By: Jeff Smith

Once relegated to the administrative realm of payroll, compliance, and workplace policies, human resources today plays an integral role in shaping company culture, attracting top talent, and devising creative solutions to workforce challenges.

“HR, done right, ends up involved in so many talent decisions,” says Jeff Smith, whose resume includes stints as head of HR at BlackRock and as a senior HR leader at Time Warner. “A creative HR team ends up shaping culture and helping leadership meet broader goals.”

However, cultivating a forward-thinking HR team and culture of creativity is no simple undertaking. It demands an approach that involves understanding the psychology of the workplace environment, leadership development, continuous learning, and embracing new technologies and data-driven insights.

Psychological Safety and Creativity

Creativity thrives in environments where people feel empowered to voice ideas, take calculated risks to drive growth and learn from failures without fear of reprisal. As such, progressive HR leaders prioritize building psychological safety rooted in open dialogue and mutual respect.

Jeff Smith’s approach underscores the importance of trust and nonjudgmental exchange. “I like trying to play the role of helping to bring out the best in others, to bring people together,” he shares.

This ethos starts with leaders modeling vulnerability and humility, a process that involves steps such as actively soliciting diverse perspectives, acknowledging limitations, and embracing constructive criticism.

“Getting talent to the front and center of the agenda of the CEO and the leadership team is huge,” says Smith. “Some leaders might not like conflict and want you as the HR person to have all the right and hard conversations.’ You need to balance this with helping leaders give feedback, to have difficult conversations, to learn to grow and develop their people and to hold them accountable.”

In a report published by the MIT Digital Initiative and Capgemini, John Ferriola, CEO of Nucor, a prominent steel producer in the U.S., explained that “if we, through our actions, encourage our teammates to fear failing, they simply will not stretch the limits of their capabilities or the limits of their imaginations.”

Janelle Sallenave, Uber’s former head of customer support, said, “This is a company that is obsessed with what we call experiments. Everybody is encouraged to, whatever it is that they’re working on, reimagine how it could be better, different, cheaper, faster, whatever it might be.”

Embracing Diversity

Teams with similar backgrounds can be prone to collective blindspots and stagnant thinking. To catalyze true innovation, HR leaders should prioritize assembling diverse teams marked by a breadth of backgrounds, experiences, and problem-solving approaches extending beyond traditional diversity metrics.

“If you are hiring for a very specific job, industry matters,” says Smith. Teams in engineering or graphic design will, of course, share certain technical skill sets, but even within these groups there’s room for different perspectives on problem-solving. And in more open-ended departments like HR, sometimes it’s a more general open-mindedness and culture fit that’s most important in driving performance and creativity.

“I think people can learn industries, and if you bring in people with the right basic skills, personality, and culture fit, then I think it is much easier to have those things and learn an industry than it is to have industry knowledge and change your skills, personality and fit for the culture,” says Smith.

Continuous Learning and Knowledge-Sharing

In a complex knowledge economy, competitive advantage hinges on the ability to continuously learn, adapt, and cross-pollinate ideas across domains. HR should foster a culture of continuous development by exposing employees to diverse contexts and bodies of knowledge through initiatives like cross-functional projects and interdisciplinary training.

Moreover, HR can spur innovation by facilitating open knowledge sharing and in-person events that encourage “creative collisions” — serendipitous encounters between individuals from different areas of a business who can draw novel connections and insights.

“Culture is easier to create in person,” says Smith. “It’s easier to have random moments of learning or mentoring or coaching or ideation and innovation if people are walking the halls and interacting with each other.”

What Is Intrapreneurship?

While established organizations often struggle to cultivate entrepreneurial mindsets, HR can play a pivotal role in fostering a culture of intrapreneurship: empowering employees to autonomously pursue innovative ideas and entrepreneurial initiatives within the corporate structure.

This could involve granting staff a degree of flexibility and ownership over self-directed projects, spotlighting when an individual or team comes up with a particularly self-motivated creative solution, or implementing compensation models that reward creative contributions through bonuses.

As Jeff Smith highlights, “I think it’s a huge advantage to have the best talent motivated and incentivized to make decisions for the company in a way they would about themselves.”

Design Thinking

Design thinking, with its emphasis on empathy, iterative prototyping, and user-centric solutions, can be a powerful framework for driving innovation within a company. When HR teams focus on understanding how others within a team or broader corporate structure understand a company’s culture and purpose, it helps gain insights to inspire novel approaches across the talent lifecycle, from engagement and retention initiatives to organizational design.

HR can embed design thinking principles into core processes, encouraging divergent thinking, rapid experimentation, and a feedback-driven approach to continuous improvement.

“If you are trying to create the culture you want, you need to implement practices that create the culture you want. Don’t just let it happen,” Smith advises.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Today’s corporate environment is rich in data on both employee performance and attitudes. Based on this data, HR must prioritize building robust analytics capabilities to drive strategic talent decisions. Drawing upon quantitative and qualitative data insights — from employee pulse surveys to sophisticated workforce planning models — can inform everything from tailored retention programs and career development pathways to targeted leadership coaching initiatives.

As Smith emphasizes, “It’s critical to have exceptional technology to make processes better and more efficient, for governance and risk management, and to help provide data and insight to make decisions.”

However, HR must balance metrics with human nuance, he continues, acknowledging that measuring human characteristics and HR outcomes means also having “faith and belief in your practices because not every characteristic is quantifiable.”

While unleashing creativity is a strategic imperative, Smith cautions against prematurely chasing innovation at the expense of foundational excellence.

“I think getting the basics right and executing them is far more important before you innovate. Pay people right, have great hiring practices, develop your leaders, have a culture of feedback, ensure leaders know their expectations, have good solid processes, then innovate on top of that where it is going to work because there is a foundation to innovate on top of.”

Published by: Khy Talara