A common problem for teams who work towards a common purpose but do different things for most or all of the time, is how to build co-operation and understanding across the team. Most enlightened team leaders recognise either explicitly or implicitly the unique and valuable contribution each team member is able to make. However, is is not uncommon for individual members of the team to see things only from their own perspective.

One of the challenges for all team leaders (including senior managers and directors) is to help their people to recognise that there are many different modes of thinking and that the more perspectives that can be brought to bear on the challenges facing the team, the better the quality of group thinking, idea generation and problem solution.

We are finding that increasingly we are being asked to run creativity workshops for teams that not only introduce a range of practical techniques, but that also help attendees to understand that a number of brains (and backgrounds and personalities) that are different are likely to work better than ‘like minded’ individuals working together. Often these workshops are built around real challenges facing the whole team or part of the team.

The benefits of this approach are clear:

• that everyone understands and appreciates better the differences between team members; these differences start to be viewed as a source of potential benefit rather than as a source of conflict
• a range of techniques are introduced and used so that the next time the team leader (or other team members) get together to ‘be creative’ they have a number of alternatives to ‘brainstorming’ which they have seen working
• progress is made on real challenges

If you would like to find out more about how a creativity workshop could be tailored for your requirements simply call us on +44 (0) 1753 866633 or e-mail us

Click here to see details of “The Illumination Workshop®” - a one day creativity workshop which can be tailored to meet your particular requirements.

Tags: Creativity and Innovation, Team working

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 9:21 am and is filed under Creativity and Innovation, Innovate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.