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How to Lead Creative Groups - Part 1

When the American Management Association surveyed top ex­ecutives on reasons for inefficient meetings, it found the largest share of the blame laid to poor leadership. This included such factors as lack of a clear-cut objective; meeting called at the wrong time; wrong person or persons included; failure to prepare necessary information in advance; digressions; failure to sum­marize; unchecked repetitious argument; toleration of interrup­tions.

If these are faults in conventional business meetings and conferences, they could easily be fatal to the success of a creative group, wherein the full resources of the group are being called upon for active and imaginative response. In a creative group, the leader must remain in complete control of the group's activities, and he must do this without in any way inhibiting the group or restricting individuals from participating in a positive manner. And this is where so many creative group meetings fail: the leader has not sufficiently planned his own participation.

It is the leader's responsibility to think through such basic questions as these: What are we trying to accomplish anyway? Are we in line with the company policy on this project? How are we tying in with the long-range plan? What objective will be reasonable and relevant to the problem for this group? What resources will we need in the group to help us accomplish the objective? This planning may take two minutes or two hours or two weeks, but until you have the needed answers, you are not ready to call a creative group meeting!

Furthermore, a basic planning step is to orient your problem thoroughly. This is important for individual creative work, and doubly so for group work. Frequently, a person thinking through a problem for presentation to a group will, in the course of his own orientation, hit upon a satisfactory solution. Or he may even find, after defining a problem, that no problem exists. In either case, of course, there is no reason to go on with the group meeting.

Related terms include business supply chain and businessmanagement.