EMBiz: Promoting Creativity on Your Team

Laurel Mintz, CEO & Founder

Promoting Creativity on Your Team

Hi guys Laurel Mintz here with Elevate My Brand and I want to talk to you today about the creative process and how you can bring more play and fun to your team. Now you know we’re a marketing agency and our job is to bring that creative fire, that energy, that juice to our clients. But the truth is that we just don't feel it every single day as I’m sure you don't. Everyday’s a little bit different but here are some of the things that we do to break up that monotony and get us to a place of play and fun. 

Number One is creative brainstorms. So we get everyone in the room from my level to our EA because you never know where the creative ideas are going to come from and you always want everyone to feel like they’re a part of this collective process. SO we do what we call our rapid creative processing and everyone puts on a board in a specific time frame whether that's 2 or 5 minutes, all of the ideas - wacky, wild or totally executable - around a concept or creative idea for a client. And then gallery style, we walk around and everyone circles two ideas, the one that is the most wacky, wild and interesting, and the other is the one that is the most easily executable, so something we think we could really easily nail. That’s a great way to break through that monotony and get everyone in a room, get the juices flowing and come up with some new creative ideas that you might now have thought of before. 

Number Two is that we play a lot. Play, fun and creativity are part of our ethos as an agency and so about once a month, I’ll call someone very seriously into the conference room and I’ll challenge them to a game of giant jenga and then whoever wins has to play it forward and pick the next person in the company to play until everyone has played the game. Again, just another fun way to break up the day to day monotony and make a little place for play and fun in your daily activities. 

And finally, we like to break up our creative process with either field trips or walks around the office. And again, everyone gets up and gets out. One person is responsible for what we’re doing each day, so whether that’s deciding whether we’re turning right or left, or whether we’re going for ice cream or lunch or whatever that is, it’s about creating new moments of creativity and possibility. There’s been a lot of studies that show that when you do different things everyday, it creates different new brain folds that help open you up to new possibilities. So that could be as simple as turning left on a street instead of right, but again just getting out there and getting out of the work environment and having a little creativity and fun. 

So that’s how we break up the day to day monotony. Even when we don't feel like it, getting up and out and moving and playing and laughing, is really truly the best medicine. So I highly recommend that you play a little bit with your team. It doesn't have to be giant jenga, it could be whatever you want it to be. I’ll also say that cocktails always help! Stay tuned for more from Elevate My Brand.