Originally published by Katya Andresen on LinkedIn: How to unleash creativity in your teams

A colleague of mine recently told me a story of when he did some of the best work of his life. A boss gave him a six-week deadline for a project that typically took six months. Then he told my colleague he knew he had it in him to make that happen, and encouraged him every step of the way. My colleague had to rethink every way things had been done before and focus his team on changes that were bold, not incremental. He succeeded.

His story made me reflect on when I've done my best work, and the circumstances were similar: a meaningful challenge, real constraints and the freedom to figure out how to make it happen with my team. Like my colleague, my best work happened when I was working with people who unleashed my internal motivation and fostered environments that supported innovative thinking. They didn't tell me to be creative. They showed me they believed in my creativity. And they never stopped reminding me of why that creativity mattered to what we had set out to accomplish.

I've been thinking of these experiences given where the world and our workplaces are headed. As more and more tasks are becoming automated, there is a growing recognition that a leader's most critical skill is not just driving to an outcome but doing so in a way that sparks the uniquely human attribute of creativity. We need people to do what only people can do: innovate in ways that matter most to the lives of other people.

As Steve Jobs said in 2010: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone isn’t enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.”

The business writer Seth Godin calls the people of greatest value in this economy linchpins. A linchpin is a person who walks into chaos, creates order and invents, connects, creates and makes things happen. "The competitive advantages the marketplace demands is someone human, connected, and mature," he writes.

So how do you inspire and keep such people? It is not a classic "carrot and stick" management environment. As my colleague's story illustrates, it's something else entirely.

One of my favorite books about this question is Daniel Pink's Drive, which delves into the nuances of professional motivation. His premise is that extrinsic efforts to prompt performance - like the old "carrot and stick" system of rewards and pressures - don't result in the kind of work most needed in today's organizations. This style of management gets you "Type X behavior" - which is not the stuff of linchpins.