Page 248 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE WHY OF WORK

playfulness, and civility. Then we’ll talk about how fostering
delight at work among employees can also create a climate
of delight for customers.

Creativity

Delight is both an outcome of and a contributor to creativity.
This is a chapter about finding delight, not using delight to
build creativity, but the process certainly can go both ways.
If we know we want to foster creativity at work, then provid-
ing people with rich images and evocative raw materials will
invite the creative part of them to come out and play. We do
our best sustained creative work under moderate, not severe
stress, when the heat is on but we are not in the pot. As long
as the challenges of staying in business and keeping a job are
sufficiently motivating, an atmosphere of playfulness, humor,
and support can keep things from boiling over.
But creativity is also delightful! When we have a creative
breakthrough, a moment of innovation or novelty, we often
get a huge charge out of it. It sparks delight to see a solution
that has evaded us, to realize a connection we hadn’t made
before, to be surprised by truth. If we want to find work
delightful, even small doses of creativity enrich the stew.
In many organizations creativity is the domain of research
and development. It is not really fostered on the plant floor or in
the accounting office, where in fact creativity is suspect. Who
needs a creative accountant? You do. Even if you don’t think
accounting creativity will help your bottom line, it can help
your employees, who can help your bottom line. Like this:
Creativity experts Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan describe
Jerry, an accountant for a Big Six accounting firm. Jerry

224