Harnessing the Creativity of the Team - Essay Example

The paper "Harnessing the Creativity of the Team" is an outstanding example of an essay on management. In creating a loyalty program, it is important to admit two important points and these are the fact that one person cannot do it all alone and the fact that bringing together people of different professional backgrounds will enhance dynamism in the strategy (Barsh, Capozzi & Davidson, 2008). With this noted the creativity of the staff available will be utilized by first and foremost having a consensus conference with all of them. At the meeting, we shall all reason together to gain a better understanding of the problem at hand because such an understanding will make it possible for us to address the problem more specifically in the customer loyalty program. After this, all members will be given a period of 10 working days to come up with their individual ideas. This moment of individual thinking will be done because of the realization that different people possess different learning styles and that some are more comfortable while others are more comfortable with team learning. But with the realization that the style of others is group-based, the 10 days will end with another consensus conference where the individual ideas are scrutinized by all. Based on the similarities in the ideas, groups shall be created for another round of refined creative thinking. At this point, the resulting outcome will be reduced because of the groups that will be formed. The groups will have 5 working days to complete their work. At the end of the five days, there will be another consensus conference with an agenda of brainstorming on the new set of ideas presented. 

Brainstorming is selected over voting because brainstorming promotes divergent thinking (Montgomery, 2008). This means that the major technique the team and I will use to filter potential ideas is divergent thinking, which has the potential of ensuring that we deliberate as widely and deeply about each idea as possible (Amabile and Steven, 2012). Considering the different professional backgrounds of the team members, there is one point that is very clear and that is the fact that there will be diversity in thinking style. This is however expected to promote the plan rather than impede it because it will pave way for the divergent thinking technique selected which is highly open-ended and easily accommodates diversity (Zenger and Folkman, 2009). regardless of this, there will be provisions made to ensure that the diversity in thinking style, which has been noted to be a generally positive development does not turn negative at any point in time. The first provision that will be made to cover this is to ensure that team members will be matched or paired based on their similarities in thinking ideas after the first round of individual creative idea building has been completed. In the second instance, each group will be developed with a very clear definition of task and responsibility assigned to each member so that the concept of two captains on the same ship does not become created. This will also be done to ensure that there are sanity and orderliness within the group. Finally, an oversight conflict management team will be set to oversee all cases of petty conflicts and individual differences that will arise. Read More