What do you do if your team lacks creativity due to a fear of taking risks?

A safe & secure environment is required for people to feel like they can express themselves fully. Building trust amongst a group can be tricky but critical to allowing this space. Gaining Trust in corporations or teams can take a significant period of time but can be broken in moments. It’s imperative to keep working on this by building relationships amongst senior & junior members of a team. The more secure the group is the more likely you are to get a cohesive team which will allow you to members to challenge ideas or express thoughts feeling they will be heard & empowered. Successful teams work together as a group, know their strengths, their areas for improvement & work to get the right people in the right areas.

Many minds are stronger than one… Knowledge is power. Best way to gain knowledge is to study or learn from others. People are individuals will have different thoughts, ideas & will see things differently to each other. There are many ways to succeed & one size may not fit all. Having open discussions in safe environments will encourage creativity & be empowering to a group. Leaders can design a plan but understanding that just because they have their own particular vision, having more eyes on that vision can only help to drive the success of a group. In sports teams, with many different positions in a team, people will see the game differently. Therefore taking onboard thoughts of players in different positions can only be useful.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.”- Wayne Gretzky Taking risks can be exciting, nerve wracking & challenging at in one… But if you never take a risk, you are not challenging yourself to your full potential, so you might find yourself standing still. Although its important to not be wreck less when comes to taking risks but calculated. These can be empowering for a group, drive an excitement towards success in the future. Calculated risks can be planned with a strategy put in place by members the team. Once the strategy is in place it can feel like the risk is minimised with ideas from numerous individuals making it shared plan. Once the plan is decided, then the team can feel they have all contributed & have belief in it

Empowering individuals to have a voice & express their feelings should always be encouraged in all forms when it comes to successful teams. In team, there are different roles which need to be filled. For the success of the team Leaders/ Managers should understand what their individuals in their team strengths are & encourage them to express them in the right way to have their own identity within the team. If individuals feel they need to be up skilled in certain areas, they need to be able to ask for help & feel supported to do that. In sports teams, it could that a player fields there need more speed to improve their performance. They should feel comfortable to express this & expectation to get that appropriate training required.

Setting targets with rewards attached for individuals or groups is a powerful way to encourage a group. Rewards can take many different forms, personal, monetary, promotions… They can be both for a team or individual rewards. In our sports team, we would set both individual & team goals throughout the course of a season. Individual goals would be weekly, eg. player of the game, most highlights, most tackles… These rewards would be small We would set team goals over the course of 3 / 4 games & reward the team with a social event if they reached their targets . All these small individual & group targets would in term lead to the long term goal the team would set at the start of a season enabling to enjoy the journey of the season.

If your team has a fear of taking risks, I think it's time to take an honest evaluation of your company culture to see if you can find out why that might be the case. The fear of taking risks is typically created by micromanagers or authoritarian leaders who are quick to point out each time an employee does something wrong and has created a culture of fear. I'm not saying that's always the case, but in my experience, it is most of the time. In other situations, you might have an employee who has a fear of taking risks that brought this fear with them from a previous job or role due to a poor work environment. In this instance, you must build them up to let them know it's safe and even celebrated to take risks.