers We can follow a few basic rules. Don't Fake It Before he was hired as IBM's CEO, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. was a McKinsey & Company consultant, then an executive in a company that sold credit cards (Amex), biscuits, and cigarettes (RJR Nabisco). Tapped to turn around one of the best technology companies, he admitted in his first interview for the job that he was not qualified because he lacked the technical background (Gerstner, 2002, p. 10). In fact, one of the first pieces of advice he got from his older brother (a retired IBM executive) was to buy a home PC and to learn how to use it to log on to the company's internal messaging system (p. 34). Some may interpret your admission of what you do not know as a sign of weakness, but misrepresenting your skills to the technical staff is a worse sign of weakness. They will lose their respect for you and ask themselves (and worse, ask each other) what else you may be hiding. Showing respect for the skills of people is a very good way to convince them that their help is important for the company. Most of them want to do a good job, and if they see that you are sincere and open with what you do not know, they will realize that you will have an open mind and listen to them when you ask for their ideas (Hendrickson, 2002). Nothing shuts off the creative mind more than knowing that their creativity cannot be expressed. This is the problem with know-it-all manager types who give the false impression that they know more or as much as the technical people do when, in fact, they know nothing. Knowing what you do not know will motivate most of them to teach you (and technical people like doing that). And if they abuse their knowledge, you as the manager know what to do. After all, you have power. Show them what you know A manager usually occupies his position, whether or not he has a technical background, because he possesses the skill set needed for his new position. Technical people are highly specialized in their approach to problem solving, choosing elegant solutions that may reflect precision but do not comply with what customers want, or with what the manufacturing people could realistically produce. Managers are good at communication and motivation, and this is what technical people need: they want to know the problem you want them to solve, and what solution would result in profits for the company and the satisfaction of your customers. This is where your managerial skills become useful. Having a technical background can be either an advantage or not depending on how you use it to get what is right for both the customer and the company. Knowing what is right is a managerial task: how flexible are the deadlines and the budgets, how reliable are the feedback from sales and marketing, and how realistic are the objections of manufacturing These are questions that managers have to think about, and having a technical background may help but is not absolutely necessary. What you need is the managerial quality of knowing whether the solution you get is the best for the given situation (Sonnenburg, 2004). An example is the design of the Motorola RZR mobile phone, where a team of technical and non-technical managers worked with the best minds of the company to come up with solutions that defied logic and convention (e.g., putting the internal antenna at the lower half of the phone instead of placing it in its usual position on the upper half) to come up with a blockbuster product (Lashinsky, 2006). Remember, a manager rises because of his strengths, not his weaknesses, so use those strengths to manage your group. Show your technical people what you've got and what you do well and you will earn their respect. Best of all, they will see that you and they can make a great team, with them being left "alone" to create new products and you learning how to communicate these to the rest of the world. Ask if you don't know Your honesty has made you admit what you know and do not know, so you should show your honesty by asking questions if you neither understand the answer nor the explanation. The best managers are those who know how to ask the right questions, starting with their favorite phrases like "Please help me understand" or "Explain this to me" and not stopping until they really understand what they need to understand. Having reached this stage, one might be tempted to look smart. Don't, or you will lose whatever honesty and respect capital you have gained thus far (Carson and Carson, 1993). A good side effect of asking questions until you understand the answer (and the technology) is that you are training technical people how to communicate by expressing their ideas in clear terms. Sometimes, you have to ask not as a manager with a technical background but as a customer or someone in sales who wants to know all the answers to all the possible questions the customer, supplier, or production supervisor would ask (Andriopoulos, 2003). By learning how to ask, you teach techies how to explain the product design, maybe even carry out some design simplifications that would enhance the product's ease of use to the customer. Lastly, ask questions intelligently and try to avoid rhetorical questions that may sound insulting. For example, if you ask: "What do you mean the component is too big" you can be understood as saying: "You idiot! You haven't used your mind!" Soon, your staff will give you only those answers that they think you want to hear. Accept the information you get whether or not you like it, and then paraphrase the question so that you convince your staff that they have to find a way to make that big component fit (Oldham and Cummings, 1996). Asking questions trains your people to communicate and keeps you informed on what is happening, how each one is pulling the cart, and whether you can meet your deadlines. This is a very good feedback mechanism that will allow you to manage your group more efficiently. It also causes your staff to question their own assumptions, helping them improve their work (Hendrickson, 2002). Keep a People Focus Managing is about keeping the people working for you motivated so they perform at the highest level of their individual and team ability. Your ability to work with people is what made you a manager. After all, management is getting things done through others (Drucker, 1997). Keeping your people motivated is a complex exercise. Some respond to tangible rewards, while others prefer intangible ones. Some like working alone, others working with a team. Some like to lead, others prefer to follow. One set of skills a manager should hone is the ability to know what makes each team member click, each one's working style, how to stimulate creativity, and the bodily and emotional signals each one shows and their meanings. What works for one may not work for another, or what worked for you may not work for them. This is where the manager has to do some heavy thinking, analyzing each team member so that he or she can be given the right assignment and put in the best place so as to do the work in the best way (Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, 1997) For example, attending a technical discussion on a topic you may be ignorant about is not necessarily bad, as this allows you to be sensitive to the body language and nuances of communication that each one is showing. You may be able to work with them and they with you, but if you do not get them to work with one another, you have a big problem in your hands. This allows you to spot potential problems and resolve them before they blow up. After all, it is a manager's job to solve small problems so that they do not get bigger. Learn on the Job One skill that good managers have is the ability to learn new things without giving up. If you are a non-technical manager, you need to learn something about the work that your people do. You do not have to be the best at it, or should learn so much that you start threatening your people and begin acting like a know-it-all-you-can't-fool-me manager type who starts throwing his weight around. Having gone this far, a good manager of technocrats should show that you are interested in what other people do. They should see you doing your homework and exercising creativity and initiative on your own. This will motivate them to do the same, perhaps learning how to be a good manager or communicator so that they will know how to deal with you (Englander, 2004). This is part of the mutual respect that needs to be developed between the manager and his or her team. In the same way they know that you will ask when you do not understand them, they also know that they can ask you questions (about the customer, other departments, the economy, pricing strategies, and other topics) and will be given an honest answer. Your problem is knowing where to start, and the answer is that which would be most beneficial for you to do your job effectively. Since your job as manager is to get things done through other people by channeling their creativity, you should find out how you can accomplish this. It can be technical or not at all (Gagne and Deci, 2005). One of the first things that Carlos Ghosn, the Lebanese-Brazilian-French Renault executive who turned around Nissan Japan, learned how to do was to eat Japanese food and speak Japanese so he could bond with his Japanese managers, engineers, and workers when he visited factories. This allowed him to reinvigorate and reform Nissan's existing culture and rallied most of his 180,000 workers to his cause of making the company profitable. In return, he also taught his Japanese managers how to speak English (Ghosn, 2005). Final Management Challenge Galbraith's words (1967) on the technostructure's role in running the corporation continue to hold true in today's globalised market-driven economy, with customers on one hand and technocrats like engineers and Wall Street financial analysts on the other. Squeezed in the middle are the managers who motivate designers and creative workers so that the business can satisfy the desires of bankers, stockbrokers, and shareholders. Mumford (2000) considers the three most important factors in managing creativity: knowledge acquired through study and experience, process that involves the clear definition of problem and customer needs, and work styles, both that of the manager and the creative worker. The basic rules we have outlined above touch on each of these factors. While management practices can enhance the likelihood of innovation, it is ultimately the technical worker who is the source of the new idea. The best work that a manager can do is to lay down the foundations that begins with gaining the trust of the workers, defining in as clear a manner as possible the problem that needs to be solved, and motivating workers to give their best effort in solving the problem. The tough job facing the manager is to give creative workers the resources and time they need so they can think clearly without losing sight of the key objectives (customer satisfaction and creating shareholder value) while at the same time ensuring that everyone achieve their own personal and professional objectives (personal satisfaction at exercising their creativity, possible career advancement, being adequately and satisfactorily compensated). This is a managerial challenge that demands the highest levels of management creativity. Reference List Andriopoulos, C. (2003). Six paradoxes in managing creativity: An embracing act. Long Range Planning, 36, 4, 375-388. Carson, P.P. and Carson, K.D. (1993). Managing creativity enhancement through goal setting and feedback. Journal of Creative Behavior, 27, 1, 36-45. Drucker, P.F. (1997). Managing in a time of great change. London: Butterworth-Heinemann. Edersheim, E. H. (2004). McKinsey's Marvin Bower. Vision, leadership, and the creation of management consulting. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Englander, E.J. (2004). The end of managerial ideology: From corporate social responsibility to corporate social indifference. Enterprise & Society, 5, 3, 404-450. Gagne, M. and Deci, E.L. (2005). Self-determination theory and work motivation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26, 331-362. Galbraith, J.K. (1967) The new industrial state. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gerstner, L.V. (2002). Who says elephants can't dance New York: HarperCollins. Ghosn, C. (2005) Managing across cultures. In The World in 2006. London: Economist, 129. Hendrickson, E. (2002). Managing technical people (when you're no techie). Software Testing and Quality Engineering, July-August, 58-59. Lapierre, J. and Giroux, V. (2003). Creativity and work environment in a high-tech context. Creativity and Innovation Management, 12, 1,11-23. Lashinsky, A. (2006). RAZR's edge. Fortune Magazine, June 1. Retrieved 12 August 2006, from: http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/31/magazines/fortune/razr_greatteams fortune/index.htm Mumford, M.D. (2000) Managing creative people: Strategies and tactics for innovation. Human Resource Management Review, 10, 3, 313-351. Oldham, G.R. and Cummings, A. (1996). Employee creativity: Personal and contextual factors at work. Academy of Management Journal, 39, 3, 607-634. Sonnenburg, S. (2004). Creativity in communication: A theoretical framework for collaborative product creation. Creativity and Innovation Management, 13, 4,254-262. Tan, G. (1998). Managing creativity in organizations: A total system approach. Creativity and Innovation Management, 7, 1,23-31. Teece, D.J., Pisano, G., and Shuen, A. (1997). Dynamic capabilities and strategic management. Strategic Management Journal, 18, 7, 509-533. Read More