Here's how you can enhance your creative process as a leader by incorporating diverse perspectives.

To enhance your creative process as a leader through diverse perspectives, start by cultivating a culture of inclusivity where all voices are valued. Actively seek input from team members with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and skills. Encourage brainstorming sessions that welcome unconventional ideas and viewpoints. Foster collaboration among team members to combine different perspectives into innovative solutions. Regularly review and challenge assumptions to avoid groupthink and broaden the scope of possibilities. Celebrate diverse contributions to inspire continuous creativity and innovation within your team.

Implement these strategies for a more innovative environment: Seek diversity: Form a team comprising varied backgrounds, experiences, and expertise, fostering a rich pool of perspectives and knowledge. Value all voices: Encourage open dialogue, ensuring everyone feels heard and respected, as diverse ideas stimulate creativity and innovation. Promote inclusivity: Cultivate a work culture where differences are not merely tolerated, but actively embraced and appreciated. Collaborate effectively: Enable team members from different backgrounds to collaborate, leveraging unique insights to generate novel solutions and improve problem-solving.

Actively listen to truly understand the person you're conversing with. We've probably noticed when we truly actively listen to understand someone, we can remember their words and emotions. Acting like we're actively listening to understand can have a lot of parroting, or repeating what the person said in an effort to prove that we were listening. But do we remember what they said the next day, week, or month? When I started to sit in silence, focusing on the emotions of the person I was conversing with as I strived to actively listen to what they were saying and why, simply to understand everything they wanted to share, those are conversations that I still remember. Those are the conversations that we grew from.

Having a diverse table leads to greater success in questioning your own assumptions and encourages all to do the same. Creativity often gets stifled by preconceived notions of what’s possible or appropriate. Challenge these assumptions to open the floor to a broader range of ideas. Facilitate brainstorming sessions where all ideas are welcomed without immediate judgment. Additionally, play devil’s advocate to test and strengthen existing concepts. Engage team members from different backgrounds and disciplines to bring unique viewpoints, fostering a culture of open-mindedness and continuous innovation. This approach not only sparks creativity but also leads to more robust and innovative solutions.

With the amount of ideas that want to be shared, including everyone's perspective can be the challenge. I love starting each day with a thought-provoking question and giving the spotlight to my team of leaders, employees, and learners to respond. Giving the option of responding via chat or vocally helps everyone participate comfortably at first, but it always results in everyone taking the mic and sharing their ideas on the topic of the day. One of the initial questions I like to ask is, "What is the most effective learning style for you? Share an example." Whether I'm wearing an Ops hat or L&D hat, their responses allow me to approach their growth effectively and efficiently. It opens the conversation to all things growth and development.