Ten Best Practices for Creative Teams
By Steven Kowalski, Ph.D.
Author, Creative Together: Sparking Innovation in the New World of Work
President and Founder, Creative LicenseTM Consulting Services
In Creative Together: Sparking Innovation in the New World of Work, readers reclaim their creativity so that they can co-create more effectively with others. Why? So that we can all invent new futures for ourselves and for the companies, organizations, and causes whose mission we share.
In our work and at our workplaces, we’re all chasing after innovation—the generation of new value. But we’re focused on the wrong thing. Innovation is actually an outcome, the result of one of the most powerful and sustainable forces available to us. Creativity is the spark driving innovative results. If you want innovation, you must activate creativity.
The good news is that every company is rich with creativity, because every person—every employee—has been gifted with an inexhaustible well of creativity and a wealth of new ideas and fragments of ideas that can benefit the company. A company’s job is to create conditions (e.g., culture, processes, structures, governance, and programs) for creativity to flourish. Our job as employees is to activate our creative potential and apply it when the status quo is no longer sufficient to achieve collective, shared purposes.
Our companies need each of us to bring our creativity forward and apply it to improve and optimize the business of “today.” But they also need us to build the business of “tomorrow.” In fact, the biggest innovation opportunities in companies come not from one part of the value-chain alone, but from co-creation within teams whose members cut across functional boundaries. Often, these teams require unconventional membership—even drawing upon competitors and partners from outside the organization.
These are the kinds of teams that can create the future by consciously and intentionally looking beyond boundaries to generate new value. But these teams don’t naturally exist in the organizational structure. They have to be assembled—intentionally—by people who are passionate about a shared purpose and may be working together in addition to their “day-jobs.”
Today, virtually all our work gets done in teams. But cross-functional teams like these—especially those seeking to generate new value—often don’t have the kind of established norms, structures, and familiar patterns of behavior that others do. They are pushing the boundaries of what is known and what is possible: venturing into the unknown. And while some of their challenges are structural, many of the difficulties that arise are interpersonal in nature.
The following ten best practices can help teams engaged in cross-boundary, creative work nip these interpersonal dynamics in the bud, resolve issues that may arise, and succeed in ventures that involve discovery, exploration, and invention.
When outcomes are uncertain, you can be sure that each team member will have their own vision of what success looks like. Sometimes these are not compatible—or are in direct opposition to one another. And typically, visions for success are tied to deeply held values, to our sense of competence, and to our identity.
At one international consulting firm, for example, a team was assembled to invent new services for clients. The team lead viewed success as the institutionalization of his methods for working with top management. This would be his legacy. The rest of the team sought solutions to help clients that could be delivered by the firm’s bench of consultants. That’s what a job-well-done meant to them. These two fundamentally different approaches were never articulated or discussed within the team, leading to constant arguments.
Avoid this type of impasse by building a shared vision for success together, within the team. Spend time clarifying the purpose for creative activity—the business case for change and for the generation of new value. How, specifically, will outcomes benefit people, organizations, and society? Then, dig deeper to connect the purpose to what team members care about; intrinsic and valued goals like making a difference, honing skills, self-expression, building community, or wellbeing.
Get everyone’s ideas about success out on the table. Together, question underlying assumptions about what “breakthrough” looks like. Work to understand both the logic and emotion that drives these beliefs. Find out where the “wiggle room” is in peoples’ perspectives and negotiate a shared understanding of the project, the purpose of the team’s creative activity, and the methods and benchmarks the team will use.
Cross-functional teams engaged in true exploration and discovery can’t rely on familiar norms that govern execution within established departments. Standard processes and tools may not work, and roles may be more fluid and potentially unclear. Even as team members join with a specific expertise or perspective, their unique contribution to the creative process may not be immediately evident.
Here, Meredith Belbin’s work to articulate the core roles on a creative team can offer valuable insight. According to Belbini, on any such team you may find idea makers, idea shapers, idea explorers, idea executors, and potentially a lead or chair role—all of whom contribute to the team’s creative performance in their own, unique ways.
Unfortunately, we tend to think of experts and idea makers as the stars, and we may miscast these people in authority roles on a team. This is a big mistake. Idea makers often don’t know how to lead a team, nor are they typically interested in implementation. Leverage them to spark the generation of a high quantity and quality of ideas. Idea shapers often make better team leads or “work product owners” (WPOs)—influencing and molding the process and ensuring outcomes are aligned with shared vision.
Idea explorers question things, gather information about viability and feasibility, evaluate ideas, and understand the broader impact and implications of the team’s work within the company. Idea executors get things done, working through obstacles, ensuring that nothing is overlooked, and verifying that plans have been completed. And a chairperson—what we might call a Sponsor—serves to motivate and inspire others to do what they do best with a more hands-off approach.
The key is to clarify and respect all of the different ways people can contribute in addition to their technical expertise. Respect each member’s strengths as creators and aspire to bring out the best in each to bring the team up to its optimum performance.
People don’t often talk about the difference between their view of what is ideal or the highest quality and what might be “good enough” or “fit for purpose.” As teams experiment and iterate in their work, each colleague will use personal, underlying (even subconscious) criteria to determine if the project is succeeding.
Challenges can arise if one team member is overly focused on perfection, for example, while the rest are just trying to get something off the ground. Or maybe the team lead enforces their criteria without explaining it or listening to others. If this occurs early in the project, it can squash peoples’ motivation to try something new, different, or unique. On the other hand, members who feel that their ideas and perspectives aren’t being heard often have not done an effective job of explaining and even “selling” their criteria to the rest of the team.
In cases like these, conflicts involving shared criteria for success can lead to subtle resistance, loss of credibility, loss of the perseverance necessary to seek solutions beyond the apparent—and may even lead to open rebellion.
At the outset of a project, clarify what is ideal, what is practical and realistic within shorter, iterative cycles of work, and what is good enough “for now.” Together, decide which criteria will be used to assess the team’s process and progress. Define a set of design principles and talk about what it means to experiment, fail, learn, adjust, and iterate. This is a critical discipline for teams venturing into the unknown on creative ventures.
It’s also critical to determine who your key stakeholders are, who is “sponsoring” the work, and who is the decision-maker. This can be tricky when teams are coming together from across functions, and no one is necessarily “in charge.” But as work progresses, the need for a “home” and a sponsor will increase in relation to the resources consumed. Consider early where sponsorship may eventually reside and seek to understand the criteria for success of potential sponsors and stakeholders.
Creative work requires varying degrees of autonomy. Too little autonomy limits the freedom to think differently, to deviate from the norm or the safest answers, to express points of view that may be at odds with key stakeholders, or to challenge methods to reach desired outcomes. For a creative project to succeed (one that challenges and changes the status quo and generates new value), people need autonomy.
But too much autonomy can be just as harmful as too little. Teams can lose focus—branching out into too many directions and wasting time, energy, and money. The trick is to balance time and space for exploration with clear agreements and radical accountability for outcomes. If cycles of iteration and experimentation cannot demonstrate progress toward outcomes (or the possibility of potential value in the future), teams may need to make the courageous decision to simply stop.
Each project and each team member will need different levels of autonomy at different phases. To manage the ebb and flow, start by exploring preferences for autonomy at the start of a project. Talk about how those preferences may change over the life and requirements of the project. Make agreements—an “autonomy framework”—based on these conversations about when more and less freedom is appropriate. And remember to revisit these agreements along the way.
Be sure to also look at the big picture—the system in which creative work is taking place. What factors in your company’s history and culture might reveal insights about how to manage the balance of autonomy and constraint? How might these factors influence the team’s potential?
The key is to actively strengthen the team’s credibility and build trust between the team and the beneficiaries of desired outcomes—whether they are customers, stakeholders, management, or even internal employees. Proactively demonstrate that the team understands the responsibilities that come with autonomy by communicating with transparency, seeking input across boundaries, and sharing progress in shorter cycles of iteration. These and other strategies will give the team a stronger platform for autonomy.
People have a sense of well-being when their basic needs are met regularly. We have many basic needs, including exploration (the desire to discover new internal and external worlds and understand how things operate), a sense of agency and some measure of control, recognition and respect (being “seen” and valued), play (juggling ideas, one’s self-image and relationships, as well as humor), and the need to balance independence with belonging.
Meeting basic needs is a primary condition for collaboration, mutual inspiration and motivation, the generation of new ideas, and the general effectiveness of a creative team process. At times, however, basic individual needs will conflict with the team’s collective needs. People may, for example, be asked to give up control to improve team knowledge sharing, or they might have to work into the night or on weekends, despite personal concerns and needs outside of the company.
When team members believe there is a balance between their basic needs and the broader collective needs, and that everyone is in the same boat, they are more willing to forego individual needs for a period of time. But if they have been asked time and again to put aside basic needs without seeing the value, or receiving recognition, appreciation, or reward in return, they may undermine the team’s goals through resentment, a loss of commitment, covert resistance, and even open rebellion.
Several simple actions can help avoid this type of conflict, chief among them communication. Build an environment where everyone feels safe to express their concerns, voice dissent, and still be perceived as team players. Then, quickly address any concerns or problems team members raise. Openly acknowledge when members are asked to sacrifice a greater measure of their basic needs, and freely express appreciation for navigating these circumstances.
At other times, the team may need to reconnect with the purpose of the work: to be re-inspired by the work and to rekindle passion that helps members persevere through challenging times. And finally, ensure that the team feels empowered to decide for themselves how best to balance basic needs with collective needs on a daily basis. Leave decisions like flexibility of schedules, vacation schedules, what training is needed and when, how to balance overtime with personal lives, how to make efforts more efficient, and other work decisions up to the team.
In their rush to make tangible, visible progress, creative teams often put discussions of work process issues on the back burner and never get to them. A frequently heard rationale is, “We should be working on what we are supposed to be doing, not wasting time talking about how we are working together.”
But that belief system only leads to trouble. Consider the case of a consulting team working on a large Customer Relationship Management implementation for a client in the United Kingdom. Fear of appearing “difficult” and losing their chances for promotion led several members to avoid raising concerns about how decisions were being made and enforced. The team became increasingly polarized as people talked behind closed doors, formed alliances, and spent more time talking about problems in the team than on client issues. At considerable cost to the team and the company, an outside facilitator was brought in. But ultimately, it wasn’t enough to help salvage the team’s working dynamic.
Time spent building effective work processes is time well spent. At the outset, identify some work process ground-rules for how decisions will be made, how conflict will be handled, what to do if people believe the team is on the wrong track, how acknowledgements will be shared, and how to make the best use of time together.
Be sure to also clarify each team member’s creative work preferences. What is the optimal balance of quiet, heads-down work and active collaboration with others? Do team members work best under pressure, or when there is ample time to explore different options? How will the team manage opportunities for virtual and in-person/hybrid collaboration? What methods are preferred for knowledge-sharing, and storage and access to files? How will leadership be shared across the team?
Once the ground rules and work preferences have been established, schedule time throughout the project to meet and check in with each other to discuss how work processes are or are not serving individual team members, the team as a whole, and the project. Then, adjust the team’s work process accordingly.
Creativity is a contact sport. Team members are bound to bump up against each other in dozens of ways, starting with differing ideas, perspectives, and comfort zones. Conflict is inevitable. First, there is the challenge at every step between staying with tradition and breaking new ground. Next, there may be conflicts about which ideas to pursue, who should be responsible for certain tasks, how to engage partners, allies, and stakeholders, and how to overcome obstacles. Finally, there may be disagreements about how to evaluate the quality, viability, and impact of solutions and the value generated.
Conflict itself is not always a problem. In fact, it can be beneficial to a creative team. Used properly, conflict exposes the diversity of ideas, recommendations, or expertise in a team and helps bring clarity about these differences. Conflict can also uncover areas of confusion, faulty assumptions, or misunderstandings that, left undetected, might lead to poor decisions. The key is to ensure a respectful, generous exchange of perspectives—and to clarify who is the ultimate decision-maker.
In co-creation, conflict and decision-making are intimately intertwined. And conflicts can arise about decisions and the decision-making process itself. Often, accountability for decisions flows between team members at different phases of the project. Sometimes consensus is appropriate. At other times, it might be important to identify a single decision-maker. The key is to clarify which approach is in play. If people understand how decisions will be made, trust that their perspectives and potential objections are heard, and believe that decision-makers have credibility and integrity, you can avoid conflicts about decision-making within the team.
However it arises, manage conflict effectively by taking time to understand each other’s perspectives. Find common ground. Then, examine any remaining differences between team members—or between the team and key stakeholders—and select strategies to resolve the conflict and monitor the resolution process. When there is a healthy diversity of perspectives on a team, appropriate communication and respect for each individual member, and clear decision-making, any conflicts that arise will most likely be temporary and ultimately benefit the quality of the team’s results.
Trust is fast becoming the most valuable currency when creating together within and across systems. Credibility, reliability, fairness, connectedness, and intimacy—the hallmarks of trust—are all tempered by whether others believe each team member is more oriented toward their own gain or more oriented toward the aims, interests, and desires of the collective. In a world where value is co-created, self-oriented people will not garner the currency of trust that is needed to work together in new and evolving ways.
Trust frees up energy to explore the unknown, venture into uncharted territory, challenge obstacles, and realize possibilities. It accelerates the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes and shapes the way people work together. And critically, it opens up the possibility that teams can share leadership—a key ingredient for true, conscious co-creation.
With trust as a foundation, leadership can flow between team members in an agile, fit-for-purpose manner. Instead of relying on traditional roles and outdated leadership behaviors, the team takes cues from the needs that arise in different phases of a project, from the changing landscape in the broader ecosystem, and from the diversity of capabilities and expertise among members. These shifting needs shape when and how each team member might step up into leadership actions like direction setting and decision-making—or when they might follow others.
With trust, creative teams let the circumstances guide how leadership flows between members, and how, collectively, they support each other, create alliances, and act as catalysts for each other. Each team member becomes part of the dance between leadership and followership that sparks innovation, accelerates the co-creation of value, and motivates people to look beyond the usual answers.
Trouble can come if creative teams rely on traditional leadership behaviors like hierarchical control, the power of position, or giving over one’s power to others. These behaviors are part of an old story of leadership—designed to deliver certainty, replication, and predictability. When ingenuity, discovery, creativity and innovation are required for the team’s success, these traditional methods will fail.
Creative teams may still have team “leads” or work product owners. They will still need to engage with stakeholders and decision-makers out in the eco-system who may have veto power over decisions and direction. And there will still be an ongoing give-and-take between the needs of individual members and the needs of the collective. But instead of rigid leadership structures that endure and constrain forward progress, teams with a strong foundation of trust can respond to what emerges with agility and proactively invent new approaches that generate value.
Communication is the lifeblood of every team and company. Consistent, transparent, and generous communication is vital to any team—but especially critical when that team is pushing into the frontiers of what is known and looking across boundaries in search of new value.
First, ensure that each member understands the different kinds of conversations in which they will be engaging, including “what if” conversations (exploring open-ended possibilities), “why not” conversations (identifying constraints to viability, desirability, and feasibility), “how might we…” conversations (ideating, prototyping, and seeking solutions), “how will we…” conversations (planning, implementing, and evaluating), and difficult conversations (anything that is hard to talk about, like mistakes, failures, etc.).
Each of these conversations has different criteria for success. A successful “what if” conversation, for example, requires the suspension of judgment, open-minded curiosity, and imagination. A successful planning conversation requires the participants to align with a shared purpose or vision and to set tangible milestones. “Why not?” conversations are successful when team members see the bigger picture, including larger systems and the external environment, and seek out real-world evidence. Difficult conversations require a learning mindset and the separation of facts from assumptions and interpretations.
Each of these different conversations can also be derailed. “How might we…” conversations may fail if the team hasn’t framed the problem clearly or doesn’t adequately understand customer needs. Planning conversations may derail if team members don’t talk about their implicit criteria for “fit-for-purpose” and “good enough” criteria. “Why not” conversations often fail when team members discount other’s perspectives, or when people who naturally see obstacles are scapegoated as “negative.”
Creative teams know that healthy communication is a key asset as they navigate the unknown and venture into uncharted territory. And it’s not just about getting the content of messages right. It’s also about how messages are delivered and how conversations either build or erode trust. The team flourishes when people bring a learning mindset, open transparency, authenticity, and a spirit of generosity. As a best practice, establish agreements at the start of a project that encourage straight-forward, constructive, and respectful communication. Talk about how agreements and commitments may change or evolve, when necessary, and how people will give each other feedback. Agree that there will be times when team members disagree with each other.
When companies bring together cross-functional teams to solve seemingly unsolvable problems, they anticipate solutions that create new business opportunities. Learning is a critical part of a team’s process, intimately intertwined with the creative process and a cornerstone of meeting these company expectations.
Learning is an active, generative process of weaving and revising our web of knowledge. In learning, new meaning is generated as teams construct knowledge and wisdom in the space between what members already know and what they encounter on their journey together. Through exposure to people and to new concepts, and through participation in experiences, teams build understanding that enables different choices and more effective action.
Creative teams optimize the speed, depth, and breadth of how they learn. In order to optimize speed, a team may need to relax some of its rules and develop the ability to succeed fast or fail fast and move on. That means clarifying hypotheses and assumptions, experimenting, creating “scrappy” prototypes, and incorporating customer input early and often. Teams that learn fast also quickly address interpersonal obstacles before they inhibit collaboration. And they open channels of communication to ensure members speak up to raise questions and concerns early.
To optimize depth, team members need to question the underlying assumptions and principles that guide the team’s actions and to challenge the way things are done, even if that means going against cultural norms and accepted practices. Deep, “indelible” learning requires trust and the kind of work environment where people tell the truth and speak up when questions or disagreements arise. Deep learning is essential if teams want to change the status quo, develop something unique, and generate new value.
Optimizing breadth is all about getting more bang for the buck by having the team and its individual members relax turf and boundary issues and look at their work through a wide-angle—rather than a macro—lens. Where else in the company can the team’s learning be of value? Which efforts already underway could accelerate the team’s outcomes? Who else can be included? How will other people, teams, and systems be impacted by this work? How can the team bring key stakeholders onboard and keep them abreast of its progress, issues, and challenges? These are all vital questions for ensuring that the team’s learning becomes a Superpower for the greater good of the enterprise.
Now more than ever, the companies, institutions, and organizations whose mission we share need cross-functional, creative teams to look beyond boundaries in search of new value. But fostering creativity is rarely easy for companies to achieve, consistently and over time. Any number of pitfalls can slow down—or actually derail—a team’s potential to activate creativity for innovative results. But together, we can change these odds. By adopting the ten best practices described in this article, creative teams can enhance the probability of success, support the natural creativity of each team member, and generate unique-in-class products and services that benefit both customers and society at large.
i Belbin, Meredith. Team Roles at Work. Elsevier Science & Technology Books, 1996
© 2021 Steven Kowalski for Creative License Consulting™. All rights reserved.
