All advice on how to manage creative people is awful

All advice on how to manage creative people is awful A good manager is someone who makes everyone feel like he or she is creative in their work. Because creative work is the most fulfilling work, and we are each capable of that kind of work. My favorite research on this topic is from John Mirowsky, professor of sociology at University of Texas, Austin. Mirowsky finds that people who work are happier than people who dont because people who are employed spend more of their time being creative. This was true regardless of age and race and the amount of creativity that a given job had. He concludes that people make choices to be more creative if they are gainfully employed. But also that we have more control than we realize over how creative we make our worklife. He says, One thing that surprised us was that the daily activities of employed persons are more creative than those of non-employed persons of the same sex, age and level of education. How can you tell if you are creative at work? You could just ask yourself if you like your job. It is nearly impossible to like a job if you are not solving problems that are challenging. And if you are doing that, well, that is creative. For a more scientific gauge, you can look at your cell phone call log. If you routinely call your friends from work, youre probably not happy at work, according to research from Nathan Eagle, at the Santa Fe Institute. Here are five ways to make a job more creative. And if you want to be good at managing creative people tell these tips to everyone who reports to you: 1. Change your mindset. So much of solving our own problems is fixing our outlook. Bad situations breed creativity, but only if you feel responsible for fixing your own problems. So stop blaming your job or your boss or your work, and start looking to yourself to make your life more creative. Also, you should know that its as misguided to divide the world into creative and non-creative jobs as it is to divide the world into creative and non-creative people. All jobs have opportunities for creativity. Some have more and some have less, but you usually get more opportunities to be creative by demonstrating that you are a creative problem solver over and over again. This usually means solving problems no one asks you to solve. Thats right: Creativity at work is often about finding your own work, finding and solving your own problems. So most of you should blame yourself, not your job, for lack of creativity in your work. 2. Change your response to stress. We tend to respond to stress with routine responses almost all of them bad for us in some way. Natalie Angier writes in the New York Times about our predisposed type of response to stress: Regions of the brain associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors had shriveled, while, conversely, brain sectors linked to habit formation had bloomed. Rodents were cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. So when you have stress, try a new response and see what happens. No job prevents you from doing that. 3. Change the pace of what you do. John Freeman points out in the Wall Street Journal that changing the pace changes what its like to do that task. You know this intuitively from dancing or sex. But its also true of workplace tasks like writing email or cleaning our deskboth of which we often do quickly with no examination of whether or not that is a good pace for that task. 4. Try job hopping. This is a way to change your level of creativity on a larger scale. A big reason that job hopping helps your career is that people who job hop are more engaged in their work. Mirowsky explains this further: People with a wide variety of jobs manage to find ways to make them creative. 5. Get in a long-term, intimate relationship. Be careful putting too much burden on a job. You need to be creative in order to feel fulfilled, yes. But there are infinite ways to be creative, and they dont necessarily have to relate to your job. Which is why the connection between a job and happiness is totally overrated. Intimate, long-term, intimate relationships matter most and, not surprisingly, the act of putting two lives into one life requires creativity, always. (Hat tip: Emily, Caitlin and Jay)