Company NewCo has hired you to advise its senior management

Company NewCo has hired you to advise its senior management on how to communicate a strategy for unleashing the firm’s creativity. You have eight weeks to put your recommendations together, which will be on the agenda of the company’s next Leadership Retreat.

Fortunately for NewCo, you have just completed a course on this very subject. After thinking about it for a while, you thought you should structure your project using material from the course you just completed, augmented by some additional research.

Your assignment this week is to evaluate the creative talent at NewCo. What creative capabilities do your employees possess? Are there strenghts that are being underutilized? Are there areas of deficency in which training or new talent may be needed? Provide a creative inventory for NewCo that will help reach the goals of the project.

Approach to the assignment:

1. In addition to drawing on your readings from this course, you will be expected to conduct additional research to complete this assignment.

2. The section title must be centered and bold. Sub-sections, based on your content coverage, must be left aligned and in bold.

3. This paper should be at least 2 pages long, excluding your cover and reference pages, and must be fully compliant with APA standards for academic writing.

Solution

Evaluation of Creative Talent in the Company:

To evaluate the creative talent of the company, one needs to closely work with top management of the company, especially with key managers of every department. Each manager should be convinced and given some set of tasks that they need to assign to their respective subordinates. These managers will have to submit a report to the concerned person (i.e. the consultant) after 3-4 weeks. These could be

- Providing short term difficult/impossible but ambitious target to attain. The managers in this case will not provide any directions and will have to provide full autonomy to their suordinates. The duration could be of 7-10 days. This will help to bring out the innovative thoughts of each and every employee. Every manager will have to observe each idea closely and record it.

- Each employees can be given a chance to lead the team for a day or two. This will only be possible in case of a small department and this will bring out the leadership potential of the employees. Alternatively a brainstorming between a diverse group, in case the department size is higher. The potential leaders by themselves will come to forefront and will take lead. The managers along with the consultant will have to observe closely and make note of the observations.

- Cross functional activity could be arranged between various department in which some employees of one department can join some other department and try to fit into their shoes. This can run for atleast 15 days. This will help to identify the persons who are more adaptive and the ones who may be average in his/her current role but could be proved efficient in the other role. It will help to develop a competency mapping and reshuffling.

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Based on different activities for over a month\'s period and report from the key managers (selected at the begining of the activity), a metrics should be prepared. This metrics should categorise employees into different quadrants of Innovative thinking, Leadership and competency. Moreover, under each quadrant employees should be ranked on a scale of 10. In this metrics, a co-relation should be made between a employee\'s score and his/her concerned department. This will help to understand the localization of traits (i.e. Innovative thinking, Leadership and competency) in different departments. It will also help to understand which department is having more, adequate or less talents. This will also help to know how an employee\'s talent is being utilized in his/her own department.

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Mico obseravation of the created metrics will itself indicate the skill gaps and need for training/hiring in every department as well as in the company at a large.

identification of potential of each employee and filling up the identified gaps in itself will help the company to build its creative inventory. As a consultant, one can provide assistance to the company to hire right and creative people.