Creative Minds Are Starving To Create, This Is Why Managing Creative People Is Just Different.

While it’s obvious that innovative teams need creative people, it is less clear that once they are part of your team, they will expect to be able to express their creativity and create, they will expect to take initiatives, they will look for a purpose and meaning.

Creative people expect for a direction and guidances, this is why handling ambiguity is not so easy when you are that eager to create something. On the other hand, they defiantly don’t want to be limited and constrained by the problem itself and are looking to explore new ideas.

Motivated employees are important to the company success more than ever, and it is worth working hard to keep your employees happy. Creative people that are too limited in their ability to create will eventually loose their motivation. Why limited? It can be that the team is too much into bug fixing, the process is limiting them, the product manager is giving too detailed specifications with no space for self-interpretation, it may be the internal politics / dynamics that put pressure on the team for deliveries and so on.

One way to handle this lack of creative satisfaction, is to make simple tasks more complex than needed, making a simple “justdoit” task to a complex research task that will just put more risk and ambiguity. Another way is to find some place for self-expression in other projects, but eventually, they will have to settle for something - enough money, enough sleep or enough creative satisfaction (diagram). The good thing is that those people usually know when (and how) to raise flags when somethings is not working right and are striving to regenerate their creative energy.