Creating an Uncreative Environment: 10 Traits of Terrible Leadership

Is your team truly innovating, or are they too afraid to fail? If new ideas are met with silence, the problem might not be your team—it might be you. In this episode, we unpack how psychological safety fuels creativity, the power of intrinsic motivation, and the small changes that unlock big innovation.

• Transcript

  Do you as the key leader of your team feel like you are the only one driving creativity and innovation? Have you ever sort your team’s creative input and received crickets?

  Creativity and Innovation don’t happen in environments where people are afraid to fail. If your team avoids risks, it’s likely not because they don’t have ideas—it may well be because they don’t feel safe enough to share them.

  Let me pause and tell you something I have learnt about myself. According to the Working Genius; I have the genius of discernment. This genius means I have a gut feeling for how things will work. Unfortunately the shadow side of this genius is that my natural response to ideas that I feel won’t work is a sharp dismissal. I thought I was being honest and communicating efficiently. However the result of this was that my teams tended not to feel safe enough to bring new ideas. I had no idea that the reason my teams were not innovative, was me.

  Let’s make this personal for you. When was the last time someone on your team brought you a new idea? More importantly, what did you do? Did you explore it? Did you challenge it in a supporting and constructive way? Or did you dismiss it because things are fine as they are?

  Daniel Pink, in his book ‘Drive', talks about how intrinsic motivation fuels real innovation. Think of intrinsic motivation like this: If I ask my child to clean their room and tell them they can’t use screens or even if I offer to pay them, this is extrinsic motivation. It works. But both the ‘Carrot’, the pay and ‘the stick’, lack of screen time are external motivations. And from experience they might do a good job, or they might not. However, recently, I came home from some meetings and one of my daughters had cleaned her room, the dining room and the kitchen, and she had done a stellar job. I was blown away! I went and asked ‘why?’ Well, she had invited some friends over and she wanted the house to be tidy for them. That is intrinsic motivation.

  Intrinsically motivated people don’t just clean their room, they clean the house. Would you like to see more of that in your team?

  If you want to develop a team that is intrinsically motivated, leading to great creativity and innovation, you need to start with psychological safety, if people don’t feel safe to experiment, those drivers disappear. A McKinsey study from 2021 backs this up. Teams with strong psychological safety are more likely to innovate and improve continuously.

  So, what’s one thing you can do today to make innovation safer in your team? Do you need to build trust within your team? Do you need your team to become comfortable with failure? Maybe it is asking a tricky question at your next meeting and sitting in silence until someone answers, and positively reinforcing the boldness and courage when they do. Whatever it is, start small—but start now.