The idea of creative burnout often gets directed only at people engaged in the arts or creative endeavors. Think writers or graphic designers. However, creativity and innovation are an important part of any team. Both might appear as new and novel adjustments to workflows, changes to best practices, or the discovery of new solutions to existing problems, for example.
The long-term success of any team or organization relies on creativity and innovation. And both can suffer during periods of stress, monotony, or isolation, no matter your industry. The opposite is managing the status quo and stagnation.
This is Chris from Level Up Leadership. This week, let’s take a look at creative burnout.
Understanding Creative Burnout
Creative burnout occurs when someone experiences a drop in motivation, engagement, and creativity. There are also feelings of frustration. Specifically:
- Mental and Emotional Exhaustion: It becomes difficult to think about and act on new ideas.
- Default to Immediate Needs: Rather than consider ideating new solutions and improvements, team members strictly focus on what’s in front of them.
- Procrastination: A completely new project or task often requires a lot of creativity because it just doesn’t yet exist. Delays are often the result.
- Increased Frustration: Team members start to express negative opinions about new possibilities, but not in a constructive manner. Here are two examples: “That’s never going to work!” and “That seems like a complete waste of time!”
Strategies to Combat Creative Burnout
What can you do? Here are effective strategies to prevent creative burnout in the team.
Open Communication
Foster a supportive culture. Team members should feel able to express their ideas and feelings without fear or criticism. When a supportive culture becomes the norm, it’s easier to detect a shift in anyone who suddenly can’t constructively contribute to discussions or reacts with cynicism to the generated ideas.
Suggested read: 7 Tips for Team Communication.
Set Manageable Expectations
Tight deadlines, a shortage of manpower, and persistent stress all contribute to creative burnout.
With the team and each person, define clear, achievable goals. This alleviates anxiety and feelings of being overwhelmed. You should also clearly break projects or responsibilities into phases, with realistic deadlines and check-ins.
Effectively Delegate and Manage Workloads
Don’t forget to consider task-relevant maturity when you delegate tasks to the team too. You will need to provide longer deadlines and increased support when the task or responsibility is unfamiliar. This ensures that new tasks provide professional growth, but no one also feels overwhelmed and without support.
Pro point!: Are you creating psychological safety?
According to a study conducted by McKinsey, teams are 30% more productive and significantly more innovative when they feel safe to take risks without fear of failure.
Manage Proactively
When you take proactive actions, you also incorporate another important strategy in preventing creative burnout.
Unfortunately, teams too often take a reactive approach to problems. Despite best intentions, long-range concerns and issues get less attention, so the team jumps from problem to problem. However, reactive mode causes stress and exhaustion.
Instead, be proactive by creating time to consider, focus, and work on solutions.
Add Variety
Your team becomes disengaged when every day looks the same. Provide new opportunities that align with each person’s career goals, team needs, and strengths. New experiences lead to bursts of creativity.
Require Downtime to Recharge
Notice that I use “require” rather than “encourage” here. The former is too passive, and team members may not take much-needed time off. Require it.
When there are vacations, even short ones, people return with new ideas and the mental space to be innovative.
Wrapping Up
Addressing creative burnout is crucial not just for the well-being of employees but the overall health of the team and organization. When you implement these strategies, you create, maintain, and reinforce a creative culture. You prevent creative burnout in the team.
Until next week, stay creative!