Driving Creativity Among Teams
- Kim Meninger
- 19 hours ago
- 21 min read
In this episode of the Impostor Syndrome Files, we talk about creativity. What’s your definition of creativity? And do you see yourself as creative? I struggled with seeing myself this way for many years because I’m not artistic. Expanding my definition of creativity helped me to see that I’m far more creative than I thought. You probably are too! This week, I’m talking with Dr. Amy Climer, a creativity and innovation consultant, about driving greater creativity and innovation among teams. Here she shares the three key elements needed for teams to be creative together: team purpose, strong team dynamics and a team creative process. We also talk about the ways in which our current structures set us up for failure by emphasizing the idea that there’s one right way to do things and by focusing on short-term, transactional results rather than long-term innovative solutions. And, lastly, we talk about the ways in which impostor syndrome and fear keep us from being creative and how creative teams can support one another.
About My Guest
Dr. Amy Climer is a thought leader in innovation, team development, and experiential learning. She teaches research-based practices, tools, and techniques to forward-thinking organizations such as the Mayo Clinic, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, FOX Sports, and the University of Wisconsin. Amy holds a Ph.D. in Leadership and Change from Antioch University. She is the author of Deliberate Creative Teams: How to Lead for Innovative Results, a book for leaders who want their teams to be more creative, but don’t know where to start. Dr. Amy’s research led to the Deliberate Creative Team Scale, designed to measure the three critical dimensions of team creativity. Her TEDx talk The Power of Deliberate Creative Teams explains her research and philosophies on innovation. Dr. Amy is the host of The Deliberate Creative™ Podcast. She is the designer of Climer Cards, a creativity and teambuilding tool used by thousands to deepen conversations and generate ideas. In 2016 she won the Karl Rhonke Creativity Award from the Association for Experiential Education. Amy lives in Asheville, North Carolina in the U.S.
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Transcript
Kim Meninger
Kim, welcome, Amy. It is such a pleasure to have you here today, and I would love to start by inviting you to introduce yourself.
Dr. Amy Climer
Well, thank you, Kim. It's so good to be here. So I am an innovation consultant and trainer, keynote speaker, coach, all those things, but I focus on teaching leaders how to lead their teams to be more innovative and more creative. So I do a lot of keynote speaking, training, a little bit of coaching, and I just wrote this new book called Deliberate Creative Teams, How to Lead for Innovative Results, which I am really excited about. And I'm just getting some fabulous feedback, which is really fun.
Kim Meninger
Oh, well, congratulations. I'm so excited for you and to dive more into the book as well. But I want to ask you a question too about how you got here. Were you always doing this work? Did you have a former career that you know launched you in this direction? How did you get to this point?
Dr. Amy Climer
I did kind of have a former career that launched me in this direction early in my like, my 20s and in my 30s, I was in the field of experiential education, or outdoor education, where I would take people, you know, high school students, through adults, into wilderness adventures. So backpacking, rock climbing, canoeing, things like that, and help them learn from that experience, help them to grow from like that leadership angle or just personal development angle, kind of dependent on the context. And so I would do some of that out in the field, but then I was managing a program. I actually managed a couple different programs related to that field, and from there, it's all about leadership. It was all about facilitating leadership. And so I ended up, I initially was working at the University of Wisconsin for their outdoor program, and then got recruited by the business school to come over to their that side and do more indoor stuff related to teaching young leaders how to, you know, just build up their leadership skills. And meanwhile, all along, I kind of had this side interest in innovation, creativity, and was sort of building that up, that interest and just digging deep into it. And then eventually went to get a PhD a few years ago, about a decade ago now, and merged those things of understanding, like creativity and innovation with teams and leadership. And now I kind of blend all those together.
Kim Meninger
I love that, and I want to ask you too how you think about innovation and creativity, because I have, since I was pretty young, always thought of myself as not creative because I don't draw or paint, right? I'm artistic. And then I started thinking I built my business. I've been doing this for almost 15 years, and I'm full of ideas. I'm always generating new ideas and trying out new things. And I thought maybe more creative than I thought I was. And so I think it's a lot of it is the story we tell ourselves around innovation.
Dr. Amy Climer
Yeah. I mean, you are spot on. So I would have been if we were friends in high school, I would have been the friend that was like, No, Kim, you really are creative. It's not about your ability to draw. I don't know why I was like, even back in high school, I was very emphatic that everyone had this ability to be creative. And you're right. It is not about our ability to draw, even though that has historically been not the definition, but the perception. So the definition of creativity that I use is that creativity is novelty that is valuable. And so all these ideas that you're talking about, that's creativity, you know? And then you, you implement them, and you make a change in the world. It's like, yeah, you're doing creative work. You're doing innovative work. So most people are more creative than they think.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, and I, I wonder why it feels so daunting to think of ourselves in that way. And I wonder, you know, I, I always tie everything back to confidence and self-doubt too, but I think there's sort of this, this fear of, I'm going to do it wrong, or someone's going to judge me for it. If I put my idea out in the world, it might be rejected, right?
Dr. Amy Climer
Yeah, well, and it's interesting. I do think that in some ways, we're kind of set up for failure, not intentionally, but well, maybe there's some intention behind it anyway. Here's how I see this is that we, if you grew up in sort of mainstream America, you went to a high school, definitely a public high school, maybe a private high school. You were taught from a very young age, when you were just, you know, a few feet high, that there's a right answer for just about everything. And so every multiple choice question, every fill-in-the-blank response, like every test we've ever taken, the way we are taught it's about getting to the right answer, and then what happens is we become an adult, and we go out in the work world, and very rarely is there one right answer for the types of problems that we are trying to address. So you know, when in your life have you had a supervisor come to you and say, Hey, Kim, I've got this issue, and I need your help in solving it, and there's only three options, A, B or C. No. I mean, it's ridiculous, right? Of course not, because the supervisor doesn't know either because most of the stuff we're looking at, there's no right answer. It may not have been done before, or it may not have been done by this team or this organization, and so that's why I think we're set up for failure, in a sense, or we're set up to, you know, then we build these internal ideas that like, Oh, I'm not good enough. I'm not creative enough. Well, you weren't taught to be creative but you're being asked to be creative, and creativity is a skill that you need to develop, just like any other skill, and that's what I focus on.
Kim Meninger
I think that's such an important point because I think about that a lot. When it comes to perfectionism, I feel like perfectionism is often a byproduct of the same kind of educational structure that you're talking about, because there is always a right answer, and because you can get 100 on a test right, but you can't, when you get out into the workplace, anticipate every question that's going to be asked, or, like you said, a lot of questions don't have the answers yet, because we're just, just asking them for the first time. And so we have to break from those old habits and those old traps that we fall into about how to, you know, what defines good performance, right?
Dr. Amy Climer
Yeah, I think it's so true, like thinking about perfectionism and the idea of getting 100 on a test and then making a correlation to, you know, in the work world, when you get, you know, your annual evaluation, like supervisors are actually trained not to give you 100 you need to have room for growth, right? Like, who would get 100 It was perfect. Like, it's just ridiculous again. Like, and then we just get all, like, wrapped up in our heads and causes all sorts of problems.
Kim Meninger
You're absolutely right. And I wonder, then, what you see as the conditions that are needed in order for innovation and creativity, like what, what are we missing? Or what are the biggest challenges that you're seeing out there?
Dr. Amy Climer
I think one of the biggest challenges we're seeing, which we're kind of talking about, is just a misunderstanding of what creativity is and how it works, and then by default, how it develops within us and how we can develop it in our teams. So the main focus of my book is about these three elements that I identified in my dissertation research, where these three elements are what teams need in order to be creative together. So they need to have a clear sense of team purpose. They need to have strong team dynamics, like they need to be able to trust each other, communicate well, engage in conflict. And then finally, they need to have a clear team creative process. So what's the process of how they're going to be creative together? So team purpose, team dynamics and team creative process. And what I've found with the clients that I work with, most of them don't even know there could be a creative process. And so that's I lay this out in a Venn diagram, and that's the circle that most of them struggle with. Like, wait, what? There's a process for being creative, yes, and when you know the process and you follow the process, research has shown us since the 1970s that this you will actually be more creative if you follow a creative process. And it's not difficult. We've all done it naturally, but we have a tendency to get in our own way, as we've talked about, and I know you talk about a lot in your podcast. Well, yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. Is for leaders and teams to understand how it works, how creativity works.
Kim Meninger
So is that, what do you teach them the process? Is that what you do? [Yeah, absolutely.] Yeah. Because I feel like there are so many assumptions or sort of implicit rules, or that, you know, we're sort of operating in these environments where we're not saying things out loud that would help us to work better together. And so if you're trying to be creative, I might assume that you don't like my way of doing things, and so you're challenging me in some way, right? Or you don't do it right because you don't do it my way. Or, you know, there's just so many ways in which we don't appreciate or respect each other's creativity because we haven't established that that is part of the system and that it's something that we that will make us all better.
Dr. Amy Climer
Yes, that is 100% that's exactly what I see. Is that, you know, people have different ideas of what creativity or what the process might look like, and especially when you have some one person on the team who's maybe really comfortable with that disagreement and just like jumps in, like, Oh, yeah. Well, what if we did this instead? Or, you know, and they have all this energy for it, and then other people might be like, Well, wait a minute. A minute, does that mean we're not doing it this other way we just mentioned? And they sort of mix up the generating ideas with evaluating ideas, and they're doing them at the same time, and it causes all sorts of confusion. But if you can get really transparent of like, Hey, here's a process we're going to follow, then that doesn't happen. And you can, I mean, I've seen teams generate, you know, 100 ideas in 30 minutes an hour at most. And the more you do it, the better you get at it, both in quantity and quality. And so when teams have this process, the results are amazing.
Kim Meninger
I wonder, too, when you talked about the process as being part of the three-legged stool of purpose and dynamics as well, do you think that teams have to come with a certain level of trust or psychological safety first? Or, do you think they can build that as a result of the process? Like, do they work together? Or do they go, are they linear?
Dr. Amy Climer
Yeah, that's a good question. I think that there, there can happen side by side together. I mean, I do think that I almost think of it as like an upward spiral, and that, you know, you're working on being creative together, and at the same time, you're tending to the psychological safety and the trust of the group. And as that safety, as people get more comfortable and trust increases, they're going to get more creative together, because they're going to be comfortable, you know, throwing out more ideas that might feel a little random or wacky at first and then, and it's just this positive upward spiral where, because I also think too, it can be very difficult for a team to develop trust without doing work together. [Yes.] Like, that's how the trust is built. And so as we work together, we test things out. Like, what happens if I disagree? Am I going to get thrown under the bus? Is it going to be awkward, or is it like, Yep, this is cool. And then that builds trust in itself, and so that work, yeah, I do think it's so intertwined.
Kim Meninger
That makes a lot of sense to me too, because I think you're right. I mean, there are a lot of teams where they're not. They might be part of a team, but they're, they're really spending most of their time working with other teams, and so they don't have as much interaction, they don't have as much opportunity to work together. And so giving them some blueprint for lack of a better term for how to go about doing that is really important because everybody's stressed, everybody's tired, everybody's reactive, right? And so, so I think, you know, for when I think about the kinds of challenges that I address, whether that's, you know, fear or imposter syndrome or defensiveness or just other things that get in the way, I think sometimes establishing what is the structure in which we're going to work, and then how do we name that so everybody knows kind of what are the rules, or what are the expectations that we understand, Oh, okay, I have permission to do this, right? Like I'm not overstepping, or this person's not being disrespectful to me. They're just sharing their own ideas and that, that creates a better space for people to contribute.
Dr. Amy Climer
I think it's spot on. I had a colleague or a client talk to me once about how in her team, anytime they were going to generate ideas, they always went with the first idea that came up. And I was like, wait, what? What if it's not a good idea? And she's like, it never occurred to us to keep going because they didn't have any structure or any, you know, they never talked about the process. And so, you know, I'm sure the meeting was like, well, we got this issue. What do y'all think? And someone says, What are we what about if we do this? I was like, Okay, sounds good. Because no, there wasn't. like, yeah, I don't know. I just feel like process and structure is so important. And sometimes it can get a bad rap because it feels it might, you know, I think some people think, oh, it's going to make us too rigid, or too, you know, formal, when actually the opposite is, what happens is it gives you this opportunity to be more flexible, and yeah, it can be really powerful but.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, I agree with you. I think there are definitely, especially when you're growing from a startup into a more mature organization, there's that fear of over-engineering things and taking away some of the, the informality of the environment. But the more you grow, the more you need to put structure around things, right? And then, to your point, that actually creates more room for people to engage because you feel safer doing it. [Yeah, exactly.] Yeah. So I want to ask you about your imposter syndrome experience, or when you first learned about imposter syndrome.
Dr. Amy Climer
Okay, so I, I mean, I think it's one of those things we've all, most of us, I would guess, have had experience with our whole life. But when I first learned the phrase imposter syndrome, it was my very first day of my PhD program, and I went to a pretty unusual school. It's Antioch University. It was an amazing experience. It was a PhD in leadership and change. And the way Antioch designed their program is that the two people who developed the program, this was like maybe around 2000 they said, Hey, let's get together and design a program based on how adults actually learn, not based on 150 years of higher education and what's already been done. So they're very intentional, of like, let's design this program that actually works. So the first day of class, the director's name is Lorien, and Lorien says to all of us, okay, so I know that some of you are probably wondering, what, how you got accepted into this program. And I just want you to know we did not make a mistake. Nobody accidentally slipped in. You're all here because we know you have what it takes to succeed. And she's and I'm like, Oh, this is great. And I'm like, feeling like, super, you know, like, pumped up, you know. And then she says, Now you might have read, because they in advance, they sent out everybody's bio that's in our programs, like a cohort of about 25 of us. And so she said, you know, you might have read some of the bios in advance. And I'm thinking, oh, gosh, I, I honestly didn't. There was so much other pre-work, and I was like overloaded, so I had no clue whoever anyone else was. And she said, you know, if you did read them, you'll know that we have in this program, CEOs, Deans of universities, ER nurses at, you know, an ER nurse at one of the top hospitals in Canada, we have someone that ran for the President of the United States. And I was like, what President of the United States? Sure enough, yes, there was a woman in our class who ran on the Green Party ticket a few years earlier. She was a phenomenal person. Anyway, and then Lorien says, if you're feeling any, you know, anxiety about who else is in the room, you might be experiencing imposter syndrome. And then she went on to explain what imposter syndrome is and that. And she was like, no, all of you are here on purpose. We are not the kind of PhD program that accepts a bunch of people with the expectation that half the people will fail, though our expectation is that you succeed. And after that moment, you know, the next three, four years that I'm with this cohort, we talked about that conversation quite a bit. And anytime somebody was, you know, having some self-doubts, we would say to them, Hey, it sounds like you might be experiencing some imposter syndrome, and you don't need to like you got this. It just created this amazing, positive dynamic that helped us support each other.
Kim Meninger
I love that so much. I feel like that should be part of every onboarding process, right? Everybody who's hired cohort should be given that message because everyone's thinking it.
Dr. Amy Climer
It just made me think of like, you know, Organic Chemistry in college, we were like, Okay, look to your left, look to your right. One of you is gonna fail this class. Who is that helping? Nobody.
Kim Meninger
That's exactly right. Oh, I mean that is just goes. It's in such alignment with my belief in just saying these things out loud, and once you name them, it dilutes a lot of the, the fear and the power behind them. And, like you said, it gives you space to refer back to it to, to normalize the experience, like anybody else feeling that imposter syndrome that we talked about on day one.
Dr. Amy Climer
Yeah, it was amazing. I'm a big fan of it now. And and I had known of I hadn't known the term, but I don't know if you're familiar with the book The Artists Way by Julia Cameron, yes, I have that. Oh, okay, yeah, it's an amazing book. And I think I stumbled upon that book in like 1998 to 99 and, you know, kind of learned about that inner critic that we all have. And so I certainly knew the concepts. But I just love the term imposter syndrome, like it's just so fitting
Kim Meninger
It is, and it really does tie in. What we're talking about, too. You and I had chatted a bit before I hit record about how it can be really hard to be creative and innovative when you struggle with imposter syndrome, because a lot of times when you are experiencing imposter syndrome, you're in a state of fear, right? You're so nervous that you're going to make a mistake, you're worried about what people are thinking, and that's not conducive to creative thinking when we're in that mode we're in, you know, all it's fight-or-flight, right? All resources are allocated to keep us alive. We're not thinking clearly. We're not, you know, operating at our most rational levels, right? And so, so I think that you know, to, to be able to be creative, to be innovative, we have to let go of, of that inner critic.
Dr. Amy Climer
100%. Yeah, I do think that. I mean, there is research that backs us up that like fear, fear inhibits creativity. Or when we're stressed, when we're really stressed, creativity goes down. And there was this one study I thought was so fascinating, and I'm not going to remember the reference, but when people have a deadline that they're trying to meet, and you know, they're stressed about that deadline, they say that they feel more creative because they have to, like, there's just, you know, probably all this adrenaline pumping, but the results are actually less creative. And then if we are able to just, you know, calm down and, like, take our time and relax into it, then the results end up being more creative.
Kim Meninger
You know what I wish, and I wish there were a greater appreciation for this at a senior leadership level because I think so much of the environment in the average workplace is driven by short-term deadlines, like especially in public companies, where they, their quarterly earnings are the most important thing that They are. So everybody's sort of in this frenzy trying to get through a quarter without being able to think longer term, without being able to strategize. And so we're, we're all really shutting off that part of our brain that allows us to think more creatively.
Dr. Amy Climer
Again, I think that the system is some ways, like set up for failure, or at least set up to decrease creativity. And I remember years ago, learning that you know when companies, you know, they're trying to, to make the best, or, you know, make the most profit for their shareholders, that that's actually required by law, that they're required to make decisions that bring in the most money for their shareholders, like, oh, well, that's going to be incredibly limiting if you're only able to look with, you know, to the next quarter, [90 days at a time.] Right? I mean most good ideas, not even complicated ideas, but most good ideas are going to take more than 90 days to implement, right or, sincerely, more than 90 days to see a real return. And but I do think we're kind of in this situation right now culturally, where the pace is so fast, the expectations are so high there and then at the same time, we're like, oh, we're cutting staff because we need to save money. And it's just not realistic, and it's really hurting our ability to be creative and innovative. One of my favorite phrases is, go slow to go fast. If you can slow down a little bit, you actually, in the end, will get better results that will lead to, you know, higher profits, higher, you know, better outcomes, whatever it is you're measuring. But if you go so fast, you mess up, and you don't take the time to, you know, generate some really good ideas. Well, you're just not going to have as good a results.
Kim Meninger
And sort of a silly parallel to that. I have kids that are nine and 14 right now, and I know, with my nine-year-old in particular, he can drag his feet in the morning when we have to get into the bus. And we had been trying to be like, Okay, let's go. We gotta go. We gotta go. And then it would take him forever to zip his coat and he wouldn't be able to tie his shoes, and he was just it was taking so much longer. And now we find that if you're just like, okay, tie your shoes right. Like, okay, what do you need to do? It seems counterintuitive to slow down, but he can't handle the frenzy of right. That's how we all operate in these kind of 90-day cycles of, well, no, I just have to get through the next deadline, as opposed to Right. Like, let me, let me slow down and ask some bigger questions. Can I think a little longer term here?
Dr. Amy Climer
Yeah, and I think, you know, that is kind of a silly example, but like probably so many of us had that experience as kids, our parents like, hurry up, hurry up. And now we're adults, and it's the same thing. And it doesn't serve any of us well. I mean, okay, our brains are more developed. We can usually handle it more, but still, it's not helpful.
Kim Meninger
No, exactly. So then what doesn't What does a team need to I'm thinking as I'm talking, because I'm just thinking like there are ways in which teams can operate on their own and other ways in which they are part of a larger system. And so if you're coming in and you're trying to help a team to be more intentionally creative, how much buy-in do you have to have from the organization overall? Is it something that can be started with one small, intact team, or, you know, what does it need to look like for a team to do this work with you?
Dr. Amy Climer
Yeah, that's a good question. It definitely can start with a team. And, I mean, it might depend on the organization, but a general is very generalized answer is it can start with almost any team. And there's part of the foundation of the research that I did was based on that the most important people that will impact creativity within a team are the team members. So that's going to have a bigger impact on the team, more so than the CEO or the top leaders or whatever, I mean, unless it is the team of top leaders, but what's happening internally in that team is the most important. Now, obviously, a culture that supports innovation is going to help a lot. It's going to, you know, you might have a team that's incredibly innovative, but if the culture doesn't support innovation, they're just not going to be able to do anything. You might have the ideas, but they're like, Yeah, that's cool, but we're not doing that, and we're not giving you money for it or time for it. So well, what was the point? [Right.] So there has to be, you know, some system at a system level. There has to be some buy-in. One of the questions I often get is, How do you convince organizations they need to be more innovative? And my response is, oh, no, I don't that. If an organization doesn't understand that they are far from being ready to work with me. And the ROI of innovation and being more creative is outrageous. Like, it's huge, but it also takes some risk. It requires risk to do that because the challenge with innovation is you don't know if it's going to work. You think it will, and there's a lot of things you can do to, like test and check and mitigate that risk, but you got to be willing to, you know, be a little rebellious and be a little innovative, right? And so when organizations are ready for that, then that's when I start working with them.
Kim Meninger
That’s a really good point. You know, I was thinking, I was thinking about that earlier, when you were talking about, I'm glad you brought that up. The relationship that we individually and collectively have to quote-unquote, failure is so important to innovation and creativity, because if we're, if we're, and that goes back to the whole idea of getting 100% on a test, right? But if you, if you work in a culture that punishes you for getting something wrong or doesn't make it safe to make mistakes, you're automatically going to exclude all forms of creativity and innovation, right, because that's too much of a risk for someone to take.
Dr. Amy Climer
Yeah, absolutely.
Kim Meninger
Yeah, wow. Well, this has been such a fascinating conversation. Amy, I love the work you're doing, and excited to check out your book for others who feel the same way want to learn more about you and how to how to find your book. Where can they find you?
Dr. Amy Climer
Um, you can find my book anywhere books are sold. It's called deliberate creative teams, how to lead for innovative results. And you can find me on my website, climber consulting dot com, C-L-I-M-E-R is how you spell Climer. And I'm also on LinkedIn, Instagram, you know the usual places.
Kim Meninger
Well, I will put the links in the show notes as well. And thank you so much for your work, and thank you for being here today.
Dr. Amy Climer
Oh, thank you, Kim, this is really fun.
