While pushing employees to the limit might work when tasks are mechanical and monotonous, it’s absolutely the wrong approach for highly skilled, creative positions. In fact, according to Yale School of Medicine neuroscientist Amy Arnsten, intense pressure (good or bad) actually squelches creativity by causing dysfunction in a human’s prefrontal cortex.
With the U.S. unemployment at its lowest rate since the recession ended, your star creative employees may already be considering their options. As Gallup’s recently updated State of the American Workplace report showed, the number of workers who think that now is a good time to find a better job has more than doubled since 2012.
And — from the same study — more than half of employees surveyed said they were actively seeking new jobs or scanning help-wanted ads.
Valuing them, however, isn’t enough. Employees who are under pressure or feel that they’re spinning their wheels won’t give you their best. They need a workplace where they can evolve and grow — even if this means they ultimately outgrow you.
If you want them to fly, set them free.
To spur true creativity and innovation, you must be willing to lose your best and brightest. Here are three ways I’ve learned to keep my teammates engaged in their roles here at Clevertech while still challenging them to grow.
1. Stretch them to explore their abilities.
Many companies view employees as cogs, objects good only for particular purposes. However, unlike humans, objects hold no future potential or past experience. Everyone on your team possesses his or her own personal history, concerns and ambitions. Ignoring these individuals’ futures beyond your company means that, at best, they won’t improve — or, at worse, they’ll burn out. Stretching people requires changing how they see things.
Maybe employees can’t see your bigger picture from their vantage point, only the long, trudging path toward a giant end goal. To challenge and change assumptions, encourage employees to explore the current edges of their skill sets and afford them enough space to practice and expand.
When teammates feel overwhelmed at my company, we break tasks down into smaller components to see what initial product we can come up with from what we already have. Our goal is to figure out how what we’re doing right now could delight…