Sparkling Hill Resort
This week I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote presentation to a group of new car dealers in British Columbia. The conference was held at a unique resort called Sparkling Hill. Although it had spectacular views of the Okanagan valley from every room, I was captivated by the crystal architecture that inspired every part of the property (the hotel has 3.5 million Swarovski crystals). The man driving me to the resort said, “Everyone who comes here seems to leave profoundly changed.”
“Why do you think that is?” I asked the driver.
“Because it’s different. Everything about it is meant to help you be more creative. Most hotel rooms look like a box with four walls and it keeps you in the box. Sparking Hill is based on crystal architecture so everything is angled and curved to look like a crystal. It really does force you to think out of the box, literally.”
The driver was on to something. Different surroundings really do force the brain to make new connections. “Epiphanies rarely occur in familiar surroundings,” writes Gregory Berns in Iconoclast. “The key to seeing like an iconoclast is to look at things you have never seen before.”
As a leader you certainly want to inspire your team to develop creative breakthroughs. But are you doing all you can to nurture creativity? Here are three traps that can kill the creative process.
You keep people chained to their desk. Creative breakthroughs rarely happen at one’s desk. They happen on a hiking trail, in the gym, at a coffee shop, on a beach, or at a resort with spectacular views. For four years, I worked as the vice president for media-training at one of the largest public relations firms in the world. The firm operated on a billable hours system, a sure-fire way to kill the creative process. It meant if I wanted to attend a conference to learn something new and I couldn’t bill a client for that time, I couldn’t go to the conference. Even if I had wanted to pay for the conference out of my pocket, I would have to take vacation days to do so. It meant that when I visited a client in the firms’ Venice Beach office, we couldn’t walk two blocks to the beach for a meeting because the employees had to rush back to their desks to fulfill their billable quota for the week. I only recall one off-site lunch with my colleagues in four years! Although the PR firm won new accounts by touting the creative skills of its account teams, it rarely nurtured their creative side.
If you want your team to be more creative, force them out of the office. “Sometimes a simple change of environment is enough to jog the perceptual system out of familiar categories. This may be one reason why restaurants figure so prominently as sites of perceptual breakthroughs…when confronted with places never seen before, the brain must create new categories,” writes Berns.
You hire the same people. Speaking of public relations, I just came across this job requirement for a senior PR specialist: Degree in public relations or communications, minimum 2 to 5 years experience in public relations, ability to demonstrate a high level of proficiency with PC programs such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The trouble is this is exactly the same job requirement as I saw seven years ago when I was applying for positions in public relations. Hasn’t the world changed substantially since then? Few PR firms took a chance on me because I was a former CNN journalist, storyteller, author, and entrepreneur. You’d think these skills would be valuable in a PR firm, but they didn’t fit the requirements.
The PR industry as a whole rarely looks outside its own field for job candidates. The Apple Store, on the other hand, celebrates diversity. In my research I learned that the Apple Store hires former teachers, engineers, and people from a variety of other professions. What you will not find at an Apple Store are a lot of people who worked at the retailer next door. Steve Jobs was smart enough to hire outside his field as far back as the early 1980s. According to Jobs, “Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, and poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
I realize you need to hire some people who have done the exact job in another company. But make sure every team has an outsider. One of the most successful car dealers who I met in Canada told me that his COO came from the home improvement industry, his head of HR was from a completely different industry while another executive came from hospitality. This particular car dealer was also passionate about delivering a superior customer experience. He intuitively understood that it’s better to hire great people who he could train to do the task.
You fail to introduce your team to different ways of thinking. A few years ago LinkedIn invited me to speak to a group of employees on a Friday. On one or two days every month the company would invite people from outside its industry to teach employees new skills. Employees seemed to anticipate these monthly sessions. They learned public speaking, organizational skills, even yoga. If you just hang around the same people, you won’t learn nearly as much as you will by exposing yourself to people outside your field.
I’ve been invited to share ideas with executives at a very influential automotive web site because its founder is a voracious reader and believes in disrupting the status quo. As a result he invites people from outside his company to share ideas on communication skills, design thinking, and management. As a result, hundreds of employees do their jobs better and develop creative new initiatives that benefit themselves, their colleagues, and the company. Not surprisingly, the company is often cited as one of the best places to work.
Some companies send their teams to a resort like Sparkling Hill to jump-start their creativity. That’s fine and I’m sure your team appreciates it. But what happens when they’re back from nature and back to the cubicle? Are they still creative? Don’t kill you’re team’s creative potential. Nurture it every day.