Creativity: Soft Skill #1

It’s time to invest in yourself, especially if you want to stay ahead and stand out from the crowd. Do so by writing to your soft skills as well as the required leadership competencies. Soft skills are those personal attributes, abilities and character traits that affect how you work and interact with others. And an increasing number of officials are seeking individuals with creativity, so don’t put developing it on the back burner.   

A few examples:

Using creativity is a unique way to solve untold problems, such as accomplishing specific strategies with no budget, filling critical vacancies or resolving workload imbalances. 

Case in point, most leaders might possibly assign everyone equal parts of a growing inventory instead of brainstorming how to better manage it. By getting suggestions from those who do the work, there likely are some other processes to follow. Unfortunately, you won’t know until you give it a try.  However, don’t forget to give credit to those who came up with the idea as well as celebrate the win by, for instance, providing a group lunch, certificates of appreciation, etc.

• Or, when faced with a training need, maybe conduct the training yourself to become a “train-the-trainer” of sorts. Or, have round-robin training sessions by creating challenging yet real-life training scenarios.

• Or rotate employees within various work groups, temporarily filling critical vacancies.

Developing your creativity:

Creativity takes courage. You have to be willing to take risks and be OK with making mistakes. Similar to brainstorming or dreaming with your eyes wide open, capture ideas without analyzing whether or not they make sense. Start with the end in mind, and jot down everything that occurs to you. Then analyze, ask questions and map out the necessary actions. Be persistent and practice thinking outside of the box. 

Also, keep track of the results. You’ll want to write to your creative competency when applying for your next career move.

In summary:

Whether your agency is small or large, fully funded or not, you’ll want to develop your creativity soft skill. 

• Be curious. 
• Embrace ambiguous, seemingly complex situations, and you won’t become overwhelmed with the perception of impossibility. 
• Take charge.

Work on making things happen. 

 “Without creativity, there would be no progress and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.”  — (Edward de Bono, creator of the term lateral thinking – a.k.a. structured creativity)

After retiring from the Federal Government, Sandra Hill launched her business – New Horizen Coaching & Professional Growth Advancement. She has a passion for coaching (life, business, and career), helping those who seek to build their confidence while facilitating transitions in their personal or professional life. Sandra is a best-selling author, podcast host and writes career coaching articles for Forbes and other industry magazines.

Fulfilling her personal mantra, “Each one Reach one”, Sandra also volunteers with several non-profits and serves as a mentor and partner with local schools. 

Feature image from Pixabay titled: Energy, Inspiration, Ideas