4 Ways to Elicit Creativity from your Marketing Staff

Keeping creativity flowing in your department or office can be difficult.  That river can easily get dammed by close-minded team members.  So how can you keep imagination alive and vibrant?  Here are some things to try:

1. Change your permanent environment:  Your office.  You're in there 40+ hours per week.  So is your team.  View it like your home--every now and then it's nice to switch furniture, wall color, objects + space.  It also helps if everything works together.  What I mean by that is run your environment on a theme.  For instance, at home my wife and I chose a theme we've dubbed "wine country" for styling our place.  Everything revolves around an earth-toned color palette and aesthetic.  You could do something similarly simple for an office space.  Environment has been shown to have many beneficial features to creativity...so don't skimp.
2. Change your temporary environment(s):  Meetings.  Why not have a meeting in a park.  Or better yet, a walk in the park.  We have the technology for it.  Really all you'd need is a digital recorder.  You'd be amazed what some fresh air, a conversation and a wide open space will do.
3. Build your climate through rational unpredictability:  Show that you're serious about keeping creativity flowing by doing it yourself.  Never treat each day the same in the office.  Sure, there are times when it's easy to let work take the helm and steer.  But try and maintain control of your work and keep things interesting.  Be rationally unpredictable.  Basically meaning that you should never let yourself or your team fall into the groove of a standard solution to a problem.  Really marketing depts are just facing a different array of PROBLEMS day in and day out.  Whether its putting together a proposal or updating a database of information.  Get feedback from your team, build up ideas and actions, analyze, discuss, evolve them.  Need a break?  Take that old fax machine collecting dust out back and let the team take turns smashing it with a baseball bat.
4. Teamwork not competition:  Teamwork and not competition or incentives fuels creativity.  Many companies make use of employee feedback to enhance their business.  Many companies also use groups (crowdsourcing) to help them build better products and services.  Promote a collaborative relationship with all individuals AND departments and create a learning institution.  Having an open door policy to your department and education sessions like lunch and learns or training can have a beneficial and profound effect.