Permission to Be Creative

04/05/2006

Success in life comes not from having the right cards, but from playing bad ones properly.
Joshua Dool

The article "How to Stimulate Creativity in Your Staff," in the online database Exchange Articles on Demand, recommends that a director allow staff members to concentrate on problems that especially interest them...

"According to Harry Levinson, an organization is best served when it ' . . . permits people to seize and develop those challenges and problems which most excite their curiosity.' A director, for example, could hold a staff meeting at which all staff members brainstorm about the center's major problems to be solved and opportunities to be seized. From this discussion a priority list of tasks to be addressed could be compiled, and each staff member could be allowed to choose one or two tasks to focus attention on.

"One consequence of this approach, Levinson notes, is that staff members may be interested in an issue that ' . . . may not, at the moment, be of major concern to the organization.' This drawback is compensated for by the fact that ' . . . the freedom to follow one's interest stimulates a flow of ideas.' This flow of ideas on a range of issues would be far more useful to the center in the long run than the trickle of ideas that might result if all staff members were required to be creative about a crucial problem that did not interest most of them."

Contributed by Exchange, The Early Childhood Leaders' Magazine Since 1978

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