Blocking creative progress

In her maiden speech, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy declared the creative industries key drivers for growth in the UK, outlining how they can support the government’s mission to fuel new growth. It’s clear the government sees the value these sectors and the individuals working in them bring to the economic agenda. Why then, is creativity not leveraged more efficiently on the wider business agenda?

One of the biggest challenges is siloed company culture, built on pre-existing divides between creative and other roles. This reflects the entrenched expectations employees and managers have about the remits of a job role. What’s more, it also often limits the training staff have access to. If a role is not seen as strictly creative, there’s usually reluctance (or simply no consideration) to put the employee forward for creativity training. 

Too often, creativity is kept for special occasions, and unleashed only when there’s a ‘tangible’ need for it, such as a client brief. But it can benefit every aspect of business life, from recruitment to how to conduct meetings or deliver complex projects. 

Another challenge is that when training is provided, it’s rarely linked to practice, making it hard to apply to day-to-day tasks. Without concrete ways to turn learnings into actions, training is quickly forgotten or dismissed as not relevant.

As a result, the status quo remains, preventing businesses and, more importantly, people from tapping into these valuable resources. 

If leaders want to see change and better results, they need to first shift how their staff think and work. 

Upping everyone’s Elvis

That’s what EssenceMediacom, the UK’s largest media agency, set out to do. The company has 2,000 staff, including many creative as well as non-creative roles, working together to help companies such as Tesco, Boots, and TUI achieve breakthroughs in their respective fields. 

It wanted to enable its people to think more creatively. As the breakthrough agency, everything EssenceMediacom does needs to be about providing innovative solutions for its clients. It wanted to embed this into everyday work as the more you build the capability throughout the company culture, the more likely you are to get multiple breakthrough ideas. It’s diversity of thinking that delivers creativity rather than solely relying on those in creative job functions.

To achieve this, EssenceMediacom wanted to initiate a company-wide shift in how people approach creativity, and enable all employees to start leveraging it in their work. That’s why it turned to training consultants Upping Your Elvis to create a transformation programme that would not only change the company culture, but provide people with practical guidance on how to turn creative thinking into their personal growth resource.

But this wasn’t something a one-off session could do. Instead, an eight-month programme consisting of Upping Your Elvis’s Energy Lab – a series of weekly experiments designed to help people introduce behavioural change and learn within the context of their job – was put in place to give people time to adapt, explore and review their learnings. 

Building the framework for change

To kickstart the training, the entire company joined a day-long session offsite where the framework was set for the next months. The day was used to outline what a growth mindset is, and play around with creative thinking techniques that can help fuel it. Bringing the company together helped create a shared understanding that a culture where creativity is everyone’s property is a springboard for success.  

But you can’t just have a one-off session and tell people to go be creative – first you have to create an environment where they feel comfortable doing so. That’s why the initial session had a heavy focus on psychological safety and appreciation, helping people get comfortable with the idea of experimenting with creative thinking skills.

Over the next few months, staff were sent a weekly experiment dedicated to fostering a culture of everyday learning, being clinical about using your time and focusing on what counts. The experiments covered topics that people often struggle with, such as requesting feedback or showing appreciation for work well done. Crucially, all the exercises were practical instead of theoretical, enabling participants to experience the benefits straight away. Staff didn’t have to put their work aside to participate, they were able to do the training as part of their usual work.

Gradually, through the weekly tasks, people were encouraged to apply their learnings in practice to find new ways to drive the breakthrough mindset and inject creative thinking into everyday tasks to enable more disruptive and rewarding results. 

Taking the learnings to work

As the programme progressed, the results soon started to become visible. 

Cultural change is about empowering people. In this case, it was about acknowledging that everyone has something to give in terms of creativity – and they can, and should, bring that to the work they do. 

Eight months following the kick-off session, the number of people who felt they “applied their learnings brilliantly” had increased by an incredible 1,461%. This showed that the training had succeeded in providing participants with tangible ways to channel their creativity into action, overcoming the challenges applying training to real work sometimes brings. 

What’s more, people also reported a nearly 20% increase in effectiveness, company-wide and across different job functions. This is a direct benefit to the business, resulting in a more productive workforce across all departments. 

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the training resulted in a 77% increase in people saying that they don’t just like, but actually “love their work”. The workshops had given people the skills they needed to achieve more in their roles and make the everyday more rewarding and enjoyable. 

Feedback from the team showed that depending on the participant, the training had a positive impact across very different areas. One participant said that it had helped him not be afraid of his big ideas, but instead pursue them with structure. Another had found new perspective and courage to feedback, saying the training helped him and the team step outside of themselves to look at the way they work, be critical and make improvements. The benefits ranged from ideation to finding a more efficient way to run meetings, approach briefs and structure your time to get the most out of the working day. 

Enabling creative thinking

What the programme showed is that you can’t dictate cultural change. But you can enable it.

It’s up to the employer to put the framework in place to help people gain the confidence, freedom and inspiration they need to start exploring with creativity, without fear of failure, or targets to meet. The company-wide mindset needs to evolve to encompass a wider concept of how we see creativity, and how people can own it and use it to deliver breakthroughs in their everyday tasks – regardless of what their role is or if the activities fall under the traditional remit for creatives. 

The feedback from the participants shows that once people are given training to help adopt a growth mindset and apply creativity in their role, they can achieve more, work better, and find their work lives more fulfilling.  

That’s a win-win for everyone: for the business, but especially the people that make it thrive.