Creative Reaction

Yesterday’s post was about a Harvard Business School study (in progress) on “how the work environment can influence the motivation, creativity, and performance of individuals and teams” and specifically we spoke of the positive behaviors that managers exhibit to positively impact creativity.

Today we look at negative behaviors we all hope to avoid.

Again, quoting the researcher, Professor Teresa M. Amabile:

“We found three leader behaviors that had negative impact.

One was the under- or overspecification of assignments… giving people either too little guidance or too much guidance…

The second one is monitoring in a negative form—that is, checking on assigned work too often or not often enough. Or, checking on it for too long, like hanging around and going too much into the details of what people are doing, and giving unconstructive feedback.

The third negative (behavior) has to do with problem solving—either avoiding solving problems that crop up in the team or the project, or creating problems.

Seemingly ordinary, trivial, mundane, day-by-day things that leaders do and say can have an enormous impact. My guess is that a lot of leaders have very little sense of the impact that they have. That’s particularly true of the negative behaviors.”

Wow. Heavy Stuff. This, coupled with yesterday’s post shows there’s something to be said for “being sensitive”, particularly if you do not feel compelled to be the sensitive sort. It looks like that’s something we need to consider if we want to be successful. Again, a direct link between “people skills” and good creative.

Are we aware of how our behavior affects our coworkers and staff in negative ways? What are we doing to remedy the situation? If you have any advice or anecdotes, please tell us for the benefit of all (in the comments).