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How to Lead Creative Groups - Part 9

A group, as mentioned earlier, is merely an extension of the individual personalities involved. Therefore, many of the things you must do in leading a group—encouraging them, keeping them on the track, discouraging blind arguments, and so forth— you can practice in your day-to-day relationships with indi­viduals. (This, in any event, makes good practice for you in the art of getting along with others.)

Most of the "strain" of leading creative groups in the business world comes from the knowledge that you, as the leader, have the responsibility, which you cannot duck, of making the group "pay off" for the company. This pay-off may be in the sense that you produce money-making or cost-saving ideas; or it may be that you just make productive use of the time of the individuals that you have drafted for your group. But nearly everyone has opportunities to practice group leadership, even if informally, where this strain of showing a dollars-and-cents pay-off is not present.

For example, a church group to which you belong may very well have projects or aims that could profitably use new ideas or new approaches. The same with a civic or social group. And even a friendly party of neighbors takes a certain amount of "ice breaking" to get conversations going. Any such opportunity is a chance for you to experiment, analyze, and learn without real danger of expensive waste.

Furthermore, you may find, with a little asking around, that you are not alone in having a desire to gain inexpensive ex­perience with group leadership techniques. There is a great deal of interest in creative groups these days, and many of your contemporaries may have the same desire to experiment and share experiences. If so, you could easily form a one-night-a-week study group to work on each other's problems. (Several such groups have found that they are now able to get problems from people outside their group and are paid for solving them!)

But don't let the academic considerations of what may happen in a dynamic group discourage you from trying to gain ex­perience. You can experiment and learn in small, nonvital ways and acquire a knowledge of what it is actually like to meet any of these difficulties before you are forced to meet them in an important way. Furthermore, you will learn what it is possible to accomplish in the way of producing ideas and obtaining con­crete results. And you can learn, in a small way, what will take place when you lead your first "formal" creative group. Once you know, even on a small or unimportant scale, what may, can, and does happen, then you will have the experience and confidence to go ahead and stick your neck out when the chips are down and it is important.

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