Being one who makes a paycheck as a creative professional, the concept of measuring creativity is often on my mind. Today, I’m pondering a few questions pertaining to creativity, the ability to measure that creativity — and the possible financial rewards for both the creative contributor and the company’s bottom line:
Creativity Questions:
- Does creative thinking reap financial rewards in today’s typical business model?
- How do I prove that my creative contributions increased the bottom line; especially considering most creative departments don’t even know how to measure that creativity?
- How does a company culture foster or alienate its creative contributors; and how does that positively or negatively impact its bottom line?
Creativity Defined
The University of Minnesota’s alumni magazine “Reach” explores creativity and its benefits in the article titled, “Creativity and the Agile Mind.” According to the article, creativity requires an agile mind that must “move smoothly back and forth through levels of controlled (highly deliberate) and automatic (intuitive) thinking.”
The article further states that creativity and improvisation are about “allowing your brain to be more integrative and to pick up on conceptual and physical opportunities that you didn’t ‘know’ were there. But it doesn’t mean that you go completely off course. You will have a goal, but it is how you hold on to the goal that makes all the difference. You hold on to your goal with a permissive or less-tight ‘grip.”
I find the concept of continual flow between big-picture and details to be fascinating. I know I do that daily while working on projects, but it’s often hard to explain to a non-creative how your mind is fluctuating between big-picture and details when it’s become almost an automatic response through years of experience.
The Reach article further states that “for a mind to be agile, therefore, it must slide effortlessly between abstraction and detail, finding the appropriate level at the moment when it is most helpful. But this aspect of agile thinking pertains only to the content of thought. Agile thinking also requires that the processes by which thought occurs be fluid.” This sentence confirms my belief that somewhere in-between that gridlocked data on a spreadsheet and the “big picture” concept provided by the creative professional is the perfect middle ground; the common sense reason (a.k.a. strategy) for what you’re both trying to achieve? How do you measure that? And what does success look like for us both?
Creativity Unmeasured
Unfortunately, creativity is not easily measurable. Yes, we can often come to a consensus on what traits make up a creative individual, but linking a company’s success back to the creative individual’s contribution is a lot more difficult to do, or so I’ve been told by multiple creative managers.
Since creative success is difficult for most creative managers to measure, I can infer that the creative contributor may not be fully rewarded for their successes. It seems that those who have direct access to the data (the marketing managers, data analysts, back-end technicians, statisticians, merchandisers, etc.) are more readily able to document their successes based on concrete sales margins, YTD sales numbers, etc. And having this direct correlation between their business role and success backed by that data often means being rewarded financially or otherwise.
Drawing the correlation between the creative professional’s contribution is a more difficult and abstract concept. Because of that, the creative professional may be overlooked for professional advancement opportunities that might otherwise be extended to others who are more adept at working with data and spreadsheets.
Despite most employee handbooks and company mission statements stating its desire of innovation, the reality is, creative and abstract thinking are not widely accepted. In her study, A Bias against Quirky? Why Creative People Can Lose Out on Leadership Positions, Wharton management professor Jennifer Mueller has found that creative professionals were perceived as having less leadership potential than their peers. Since there is a direct correlation between leadership potential and salary in most professions, the study proves that the stigmas attached to creativity (e.g. quirky, abstract thinking, different clothing styles, etc.) might be holding some creative professionals back from earning larger paychecks. Yet, that’s despite most companies touting the value placed on innovative thinking and creative problem solving within the company culture.
But just saying it doesn’t make it so. In fact, it’s been my overall experience that novel thinking turns off the more analytical thinker. I’ve even changed how I pitch new ideas. I have found more success in pitching concepts to team members building on the concepts slowly over time over pitching the grandiose idea all at once. This way, the non-creative professional can warm up to the idea little by little, which makes it more familiar over time. And the more familiar the idea becomes to them, the safer and more acceptable it becomes to act on the idea.
The Million Dollar Question
So here’s my biggest question. If most corporations tout innovation and creative thinking, yet most creative contributors are penalized for thinking outside the box, then how is a creative professional going to climb that corporate ladder and boost their earning potential? The question is an important one. And it demonstrates the need for performance metrics that align creativity to increased profits. Doing so would give creative professionals the same earning potential as their data-driven counterparts.
For now, this argument may merely be food for fodder for the creative professional looking for advancement. But for me, it has laid the foundation of what I’m looking for in a company culture. I’d like to work in an organization that values both the creative professional AND the data-driven expert. I’d be happy as a clam to partner with those research and spreadsheet experts to create winning formulas that reward our shared goals and outcomes. But until that day, here are more articles that attempt to measure creativity: