Episode 15
Crafting Safe Spaces: The Secret to Team Creativity
Summary:
Kelsey Arico chats about fostering creativity in leadership, emphasizing the importance of psychological safety over polished performance. She highlights the role of creativity in overcoming fear and anxiety. Leaders are urged to model vulnerability and encourage ideation by creating a safe space for rough drafts and unrefined ideas. This episode guides leaders in transforming environments to nurture originality and innovation, illustrating that great leadership is about building spaces where ideas can flourish.
Host Kelsey Airco: linkedin.com/in/kelsey-arico-775b772b
Executive Producer Jim Kanichirayil: linkedin.com/in/drjimk
Music Credit: "Lost in Dreams" by Kulakovka
Transcript
There's a moment right before someone shares a new idea when everything hangs in the balance and in that split second before the words leave their mouth mouth you leader have spark. Or shut it down.
They're scanning the room. Is this idea welcome? Will it be picked apart? Am I safe to explore and test this out, or am I just expected to perform the same way it's always been done, nod my head in agreement that pause. They take that silence. It's not about their confidence, it's. Safety, and if you're leading a team, here's the truth.
That idea lives or dies based on what you have made possible. Because creativity doesn't thrive on pressure, it thrives on trust, on space, on psychological safety, and here's where most leaders get it wrong. They say they want creativity, but they reward polish over exploration, and they shut down an idea with, oh, we've tried that before.
time. It even has a chance. [:So what does it take for you to create space for real creativity? Recently I came across sociologists and coached Dr. Martha Beck, and she has something really powerful to say about this. In her book, beyond Anxiety, she explains that we often don't think our way outta fear or ever we create our way out.
Anxiety, fear locks us in our heads. But when we engage our hands, sketching, building, experimenting, letting our mind wander, we activate a different part of the nervous system in our body and we interrupt what they call a fear spiral and step in to a creativity spiral. And you don't need a design lab to do this.
u just need, as a leader, to [:Make it explicit. Say early stage thinking is welcome here. It's encouraged, it's incentivized. We're not shutting anything down, no jumping in to fix what we haven't tried out. This is just an ideation, an exploration phase. Hey, you have to model it yourself as a leader. Bring your own messy thinking to the conversation.
Sure, you might wanna go last, but show what it looks like to move before you're ready. When you create, before you are confident, you're gonna give everyone else permission to do that too.
s laughter or, starting that [:We need a strategic one because if your team is locked in their heads, you won't get risk. Originality, big thinking, innovation. You're gonna get calculation or over calculation and conformity or silence. No new ideas. Do your people feel safe to build something new? Or are they just trying to not mess up?
Are you creating the space for them to try yourself? Or are you sending signals that say, Nope, be careful. Be smart, be polished here. Don't rock the boat because the best leaders. Might not be great thinkers or just great thinkers. That's one piece of it. They're great at building the environments where thinking can turn into something real.
your head and get in to your [:
