Encourage Creativity to Foster Innovation

Sales Representative, HR Recruiter, Payroll Specialist, Marketing Coordinator, CEO, Board Member. At first glance, these job titles appear to be unrelated—requiring different sets of skills and uniquely ranked within the office hierarchy. But these seemingly diverse positions uphold one glaring commonality: the need for innovation.

Innovation most often occurs when something new or different is introduced— often a product or service. Giving nonprofits a leg up on their competition, creativity and innovative ideas can help advance mission objectives.

Learning how to increase productivity, whilst saving time, money, and other resources, requires an extensive process of trial-and-error. However, due to a lack of encouragement and seldom office-wide participation, many nonprofits are handicapping their potential innovators.

Innovative ideas within the workplace are often unheard or simply ignored. Afraid of stepping outside of procedural guidelines, many employees shy away from sharing their creative input—especially to higher authority figures.

Follow these 4 strategies to make innovative thinking an accepted standard for every job position:

1. Set aside time and funds to help creativity levels grow. Providing ample resources for innovation will enable your workers to produce more ideas, which can lead to greater creativity flow.
2. Encourage office-wide participation, regardless of an individual’s job description. It’s simple: the more people who collaborate with one another during a brainstorming session, the greater the likelihood of interacting ideas.  Successful innovation is often the product of multiple ideas.
3. Harness a sense of confidence prior to tackling more ambitious goals. Have your team initially focus on solving simple problems through innovative thinking.  Once your employees see their ideas transformed into effective realities, they will feel better equipped for more out-of-the box thinking.
4. Foster consistent, risk-free brainstorming sessions. While not all ideas are great, they can be the stepping stones needed for innovative achievement. Innovative brainstorming is a time to make mistakes, so create an unfiltered environment where your employees are free to share any and all ideas.

Innovation provides organizational growth opportunities and keeps your nonprofit from remaining static.  Through allocated resources and abundant reassurance, your employees will adapt innovative thinking as a second-nature behavior. Building a unified team effort, through open brainstorming opportunities, will create inclusive internal relationships and strong external impressions.

Learn more tasks to breed innovation here.