Thanks to some fascinating research, I can finally decipher one of my worst grammar school experiences and one of my best managerial ones. And, more importantly, the research yields a powerful managerial formula for nurturing creative, adaptive team members.
Ms. Creativity-Crusher (not her real name, believe it or not) was a sour-pussed art teacher who once surveyed my clumsy collage-in-progress and berated me to “get some of that junk out of there.” But what was “junk” and what was good stuff? I hadn’t a clue, and she preferred scowling to helping. So, I checked out, convinced I had no artistic talent. Do you feel sorry for me yet?
Fast forward a few decades, to when I left my Tokyo Office colleagues slack-jawed by fast-tracking a promotion in job responsibilities for Ms. Opportunity-Optimizer (not her real name either). I encouraged her in the new role, then got out of her way. Which was about all she needed to shine; and she kept rising in the company for years thereafter.
Though circumstances and continents and decades apart, these two experiences actually evince common themes. Or so I’ve concluded after reading Judy Wearing’s fascinating exploration of how creativity and confidence flourish (or get crushed) among young adult learners.
Wearing, the lead learning architect at Dignity Health Global Education, investigated the impact on young adults of having undertaken a creative challenge at a teacher’s behest during secondary school. Wearing’s findings can be simplified into a managerial (or teaching) mantra: meaningful challenge…freedom…manager/teacher belief.
That is: Give the student (or team member) a meaningful challenge, and bestow the freedom to attack that challenge without a micro managerial leash, and support them along the way. (“Support them along the way” is my antiseptic phrase; Wearing’s preferred phrasing would be: “cheerlead the hell out of them”).
Even more fascinating is Wearing’s finding that completion of even one challenging creative project can yield an outsized payoff in a young person’s self-perception, a payoff that seems to last. As Wearing put it, “It went from, ‘I can write a song,’ to, ‘I can be creative, to, ‘I am creative.’ And, then they acted on that in the years to follow. The leap from ‘I can’ to ‘I am’ was universal.”
What a powerful blueprint for managerial effectiveness. But what Wearing discovered, and what we don’t typically appreciate, is that “meaningful challenge-freedom-support” is a three-part formula, not a menu. Some of us may instinctively give talented subordinates enough autonomy to perform; others of us may grasp that we get better results when team members feel supported. But we gotta focus on all three dimensions, not just on the one or two behaviors that come naturally to us.
For example, that art teacher, Ms. Creativity Crusher, certainly gave me plenty of freedom; but without her support, my confidence cratered. And, conversely, when I decades later gave Ms. Opportunity Optimizer a big challenge, and freedom, and support, I maximized her chances of success.
Admittedly, I followed that magic formula out of dumb luck rather than conscious managerial strategy. Which is exactly the point: We managers need to become way more intentional, adopting holistic, purposeful strategies if we hope to nurture adaptive team members. And developing such talent is surely essential in today’s volatile, change-racked environments.
So why do we still so often resort to managerial styles the yield the opposite outcome, especially with junior employees and new hires? We saddle them with tedious, routine scut work, all the while subjecting them to our micro-managerial gaze.
As we see it, they are “proving themselves.” But as they see it, we are delivering the same blow that Ms Creativity Crusher landed on me: “Gee, this manager apparently doesn’t think that I’m capable of contributing meaningfully. Maybe I’m not.” For not only did Wearing discover that successful completion of a meaningful challenge could engender confidence, she also found that when managers don’t offer meaningful challenges, self-confidence may plummet.
Precisely when the organization needs adaptive, innovative team members it thereby produces confidence-sapped drones. They become the “quiet quitters,” or, they muster the courage to really quit, hoping to find more challenging pastures elsewhere.
Wearing’s research complements other paradigmatic efforts to explain how creativity and productivity blossom, like Albert Bandura’s (d. 2021) findings on “Self-Efficacy” (To oversimplify: We perform more effectively when we feel some control over our working environment).
And her research calls to mind the wise words attributed to the psychologist and management theorist Frederick Herzberg (d. 2000): “If you want people to do a good job, give them a good job to do.” Or, as Wearing might put it: Give them a good challenge…and the freedom to execute it…and cheerlead the hell out of them.
