How do you unlock employee creativity?
You unlock employee creativity by inviting people to contribute from more than their job title. The “majors and minors” approach, developed by branding expert Steve Stoute, asks employees to name their major, their formal role, and their minor, the passion or skill that lives outside it, then invites the minor into real projects. When a customer service employee’s minor is photography, their eye becomes part of a packaging or marketing conversation instead of staying a private hobby. The result is a workforce that shows up with their whole self, not just the fraction their job description accounts for.
A customer service rep logs into her queue every morning. Calls, tickets, the same routine. She’s good at it.
She also happens to be a serious photographer. Nobody at work knows that. It never comes up, because nothing about her role asks it to. Her job title never said “creative,” so neither did she.
Multiply her by every person in your company who has a second skill nobody’s ever invited into the work, and you start to see the actual size of the problem. Most organizations aren’t short on creative people. They’re short on ways to unlock employee creativity that’s already sitting there, unused, because nobody built a door for it.
What Majors and Minors Actually Means
Steve Stoute, who spent the ’90s developing talent at Interscope Records before founding the creative agency Translation, built a simple structure around this. Your major is your formal role, usually tied to your title or your degree. Your minor is where your heart actually lives, the thing you’d do even if nobody paid you for it.
At Translation, when a new project starts, people don’t just show up with their major. They bring their minor to the table too. If it adds value, it’s in. A designer’s minor might be music. A strategist’s minor might be woodworking. Whatever it is, it gets a seat.
This isn’t a hobbies newsletter or a talent show. It’s a working input into real projects. That distinction is what makes it useful instead of decorative.
This is part of the ideation section of my Business Artistry Course, available now for individuals and for organizations.
The Root Cause This Fixes
This isn’t just a talent-discovery trick. It’s a direct answer to a problem I’ve written about before: the moment an organization labels one team or one title “creative,” it quietly tells everyone else they’re off the hook.
That labeling doesn’t need a memo. A “creative department” on the org chart is enough. Once it exists, the customer service rep stops thinking of her photography as relevant to work, not because anyone told her it wasn’t, but because nothing in her role ever suggested it was.
Majors and minors works because it does the opposite on purpose. It doesn’t wait for someone to volunteer their creative side. It asks for it directly, regardless of title. The question isn’t “are you on the creative team.” It’s “what’s your minor,” and everyone has one.
Why This Matters Now
Most leaders already believe their people are more talented than their job descriptions capture. Few have built a way to use that belief, and fewer still have noticed that their own structure is what’s suppressing it in the first place.
That gap gets more expensive by the year. As routine tasks get automated, what’s left is judgment, taste, and original thinking, the parts of work that come from a whole person, not a narrow function. A company that only ever asks employees for their major is training its people to leave their sharpest thinking at home, right when that thinking is the one thing left a machine can’t do for them.
How to Introduce Majors and Minors: Three Steps
1. Search and discover the minor
Stoute isn’t asking about weekend hobbies. He’s asking what someone would do if money weren’t the reason they worked. That’s a different question, and it gets a different answer.
The next time you onboard someone, or sit down with someone you’ve managed for years but never really asked, try it directly: if this job didn’t exist, what would you be doing instead? Write the answer down. You’ll need it.
2. Create the opportunity to use it
Discovery without follow-through is just a nice conversation. The step most companies skip is the one that matters most: actually pulling the minor into a live decision.
If your customer service rep’s minor is photography, that means asking her opinion the next time your team reviews product packaging or a marketing shoot. At Translation, an account executive named Joel Rodriguez had a minor nobody would have guessed from his title: he was an MC outside of work. During a project for Sprite, that minor surfaced, and Sprite’s team ended up using his rapping skills in a national campaign. Nobody could have planned for that. It only happened because there was a door open for it to walk through.
3. Embrace it. Don’t let them hide it.
This is the step most leaders miss entirely, and it’s the one that determines whether steps one and two stick. Stoute is direct about it: “I don’t want you to have to cover up your screen. I want you to work on that.”
If an employee’s mind drifts toward their minor during the day, that’s not a discipline problem to correct. It’s the exact behavior you asked for in step one. The moment you let someone quietly go back to hiding it, whether through a raised eyebrow, a “let’s stay focused” comment, or simply never following up, you’ve taught them the invitation wasn’t real. They won’t offer it again.
Where This Starts
You don’t need to know everyone’s minor by memory. You need one habit: ask the question, build the door, and hold it open once someone walks through it.
That third part is where most of this quietly falls apart. It’s easy to ask about someone’s minor once, in an onboarding conversation, and never come back to it. It’s harder to notice when it shows up on its own, in a Slack message, a distracted afternoon, an offhand comment in a meeting, and treat it as the signal it is instead of a distraction to redirect.
Most leaders say they want their people’s full creativity. Majors and minors is one way to actually go looking for it, and to keep looking, long after the first conversation ends.
Majors and minors is just one of the creative habits I share with leadership teams and at events. If you want to explore more of these habits and how they apply to your organization, let’s plan your next event.
