Unleashing Workplace Creativity: Insights from Coach Elaine Jacob
mayo 30, 2025
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7 min leer
The ability to think creatively and drive innovation sounds like nice skills to aspire to have, but these days, they’re essential. Both for individual and team-related survival and success.
But what does it mean to be creative at work, and how can we nurture this capacity in ourselves and our teams?
Elaine Jacob, founder of The Leadership Academy and TaskHuman Coach in creative thinking and innovation, helps to unpack this increasingly critical workplace competency.
Her insights challenge common misconceptions about creativity and offer practical guidance for anyone looking to strengthen their innovative thinking muscles.
Redefining Creativity In The Workplace
When many of us hear the word “creativity,” we might think of artistic talent or breakthrough inventions. According to Entrenadora Elaine, this limited view holds us back.
“Most people get afraid of it and say, ‘Oh, I’m not really creative,'” Elaine explains. “But I think that we’re a lot more creative than we think. It comes back to our ability to think creatively.”
This distinction is crucial.
Workplace creativity isn’t about artistic ability—it’s about approaching challenges with fresh perspectives and having the courage to voice those perspectives even when they diverge from the status quo.
As for innovation, Elaine demystifies this concept as well: “Innovation is also a big word, but it’s also just about the iterations or the small tweaks that I see, and am I brave enough to actually bring that forward?”
Taking Creativity From Luxury To Necessity
The stakes for developing creative thinking skills have never been higher.
En Entrenadora Elaine puts it, “It used to be a luxury like, ‘Oh, it’ll be so cool if we had creative people on our team.’ Now it’s becoming a necessity. We actually need a lot more creative thinkers.”
In fact, she believes “the future belongs to the bold and the creative” as organizations navigate increasingly complex and ambiguous business landscapes. Traditional linear thinking simply isn’t sufficient anymore.
“The world is not as linear as we thought,” Elaine notes. “Things aren’t just clear-cut anymore. We’re living with so much ambiguity in the workplace that we need different approaches.”
What Blocks Our Creativity?
If creativity is so valuable, why do so many of us struggle to tap into it? Coach Elaine identifies several barriers that can stifle our creative potential:
1. Educational conditioning
“When you look at the studies, you will see that most kids are very creative when they enter the schooling system. And by the time they leave the schooling system, they’ve lost like 95% of their creative thinking,” Elaine shares. This happens because “curiosity is one of the first sacrifices” when we enter structured institutional settings.
2. Fear of being wrong
One of the most significant obstacles is our discomfort with uncertainty and potential failure. “We’re so afraid of being wrong,” Elaine observes. This fear prevents us from sharing ideas that might seem too “out there” or unproven.
3. Need for control
Elaine candidly admits her own challenge: “I love control. And I don’t think control and creativity go very well together.” True creativity requires letting go of rigid expectations about outcomes and processes.
4. Psychological safety concerns
Even when good ideas emerge, many people don’t feel secure enough to voice them. “They don’t feel safe enough to bring the perspective forward,” Entrenadora Elaine notes. “I think our need for social acceptance is a lot higher than we think.”
Five Ways To Cultivate Creativity At Work
Fortunately, creative thinking is a skill that can be developed. Here are Elaine’s top recommendations:
1. Start with self-awareness
“Become aware of our current learning styles and be brave enough to unlearn,” suggests Elaine. Understanding your natural tendencies—whether you prefer structure and details or are comfortable with ambiguity—helps you identify what stretches you need to make.
Ask yourself: Do you need control? Do you need structure? How might these preferences be limiting your creative potential?
2. Create psychological safety for yourself and others
Creativity requires a willingness to experiment and potentially fail. Elaine emphasizes the need for a laboratory-like environment where ideas can be tested without judgment.
“You need people around to say, ‘Well, it’s okay. Let’s just try it. Who knows where it could go?’ You want people willing to just be scientists,” she explains. Conversely, questions like “Are you sure it’s going to work?” can kill creative thinking before it has a chance to develop.
Remember: “Psychological safety is obviously a two-way street.” While organizations need to foster supportive environments, individuals must also be willing to trust themselves enough to enter into that safe space.
3. Cultivate curiosity
“We’ve gotta also cultivate curiosity,” Elaine emphasizes. This means approaching situations with questions rather than immediate answers and genuinely seeking to understand different perspectives.
Structured inquiry methods inspired by design thinking, like appreciative inquiry, can help balance analytical thinking with creative exploration since it “gives you structure, but it does allow you to kind of go further because of its questions and its prompts.”
4. Embrace collaboration
“Another thing is collaboration, which we don’t talk about a lot in creativity and in innovation, but I think it’s not easy for creative thinking or innovative thinking to show up if we’re not brave enough to collaborate,” Elaine shares.
True collaboration isn’t about proving you’re the smartest person in the room—it’s about bringing diverse perspectives together to “connect things that we don’t think actually connect. That’s creativity.”
5. Balance analytical and creative thinking
Perhaps most importantly, Elaine challenges the false dichotomy between analytical and creative thinking. “I also love the thing of, you know what, ‘I’m analytical y I’m creative.'”
She encourages “living with the paradoxes” and rejecting the idea that you must be one or the other. “We’re a lot more than we think,” she reminds us, adding that this cognitive flexibility and adaptability are crucial for innovation.
Practical Exercises To Boost Creativity
Besides these mindset shifts, Entrenadora Elaine offers practical activities to strengthen your creative muscles:
The Rant Journal
To clear mental space for creativity, Elaine recommends a daily “rant journal” where you can express doubts, frustrations, and cynicism. “Every morning, I just rant. I have rant pages,” she shares.
This practice gives “an outlet to my cynicism,” so it doesn’t block her creative work.
Creative Immersion
“People should allow themselves to visit art galleries, go on creative walks, and be fully present,” Elaine suggests. In our hurried lives, creating moments to pause and notice what’s emerging around us allows “that creative muscle to be exercised.”
Putting Yourself in Uncomfortable Spaces
Growth happens at the edge of comfort. Elaine advises “putting ourselves in those uncomfortable spaces of holding an impossible idea” as a way to expand creative capacity.
The Journey Forward
For those wanting to go deeper, Entrenadora Elaine recommends exploring design thinking approaches and engaging with environments to be able to learn design thinking.
She also emphasizes the importance of understanding where your biases might exist, and challenging them. For instance, if you have a bias toward wanting to be the smartest in the room, practicing humility and curious inquiry might be your growth edge.
Above all, Elaine offers this encouragement: “Start to see yourself as creative. Embrace it so it’s not like, am I or not? No, you are. So that’s it. You now are, so now that you are, what will you do with that?”
She reminds us that “the most resourceful thing about you is who you are” and encourages us to embrace our full creative potential.
How TaskHuman Can Help
At TaskHuman, we know that everyone has untapped creative potential waiting to be developed.
Coaches like Elaine Jacob specialize in helping professionals strengthen their creative thinking skills, overcome barriers to innovation, and build the psychological safety needed for teams to thrive in today’s complex work environment.
Whether you’re looking to develop design thinking capabilities, improve cognitive flexibility, or simply learn to trust your creative instincts, our coaches provide personalized guidance to help you and your team unleash your full innovative potential.
Ready to tap into your creative power?
Connect with a TaskHuman coach today and start your journey toward more innovative thinking and problem-solving.