Ep 54: Helping Your Team Realize Their Full Potential
SUMMARY
Are you wondering what it's going to take for your team to realize their full creative potential? As a leader, you know that creativity isn't just about individual talent—it's about creating an environment where every team member can thrive. Today, I'm giving you five simple ways to raise the creative tide on your team.
When I was really young in my career (and yes, I know it seems like I'm really young, but I turned 40 this year), I didn't know what I didn't know. I knew I couldn't build and cultivate this culture of creativity that I wanted in my organization on my own. Despite being so naive that I forgot to get leadership on board with what I was doing, I set out to build my dream team of volunteers.
Along the way, I had to make some very difficult and often unpopular moves to shift people off the team. But I also learned not to judge a book by its cover. Some of my most dedicated and creative team members over the years have been the ones that I least suspected to be so creative.
The biggest impact on my team's potential was me speaking into all the potential that I saw in them and in the creative culture that we were trying to build. You can't be silent about it. You need to speak. You need to communicate about it constantly.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Confidence unlocks creativity. When you build confidence in your team members by reminding them of their importance, it builds their self-confidence—and when they have self-confidence, they're able to more freely be creative.
⚡️ Repeat your vision until you're sick of it—that's when your team just begins to hear it. Leaders often keep the vision between their ears, but you must repeat it out loud to your team ad nauseam. When you're sick of hearing yourself say it is exactly when your team is beginning to catch the vision.
⚡️ What gets celebrated gets repeated. Regularly celebrating wins shows your team that what they create makes a real difference. When they see their work creating impact, their potential skyrockets to new heights.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "The biggest impact on my team's potential was me speaking into all the potential that I saw in them and in the creative culture that we were trying to build. You can't be silent about it."
💬 "When you're sick of hearing yourself say the vision is when your team just begins to hear it."
💬 "From failure, we learn. From success, not so much." - Meet the Robinsons
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️Meet the Robinsons - A powerful movie about celebrating failure as a learning opportunity
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
Are you wondering what it's going to take for your team to realize their full creative potential? Today, I'm going to give you five simple ways to raise the creative tide on your team. Let's get into it.
Welcome back to the podcast everyone. My name is Dustin Pead, creative coach and consultant. I'm so glad that you're with me here today. Everything that I do is to help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams more so that they can create greater things together.
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So today we're going to talk about helping your team realize their full potential. I did a blog post about this a few weeks back, but I wanted to kind of just dive into it a little bit more conversationally through this podcast platform.
When I was really young in my career—I know it seems like I'm really young, but I'm not, I turned 40 this year—so when I was young in my career, I didn't know what I didn't know, right? That's all of us when we're young in our career. I knew that I couldn't build and cultivate this culture of creativity that I wanted to in my organization on my own. And despite being so naive that I forgot to get leadership on board with what I was doing, I set out to build my dream team of volunteers.
And along the way, I had to make some very difficult and often unpopular moves to shift people off the team. But I also learned not to judge a book by its cover. Some of my most dedicated and creative team members over the years have been the ones that I have least suspected to be so creative.
The biggest impact on my team's potential was me speaking into all the potential that I saw in them and in the creative culture that we were trying to build. You can't be silent about it. You need to speak. You need to communicate about it constantly.
And so there are five things I want to share with you today that you can do to raise this creative tide on your team and allow them to really experience the full potential that may be hidden deep within themselves and maybe even deep inside you as well.
But here's what you need to do as a leader of this team or just someone on this team who's trying to rally everyone to a whole new level. You need to constantly remind your team of these five things.
One, constantly remind them of their importance. Their importance. Listen, each of them is a vital piece of the culture that you're trying to build. You need to remind them of this as often as possible to reinforce the confidence in them. And when you build the confidence in them, it builds their own self-confidence. And when they have their own self-confidence, they're able to more freely be creative.
You know, just like I know, that when you're really feeling it, when you get down in your studio and you get down into the space that you're going to create in, and you're really feeling it and you're full of confidence and you feel like I can create anything today, I can create something super amazing today—you know that that comes from a sense of self-confidence. So you want to build the creative potential in your team. The first thing you need to do is you need to constantly remind them of their importance and that'll build their self-confidence.
The second thing that you need to constantly remind your team of is the vision. The vision. And I know we talk a lot about this as leaders, but it's super important not to keep it just between our ears. You must repeat your vision out loud, not just to yourself, out loud to your team ad nauseam. Like the point where you're sick of hearing yourself say it. And if you hear yourself say it one more time, you just might not believe it.
Whatever the vision is for your team, for your organization, whatever you're shooting for, whatever you're moving towards, you have to say that until you're sick of it. Because when you're sick of it is when your team just begins to hear it. And when they begin to hear it, and they begin to catch the vision of where you're going, their creative potential will skyrocket.
The third thing you need to constantly remind your team of is your potential together. Together, that you're not alone in this thing. No creative person is greater than the sum of the creative team. You need to remind them of all the unseen results that could be seen together, dreams that could be realized, come true if we can work together. Collaboration is going to be a major key. Healthy collaboration is going to be a major key in your team realizing their full potential.
Just remember back to when you felt like you were stuck and someone came up to you and said, "Have you ever thought about it this way? Have you ever looked at it this way?" And even if you may have initially felt kind of, "Ah, this isn't your thing, you know, kind of back off, don't tell me what to do, don't tell me how to create"—when that pride settled and you were able to kind of go, "Huh, maybe they have a point," you realized the potential of what you were creating was so much greater because you let others into the process. And so you need to constantly remind your team of the potential that they have together, right?
The fourth thing that you need to constantly remind your team of is the wins. The wins. If you are leading your team with project after project after project and you're not sharing with them the wins of the projects that they've created, then eventually they're going to start to realize, "What are we even creating this stuff for? What's the point in all this if we're not making a difference?"
Did the client get to meet their goals because of something that we created? Did the organization grow to new heights because of something that we created? Was there really any difference made at all because of what we created? You need to verbalize and celebrate those wins as often as possible because you and I both know that what gets celebrated gets repeated and that's where potential comes in. That's where new heights of potential come in.
And when we can celebrate the wins on a regular basis—and look, do this authentically. Okay? Don't try to go out there and manufacture some mild, false win. Listen carefully to the results of what your team is creating and there will be wins, but don't manufacture it because there's nothing that a creative person hates more than some inauthentic, false, plastic celebration. They want real, genuine response to what they're building.
And so if you can give them that, you're going to see their potential skyrocket. Also, when you're reminding them of these wins—again, I put the word constantly, remind them of these things because this is something that you need to be doing regularly. You need to regularly celebrate the wins. I would say at least once a week, you need to share with your team about how something that they created made a difference, made someone else's life easier, made the organization better, made the client more successful. Whatever it is, you need to remind them of that.
The last thing that you need to constantly remind your team of is opportunities. Opportunities. Now, here's what I don't mean. I don't mean like opportunities that are out there far and beyond. Yeah, that's good to kind of strive for. What I'm really saying here is you need to remind them of how failures are just opportunities. Failures are just opportunities. You need to help them see that it's okay to fail because you're going to collectively learn to be better next time.
One of my favorite movies of all time, if you've ever heard me speak live, you've probably heard me bring this up, is a movie from Disney called Meet the Robinsons. And in this story, I won't blow the cover, but there's this family of entrepreneurs and inventors and they have this young kid sitting at their dinner table who is really excited to show them about an invention that he created. Well, it massively blows up in his face. It's a huge failure and he feels so terrible that he's failed so publicly in front of this family who is really awesome.
And instead of the family going like, "Man, that really stinks that you failed," they celebrated it as if it was the greatest thing that ever happened because they said, "From failure, we learn. From success, not so much." I love this line in the movie. And so there are learning opportunities in failure. You need to constantly remind your team of the opportunities before them in the lens of failure. It's okay to fail—it means you tried to do something. Create space for your team to fail and have those learning opportunities, and you will see their potential skyrocket.
So what do we do with all this? I think you need to put the five things on rotation. I think you need to remind them of their importance, the vision, your potential together, the wins and the opportunities—put them on a rotation. There's five days in a work week. Every single day of your work week, remind them.
Say, "Hey, every Monday, I'm going to remind them of their importance. Every Tuesday, I'm going to remind them of the vision. Every Wednesday, I'm going to remind them of our potential together. Every Thursday, we're going to celebrate wins together. And every Friday, we're going to look at different opportunities."
Now those days may not line up. You may want to start your week with vision or opportunities and end with wins, whatever. The point being is that you're going to have an opportunity there to do these things regularly. And after a few months, if you can commit to the discipline of doing this new habit, I can promise you, almost guarantee you, that after a few months of doing this, you're going to begin to feel the creative potential rising in your team. And you're going to see things coming out of your team that you never expected before.
So if there's any of these five that you need help incorporating into your team or into your own process and system, I would love to chat with you. Go to dustinpead.com, click on the Let's Chat button and hop on my calendar and let's talk about how we can help rise the potential of you and your team just by incorporating these five simple reminders at all times.
Listen, you can do this. It is not so big that you can't do it. Put it in front of you, write it down, write the process down, plan it out and work the process like we always say.
I cannot wait to be with you next time. We're going to talk about some keys to creative bravery. We have the potential now. Let's talk about some things that we can do to raise creative bravery in yourself and your team. I cannot wait to talk to you then. We'll talk to you next time on the Creativity Made Easy podcast.