Creativity is Not a Department

Creativity is not a department. Researchers define it as producing ideas that are both novel and useful in a given context, which means it happens wherever new, valuable work gets done, not only in design, brand or production. In my research with senior women leaders in sports media marketing, four creative competencies kept appearing outside the “creative” job titles: problem-solving, collaboration, negotiation and process improvement.

Most organizations keep the word creative in a small box and quietly treat everyone else as consumers of creativity rather than producers of it. A year of interviews convinced me the box is drawn in the wrong place, and that drawing it wrong costs companies far more than they realize, especially when it comes to women.

“I am not creative”: a common, costly misconception

Rachel runs marketing for a leading digital sports and gaming company. She is sharp and fast, the kind of leader you put in front of the board when something complicated needs to be made simple. In our first interview, I asked how creativity showed up in her role. She didn’t pause: she told me she was not creative.

Then she pointed across the org chart to her production team, the people with motion graphics open on a second monitor. They were the creatives. She was, in her words, the business side.

By every measure in the research literature, Rachel is creative. She solves novel challenges under impossible constraints, negotiates partnerships that didn’t exist before she walked in, and gets people to agree on things they weren’t going to agree on ten minutes earlier. She is doing creative work every day. She just doesn’t have the word for it, and in my research she was not alone.

We have narrowed “creative” to the roles that produce visible artifacts: designers, writers, producers, brand. That narrowing limits how leaders see themselves, how teams hire, how companies distribute respect, and who feels they belong in the room when ideas are being generated. It also leaves enormous creative capacity unused.

What is creativity, really?

Ask people in any company who “the creatives” are and they will point to a department, a discipline, or a single person with interesting glasses. That is not how creativity researchers define it.

• Teresa Amabile, whose work has shaped the study of organizational creativity for four decades, defines creativity as producing ideas that are both novel and useful within a given context.
• David and Tom Kelley, of IDEO, have spent their careers arguing that creative confidence is something everyone has, and most people have been talked out of.

If creativity is novel plus useful plus in context, it lives wherever novel, useful work gets done, which is nearly everywhere a company creates value.

How the definition got so narrow

• Industrial-era organization design separated thinking from doing and confined “ideation” to a few bounded jobs.
• Marketing departments, for understandable branding reasons, claimed “creative” as a department name and job title.
• Schools sorted children early into “the creative kids” and “the smart kids,” as if those were different groups.
• The cultural shorthand for “creative” came to skew young, male, slightly disheveled and allergic to spreadsheets.

The result is a word that does less work than it should. It describes a costume rather than a way of working.

Four creative competencies hiding in plain sight

I spent a year interviewing twelve women in senior leadership roles in sports media marketing, an industry that is fast-paced, male-dominated and culturally identified with masculinity, which makes “creative” even more contested than usual. They didn’t talk about ideation sprints or mood boards. They talked about four things, and once you see them, you’ll see them in every business.

1. Problem-solving

Every leader I interviewed named problem-solving as a creative competency. Not puzzle-book problem-solving, but the kind where there is no obvious answer and you need one by Friday. Allison, a senior director at a global sports agency, said the creativity in her work happens within the bounds of business objectives: it is how you solve challenges in your own way.

Megan, who leads marketing at a global sports media company, described creativity as telling one coherent, true story across a dozen platforms with different audiences and formats. That is not a graphic design task. It is creative work of a high order.

2. Collaboration

Eleven of twelve participants named collaboration as central to creativity, not as a value statement but as the way creativity actually happens. Ashley, who leads creative for a Spanish-language sports network, told me about a halftime “fan cam” idea that became one of her most-watched segments. It came out of a team brainstorm and improved as it moved around the room.

Creativity is a team sport. I’m not the kind of person who sits alone and comes up with a genius idea.

Anyone who runs a meeting that produces an idea nobody walked in with, whether a manager, project lead or chief of staff, is doing creative work. Not crediting it that way is a failure of vocabulary, not effort.

3. Negotiation

This one surprised me. It isn’t in the standard literature on creative competencies, but it kept coming up. Laura, a senior executive at a sports network, described a budget review when international live feeds were on the chopping block. Her male counterparts proposed cutting them. She proposed partnering with peer networks to share feeds and split the costs. It worked: it saved the broadcasts and it saved jobs.

That required imagining a structure that didn’t exist, persuading several parties to join it and holding it together until it stood on its own. Several women described negotiation the same way, as the daily act of finding a third option when there were supposed to be only two.

4. Process improvement

Six of the twelve women said their creativity lived in process improvement, and several said so apologetically, as if they expected me to disqualify the answer. Jessica, a senior executive at a sports agency, told me her creativity can be as simple as building a new process or streamlining an old one, and that while most people wouldn’t call that creative, she is that person in her organization.

These leaders design new ways for work to flow and invent systems that didn’t exist. That is creative by any reasonable definition, and it may be the highest-leverage creative work in an organization, because systems shape how every other piece of creative work gets made.

Why this matters more for women

Here the research gets uncomfortable. When “creative” is narrowed to a small set of visible roles, the people holding those roles are, in many industries, disproportionately men. The people doing the negotiating, cross-functional collaboration, process design and unglamorous problem-solving in the seams of the organization are very often women. They do the creative work without getting the creative credit.

• It limits how women see themselves. Rachel was certain she wasn’t creative. She was wrong, and being wrong about that carries a real cost.
• It limits what organizations give them. Resources, sponsorship and high-visibility opportunities tend to flow to people labeled creative.

Research by Lebuda and Karwowski has documented that women’s creative contributions are rated lower than men’s even when the work is identical. Proudfoot, Kay and Koval have shown that the cultural prototype of “the creative person” is gendered male, and that prototype shapes who gets called creative in evaluations. Better mood boards won’t fix that. Widening the word until it covers what women are actually doing will.

What changes when you widen the word

• Leaders update their self-image. Telling someone that fifteen years of fixing broken processes, saving projects through negotiation and finding third options is creative work isn’t flattery. It corrects a misclassification, and people begin to claim it.
• Teams get richer ideas. When more people feel licensed to contribute, the idea pool gets deeper and more interesting. A team’s best creative output depends on who feels welcome to contribute, not just who is technically capable.
• Companies stop wasting their best resource. If some of your most creative leaders believe they aren’t creative, you are leaving capacity on the floor. That is a strategic issue, not a vocabulary issue.

How to recognize creativity in every role: three moves

The word “creative” is one of the most important words in your company. It allocates respect, opportunity and self-belief. Use it more generously.

1. Audit how the word is used. Look at job descriptions, performance reviews, internal awards and how people introduce each other at all-hands meetings. Whom do you call creative, and whom don’t you? What pattern shows up?
2. Name creative work where you see it. When a colleague negotiates a complicated partnership or redesigns a broken process, say out loud that it was creative work. Repetition stretches the word.
3. Put creativity in every job description. As a competency, not a value statement: “This role requires creative problem-solving under constraints.” That moves the word out of departments and into the work itself.

Creativity is not a department. It never was.

The most valuable creative work in your company is happening in places that don’t get credit for it. The cost of that misclassification shows up in self-belief, in opportunity and in the ideas you never hear because the people who would have raised them decided they weren’t “the creative ones.”

Rachel was wrong about herself. Most of the leaders I interviewed had been wrong about themselves at some point, in the same direction. The fix isn’t expensive. It starts with using the word more accurately.

Frequently asked questions

What is the definition of creativity at work?

Teresa Amabile’s widely used definition is the production of ideas that are both novel and useful in a given context. By that definition, creativity happens across every function, not only in creative departments.

Can you be creative in a non-creative job?

Yes. Problem-solving under constraints, building collaboration, negotiating new arrangements and redesigning processes all meet the research definition of creative work.

Why are women less likely to be seen as creative?

Research shows the cultural image of a creative person skews male, and women’s creative work is often rated lower than identical work by men. Women also frequently do creative work in roles that aren’t labeled creative.

How can organizations unlock more creativity?

Widen the definition, name creative work wherever it happens, and build creative problem-solving into every role. Then remove the systemic barriers covered in Bridges & Barriers to Creativity.

What’s a piece of work you’ve done lately that was creative, even though it doesn’t match the cultural shorthand? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

This piece is drawn from my dissertation, Playing the Creative Advantage: Creative Role Identity of Female Leaders in Sports Media Marketing (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2025). Names are pseudonyms.

Continue the series with The Quiet Advantage, on what creative confidence does for women leading in rooms not built for them, and Bridges & Barriers to Creativity. If this is a challenge inside your organization, here is how we work on it.