Want to boost creativity? Then share your shame

Ever conducted a team meeting with spinach stuck prominently on your teeth? Walked around the office with a tear or suspicious stain on your clothes and you didn’t know about it until the end of the day when someone mentions it in passing? Or mistakenly thought you’d hang up on your boss and bad-mouthed him to your colleagues only to realise he’s still on the call?

New research has shown that if you want to boost your team’s creativity, you should consider sharing these and other embarrassing situations in company meetings.

And the researchers have the science to back up the benefits of doing this. They asked online participants to write down an incident they found pride or embarrassment in, and then asked them to participate in a creativity exercise: listing unusual uses for a paper clip.

The researchers found that “people who recounted an embarrassing incident generated almost 28 per cent more ideas and over 20 per cent greater variety of ideas than those who had written about a prideful moment.”

Their recommendation? Share your embarrassing moments early when working with a team, as this fosters team harmony and boosts creativity. And go into the details - don’t just hit the highlights.

Further, make the story fairly recent if it’s to have impact; people don’t have the same beneficial reaction to stories that go further back than six months. And if one person in the group shares their embarrassing story, share yours, too.

The true cost of entrepreneurship

More often than not, entrepreneurs project their successes to the world; very few, like Tesla Founder Elon Musk, are willing to reveal the actual price they have to pay to make their ventures work.

In an interview with the New York Times, Musk revealed he worked 120 hours a week – the average employee puts in 40 hours a week. He also revealed that he spent his 47th birthday working all alone, hadn’t taken a week-long holiday for close to 20 years, and the last time he took seven days off from work was in 2001 when he fell ill with malaria.

“No one said building a company is easy. But it’s time to be honest about how brutal it really is – and the price so many founders secretly pay,” Jessica Bruder writes in an article on the psychological price of entrepreneurship.

Most entrepreneurs, even the celebrated ones, deal with issues they don’t discuss as openly as their successes.

Aside from the long hours that strain their bodies, entrepreneurs are at risk of developing mental disorders from constantly facing up to the high possibility of business failure. They’re also exposed to periods of anxiety, self-doubt and low esteem, especially when their businesses are underperforming.

The upside to these struggles, however, is that the tough times in business embolden founders, make them more resilient and more optimistic as they become aware that there are different cycles in business.