Negative environments kill thousands of great ideas every minute—ideas your company needs to stay competitive. Your leaders and managers are the ones who choose to cultivate a creative workplace environment or to stifle new ideas before they can grow. So what are your managers doing to cultivate the creative instincts of your employees? Here are 7 ways leaders can intentionally cultivate the kind of creative culture where ideas flow freely.

People will do what their leaders do. If your leaders want dedicated, thoughtful, productive people on their team, they must model those characteristics. If the leaders in your company are not walking the walk they ask of their team members, people will quickly realize they are not authentic. Trust will decline, taking influence and productivity with it.

68% of your employees may not want to be there. According to Gallup, only 32% of employees are engaged in the American workplace. Worldwide, it’s even worse: 87% of employees are disengaged at significant levels. The leaders and managers in your company clearly face an uphill climb to build more productive teams.

“How do you feel”? No one ever asked that question of employees in previous generations. But in the new year, mood measurement promises to be a hot topic for HR leaders as they try to keep employees fully engaged and productive.The mood and emotions of employees affect the overall productivity of the organization. An organization that devotes time and resources to improving the mood and emotions of the employees will attract and retain better employees.

Building a culture of inclusion among employees of all ages and knowledge backgrounds is a top driver of financial performance. When people don’t get along, nothing works well. Production falters, profits fall, and people leave. As a leader who cares about developing people and training them to succeed in your company, you’ll want to develop a “holistic inclusion and diversity program that touches all talent practices.”

Maybe you’ve been there at some point—declining production, management mishaps, plummeting morale, etc. As a Human Resources leader, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by focusing on how to fix your company or how to empower your managers to fix their ailing departments. Your CEO and other C-suite leaders may look to you for answers, demanding a strategy to turn things around quickly. When this happens, you and your team can provide a short-term band-aid approach or propose a more foundational question and discuss the greater cultural context in which change takes place.