Discussion Post: Shared Practice: Harnessing the Creativity of Your Team
There may come a time when you have to lead an important effort or initiative in your organization. This week's Discussion puts you in such a place where you are asked to work with a team to develop an innovative customer loyalty program. The challenge is to develop a plan that lays out a process whereby the team has the support necessary to create ideas, evaluate solutions, and implement an innovative program. As you consider the steps you will take to develop your plan, recall the ten fatal flaws that can derail leaders outlined by Zenger and Folkman (2009) and the ways leaders can inhibit creativity discussed by Amabile and Steven (2012). Be sure to keep these in mind as you create your course of action.
Imagine that you have been hired recently as a new manager of an auto-dealership that sells new and pre-owned vehicles. You work for Kendrick Auto Group, which own 27 dealerships in the region. The owner has tasked you with experimenting at your dealership to create a new, effective, and unique customer loyalty program. The current loyalty program is merely imitative of other competitor programs and the owners see an opportunity to create a distinctive organizational strategy that will separate their dealerships from those of the competitors.
As the manager of the dealership, your staff includes sales consultants who show vehicles to potential commercial and individual buyers, financial staff who assist buyers with payment plans, extended warranties, maintenance plans, and loans, and parts and service technicians who help repair and maintain vehicles on the lot and purchased by customers.
With these thoughts in mind:
Post an organized plan for how you intend to employ the creativity of your staff to create a new and innovative customer loyalty program. (Note: Your plan should not describe a customer loyalty program such as an extended warranty or a maintenance plan. You do not need to develop the plan for the loyalty program.) The idea is to develop a team with a diversity of creative thinking styles from your staff (ideators, clarifiers, developers, and implementers). Be sure to include:
a) How you would bring a team together and lead them to start such an initiative.
b) The tools that you have used in this course (design thinking, creative-thinking styles, etc.) to get your team to leave its comfort zone and begin to generate potential ideas. Explain how the thinking style diversity or lack thereof of your team could potentially help or impede the plan.
c) The techniques you and the team could use to filter/evaluate potential ideas (divergent/convergent thinking) to create a viable customer loyalty program strategy.
Homework: Individual Reflection: Blueprint for Professional and Personal Growth
Reflect on the process of creating goals for the BPPG in the previous courses of this program. Think about how you employed creativity to create this plan: you had to consider your currently existing leadership and professional skills, imagine a future version of yourself who has grown and developed in exciting ways, and generate innovative plans to overcome any challenges you might face in the course of your personal and professional development.
As in previous courses, you will now add to your Blueprint for Professional and Personal Growth. You should develop your BPPG from your learning in this course and design it to help you become a leader who knows how to demonstrate creativity, support creativity within your team, and use foresight to foster creativity and innovation.
Consider the following as you complete this Individual Reflection:
o What can you do now to integrate the experiences and insights you had in this course with your personal and professional development goals?
o What are the most important things you are taking from this course that will shape your future and enable you to make a positive difference?
All components of the Individual Reflection should be turned in as one document:
I. The Executive Summary: Write an Executive Summary of the course to date (2-3 paragraphs) that addresses the following questions:
a. Which content and homeworks in this course have had the biggest impact on your ability to foster a culture of innovation within an organization?
b. How have the content and homeworks changed the way you think of the role of innovation within the organization and the way you will engage in the creative process?
c. How can the knowledge you gained in this course enable you to make a positive difference?
d. In what ways do you think innovation and creativity can influence positive social change within an organization, community, or more broadly?
e. How have the content and homeworks continued to shape your goals?
II. After considering what you have learned in the course, create a focused and succinct strategy for your personal and professional life that will enable you to be the innovation leader you described in your Week 7 Individual Reflection. As part of your strategy, be sure to include responses to the following:
a. List three areas you could focus on for your innovation strategy relative to your own organization, an organization for which you would aspire to work, or your personal life. Describe the importance of each of the focus areas chosen and provide examples with support from the resources.
b. Describe how you will measure progress toward your success.
c. Describe how being an innovation leader could potentially enable you to foster positive social change. To what extent do you think innovation can contribute to positive social change? Provide an example to support your position.
III. Your action plan: Write a detailed action plan for one new goal for professional and personal development (you will continue to build on the list of goals you started in your previous course). These action plans should include the following:
a. Your specific goal for professional and personal development with an explanation as to why you selected it. Be sure to provide concrete and specific examples of why the goal is important, the extent to which this goal enables you to be an agent for positive social change, the personal or professional value you expect from achieving the goal, and how the goal relates to the resources you reviewed in the course.
b. Hint: If you want to expand upon a plan or initiative you have already proposed in a previous week, feel free to do so.
c. At least two objectives for the goal you have identified. Provide a rationale that explains how your objectives will help you to achieve your goal.
Format your homework according to the following formatting requirements:
(1) The answer should be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides.
(2) The response also includes a cover page containing the title of the homework, the student's name, the course title, and the date. The cover page is not included in the required page length.
(3) Also include a reference page. The Citations and references should follow APA format. The reference page is not included in the required page length.