3 - Creativity and Shifting Roles of an Educational Leader: A Reflection of What Creativity Used to Mean to Me and What It MeansNow

Summary

Throughout my adult life I have inherently known that I possess qualities that are less prevalent in others. I am more comfortable with risk-taking, always curious, and have the ability to quickly and effectively assess an individual. Along with these traits, I have several dispositions. I have attraction to complexity, refrain from judgment, rely on my intuition, and have a willingness to accommodate opposite or conflicting points of view. It was not until I began to study creativity that I realized these traits and dispositions were subjects of creativity research (Amabile & Khaire, 2008; Barron & Harrington, 1981; Puccio & Grivas, 2009; Shalley & Gilson, 2004; Sternberg, 2007). As I gained knowledge about creativity, I began to understand that creativity was an important and natural part of me and affected my work as a school superintendent.

I was creative in my formative years, the time when I was learning to be a school leader. I was able to convert old ideas into new processes and products by testing my rhetoric on school principals and asking for their feedback. At some point, however, I realized that the reliance on the superintendent as the lone inventor was insufficient for solving the myriad of problems within a school district. Principals and teachers were closest to ideas about student learning and they were better equipped to help shape a system that expected creative outcomes in others. After making the decision to count on creative contributions from others, I began to offer creative leadership, the ability to lead for creativity in others.

I accepted responsibility for learning outside of the mainstream of traditional leadership because creativity could not be found in the department of educational leadership syllabi. I learned to become fluent in disparate discourses including motivational theory, creative leadership in the private sector, and traditional leadership in the public sector, all of which took years of experience to develop (C. Shalley & Gilson, 2004; Sternberg, 2007). My learning trajectory in acquiring skills necessary for creative leadership was at times painful and rewarding, laden with pitfalls and promise. The journey was not one that I would have chosen, the arc of this journey was not something I self-selected, but it was through learning from suffering and celebrating that I gained the wisdom necessary to become a thoughtful executive leader of creativity (Sternberg, 2006).