May/June 2002

Be A Dreaming Team

How do you get employees to think creatively? To express their ideas, to think independently, and to take risks? Some people naturally work like this, but most others need a little coaxing. They need to feel safe expressing themselves. Expressing their creative side, especially at work, is a risk—people fear failure. Not only that, it’s just plain easier working in the same old way, rather than trying a new approach or process.

But when employees are encouraged to express their creativity, when they feel allowed to fail, and when they are surrounded by open, honest dialogue, there is a tremendous excitement in the air. People are more enthusiastic and joyful, and their creativity naturally shines through. So how do you get there? It all comes down to culture—a culture that values creativity and acknowledges those who think outside the box. In this issue of Duck Tales™, we’ll consider how to nurture such a culture and how to foster creativity within employees and even within yourself. After all, even the lead Ducks ® can benefit from a gust of creativity.

Boost Creativity at Work
Managerial practices that boost internal motivation are the most powerful means of improving workplace creativity, according to a researcher at Harvard Business School. Intrinsic motivation—resulting from the employee’s internal ambition and passion for the work—along with imaginative thinking, expertise, and just a bit of Duck Tape, thank you, are the cornerstones of creativity.

Several elements help feed these cornerstones:

(1) Freedom. Give employees a clearly defined goal—and the autonomy to choose how to achieve it, allowing individuals to take advantage of their strengths.
(2) Resources. Set realistic deadlines and supply adequate resources to complete the job. Tight deadlines and lack of resources lead to burnout and frustration.
(3) Challenge. Know your employees, and match the best person—not the first available person—to the task. It’s good for someone to feel stretched by an assignment, but not overwhelmed or bored. Poor matching may be the most common creativity killer.
(4) Encouragement. Managers can value employees’ efforts by recognizing creative work throughout the process, even at the occasional dead-end. A climate of unrelenting criticism creates a fear of suggesting new ideas.
(5) Organizational support. Creativity blooms when the organization espouses systems and values that give it high priority. This message should start with leadership and be reflected in companywide practices that stress collaboration and recognize innovation.

Tapping into Creativity
Great leaders must be problem-solvers, mediators, and mentors. They must also be creative themselves. Creativity seldom gets the attention that other leadership traits do. But creativity is as crucial to managing the bottom line as financial savvy. Here are some tips on how leaders can foster creativity within:
* Know the difference between intuition and creativity. Intuition involves listening to life’s hidden clues about how things really work. Creativity, on the other hand, means developing ways to use that insight in new and more effective ways.
* Discover how things work together. We’re often caught up in the small details, but looking at the big picture can give us a better idea of the dynamics of the process.
* Forget the beginning and end. Rather than look at cause and effect, try to discover how things are inter-related and multi-dimensional.
* Take a cue from kids. If you really want to see how intuition and creativity work, watch children play. They possess the natural creativity that we all begin life with.
* Help others look for root causes. Too often, leaders help employees cure symptoms, instead of encouraging them to dig for root causes. Only by digging deeper can people find the real problems and create real solutions.

The Inventor in You
“I am not a great inventor,” said Thomas Edison. “I’m an awfully good sponge. I absorb ideas from every source I can and put them to practical use…. The ideas that I use are mostly the ideas of other people who don’t develop them themselves.”

What can we learn from Edison’s statement? First, originality and creativity rarely stem from a single source. “Original” ideas often are no more than combinations of existing ideas; “new” strategies frequently are improvements of traditional approaches. Creativity is seldom the product of just one mind—it takes people working together for creative sparks to fly: One person’s idea will lead to another’s questions, which will lead to another’s response, and so on.

Most generative breakthroughs, thus, can be credited to not just one individual, but several. Secondly, Edison reminds us that we are all potential inventors. We all have ideas, but we often don’t act on them—and sometimes we don’t even voice them. Who knows what we might accomplish, however, if we actually spoke out and acted on our ideas?

What made Edison the inventor he became was his ability to listen—to others as well as to himself—and his courage to try new ideas and risk failure. When we embrace challenges as Edison did, we can fly to tremendous heights.

Art for Management’s Sake
Business leaders are creative by nature, so it’s no surprise that a good number of them pick up paint brushes, photography equipment, and musical instruments in their spare time. These creative pursuits are not just to express their artistic sides, but also to enhance their leadership skills and business acumen. “I think it is extremely important for any person in a leadership role to be constantly looking for better ways of doing things and more creative ways of meeting the goals and objectives of the organization,” says one chairman, who pursues sculpting and painting.

Some experts believe that building right-brain artistic skills provides leaders with a broader perspective of how to deal with corporate issues. Leaders who trust their intuitive sides and think more creatively—rather than relying strictly on their rational, cognitive side—are more effective and have a greater capacity for understanding complex issues.

The good news is that everyone has artistic abilities, probably more than they give themselves credit for. “I believe many of these talents that we have can be developed—perhaps latently and in degrees—but they can be used,” says a corporate vice president, who builds furniture in his spare time. With increasingly more problem-solving and management skills requiring leaders to call on their emotional, imaginative, and spiritual sides, tomorrow’s successful CEOs may well be those who are able to use their right-brain capacity just as confidently as they use their more analytical left-brain skills.

A Leader’s Many Roles
In “breakthrough thinking,” paradox, chaos, and discontinuity are the norm. These elements allow for the exciting breakthrough and productive changes many companies lack. To encourage break-through thinking among your flock of Ducks® , you must be willing to take on these roles:

Alchemist. These individuals help employees “get the lead out,” and move to “golden” thinking. These facilitators know intuitively that everyone has some hidden piece of creativity waiting to break through.
Dancer. By sparking ideas through brainstorming sessions, these facilitators are unafraid to spin ideas, moving participants gracefully and quickly from one creative moment to the next.
Mad scientist. These facilitators know that the greatest inventions are often unplanned—like penicillin—and they embrace these “creative” accidents.
Actor. A brainstorm leader knows everyone is watching him. Therefore, he must make sure that his audience truly believes he can help unleash their creativity.
Environmentalist. These facilitators waste no idea and can find value in the seemingly unimportant or “bad” ideas.
Law officer. While “speeding” and chaos are encouraged in brainstorming, the leader must know when to rein in the group.
Butler. While it’s common for some leaders to manipulate the thinking in groups, it’s counterproductive to creativity. The leader must be the “servant” to participants and allow them to create solutions.

Introducing Trust E. Duck
With the recent change of our corporate name from Manco to Henkel Consumer Adhesives, we felt compelled to update Manco T. Duck as well. For years the T. has always stood for trust—the trust we strive to build between our customers, our suppliers, our employee partners, and our community.

With trust as a cornerstone of our values and our desire to always deliver extra value, we believe Trust E. Duck suits us going forward. The E. is a representation