Here's how you can cultivate a positive emotional climate in a creative and innovative work setting.

Trust Building: Open dialogue encourages individuals to express their thoughts, feelings, and concerns without fear of judgment. This builds trust as people feel safe to share openly. Enhanced Communication: It improves communication effectiveness by promoting clarity and reducing misunderstandings. When people feel heard, they are more likely to listen attentively to others. Conflict Resolution: Open dialogue facilitates the resolution of conflicts by allowing parties to discuss issues openly and find common ground. It encourages respectful disagreement and constructive problem-solving.

Empathy matters to everyone and makes such a difference. I think of the golden rule do unto others as you would have done to yourself after trying to understand where the person is coming from emotionally and who they are and what they are trying to accomplish.

How do you know if someone needs encouragement? If they are breathing. People thrive when they are celebrated, yet it can be easy to be so task-focused that you forget to celebrate victories. When someone on your team has a great idea or does something that is amazing, be their biggest cheerleader. Brag about them. Talk about them to the team. Invite other people to celebrate with you. One simple way to do this, create a place to celebrate. We have a shared Slack channel called #wins. Each time someone does something amazing, we post it there and brag on each other. It's a great way to build connection and it feels pretty amazing to know you are seen and valued.

Yes this is key to reinforcing accomplishments in personal life or at the workplace and in a family. It makes such a difference to notice the good things we do and celebrate the little things and the big things together.

I love this part because continuing to learn and grow is always necessary. It is ideal for me to be able to have some sort of choice in what I do my studies on as well. This is sadly not available in alot of companies and probably because of cost.

To lead a creative team well, you must have strong emotional intelligence (EQ) and agility. Creative people are sensitive for good reason. When you create, you're often putting your heart and soul on the line. You bleed for your creation. A good leader knows this and "reads the room" before giving feedback. It's important to deliver feedback in a tailored manner to the recipient. Don't take a one-size-fits-all approach. Know your team and communicate your feedback in a way that will be well-received. When your team knows you are on their side and the goal is to help make their idea better, they will be more likely to listen to feedback and receive it willingly.

Ideas have value for two reasons: (1) they are good and useful ideas and (2) they lead to good and useful ideas. The Western / dialectic approach is very limited in scope because socially, the approach is purely convergent (i.e. it narrows the field of possibility using criticism). Creative thinking needs both a divergent approach (coming up with a broad range of ideas, the raw material you use to generate your final ideas) and convergent thinking (the process of refining the ideas / whittling down, once you have a broad base of ideas to choose from). Learning to work in groups, where it's set up so not to shoot down nascent ideas, is critical. You need to allow ideas the space to develop within a group without being killed too soon.