Yes, definitely a successful Maintenance Management is creative. Why? And how creativity relates to the Pinnacle of Maslow’s Pyramid aka self-actualization? Scientific American had a great article about self-actualization as seen from todays point of view rather than from the 1970’s point of view when the Maslow’s ideas were published. You can find it in this link: What Does It Mean to Be Self-Actualized in the 21st Century? I bring you here a brief of the article that would link self-actualization to creativity and while going on we shall link it to the maintenance profession:
10 Characteristics of Self-Actualization includes: Creative Spirit (Sample item: “I have a generally creative spirit that touches everything I do.”
Overall, self-actualization was related to higher levels of stability and the ability to protect your highest level goals from disruption by distracting impulses and thoughts. . What’s more, self-actualization scores were associated with multiple indicators of well-being, including greater life satisfaction, curiosity, self-acceptance, positive relationships, environmental mastery, personal growth, autonomy, and purpose in life.
What Does It Mean to Be Self-Actualized in the 21st Century?
The definition of creativity
The Maintenance Management is the art of achieving the organizational goals while fulfilling your team needs. We had reached this conclusion after a lengthy discussion of the management duties. Part of this duties comes from the organization while the other part are needs to facilitate maintenance team activities. You can return to it here Between the jaws of the millstone. But when I came during my readings to the definition of creativity and the steps to magnify it in our life, I found it perfectly matching the successful maintenance management or supervision tasks.
Creativity : the quality of being creative. Creative is someone who get around conventional limits.
Merriam-Webster
the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.; originality, progressiveness, or imagination . e.g. the need for creativity in modern industry e.g. creativity in the performing arts
Collins Dictionary
How to relate creativity to your daily activities?
Since management in general and maintenance management in focus involves creating solutions for new situations, that’s make your role implicitly creative. Anyhow, your role as a maintenance manager or supervisor includes a lot of dynamicity. Believe that the only fixed universal law is the universe continuous change. At the least, sometimes, there are new organization policies.
Moreover, the external business environment and the recruiting market and technologies vary. You need to update your language, role modal and to look for upgrades to your strategies and equipment to avoid being outdated. How many problems of outdated equipment and systems you faced and managed to get creative workarounds?
The proficiency and creativity is not only to find a workaround Now, but to introduce soft or hard upgrade softly. Why softly? Because you are still between the jaws of the organization and you team. Both jaws of the millstone are hard in their needs, so trying to make a hard change can break either of them. The organization seldom grants open budget to upgrade at any moment in time at your will. Your team as most humans finds their comfort zone in routine life. That’s when days are the same so they can perform on the autopilot most of the time.
Unfortunately that’s meets another universal law, law of decay with time. Unless you creatively introduce new bits and bytes in doing the routine tasks, enthusiasm, care and perfection will be lost with time. Moreover, boredom will be introduced into the workplace. Boredom in the workplace opens the door for psychological problems to be the focus of unengaged team.
After all those tasks on your agenda and your creative and dynamic solutions, believe that the successful maintenance management role is creative in all its aspects.
Do you see the creativity in your maintenance role?
When the system you are working through leaves you no space to digest and reflect back on what you are doing, that may limit your window for creativity. Wait a moment, that’s not the only reason, so don’t start blaming and complaining. Actually, you may miss seeing the creativity in your performance because of mishandling the steps to accomplish. You are so busy hopping ON and OFF between what seems urgent that you miss the creative tricks and the workarounds you had come up with.
You can slow a down your storming stream of thoughts using many techniques. One of them is to forcibly stop down for a moment and take some deep breath. When your stream of thoughts are related to psychological emotional anxiety or fear, you can find here 5 steps with Eckhart Tole practical exercise: 5 Practical Steps to shift between thoughts. While if your thoughts are storming because you want to accomplish too many tasks at the same time then, First Things First will help you to queue your tasks properly.
Another solution that will help you see clearly and apply the creativity in your role, is to systemize your work. That’s when you create a system of auto generating and distributing repeated jobs. Then you are the observer of the system and the maestro who can creatively update his system. That’s not far from the continuous improvement environment. You need a time to visualize and imagine better ways of doing the same routine job. You can spare this time only by delegating the repeated routine tasks to subordinates, systems and may be to robots and virtual assistants.
Before the pinnacle and conclusion, spread the below information:
The last couple of days to grasp the opportunity of building your maintenance solid background by joining the below training .
- World class maintenance perception and definition
- Secrets overlooked in the Maintenance Management
- Components of a successful Maintenance Program
- Setting up maintenance KPI’s
Why it is helpful to feel creative?
This way you had reached the pinnacle of Maslow’s Pyramid of needs; Self-actualization. Self-actualization is living to your full potential. Usually we recognize our full potential when we relate it to achievements. What is more fulfilling than feeling that you had come up with a creative solution. In an article by Psychology Today it says: Creativity feels good, based on many scientific researches that involved measuring the brain waves. Naturally, good feelings ignites the desire to maintain those good feelings. Consequently, you look for more creative moments into your life
This key might also serve to increase the engagement of your team. How? Let us chat about it in a coming chat.
In Conclusion,
Definitely a successful Maintenance Management is creative. However, you might not see your role as maintenance manager as a creative one due to various reasons. On top of those reasons are the schedule loaded with repeated jobs and the restless mind. We had introduced links from our publications that include solutions to each of them. Moreover, we had clarified the difference between a systemized job with continuous improvement in focus and a routine job. Till we meet again digest our talks with a warm coffee and stay safe.
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