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, it 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 finding the right solution.

We are finding increasingly we are being asked to run creativity workshops for teams that not only introduce a range of practical techniques, but also help attendees to understand 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:

- 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.

Take a look and download the FREE Topic Guide – Running Creativity Sessions:

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“Creativity for Logical Thinkers” – is our one day ‘complete business creativity workshop’ that’s available in Central London or as an in-house course for groups and teams. Find out more at www.illumine.co.uk/innovate/crlt

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Tags: creativity and innovation, facilitating creativity sessions

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 2:35 pm and is filed under 3. Creative Thinking & Innovation, 4. Meetings, Facilitation & Coaching, Creativity and Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.