When dealing with colleagues at work, decisions depend on a lot of factors such as individual

personality types, emotions, and personal relationships with each colleague. When making

decisions in a team environment, the goals may not be clear most of the time. Hence, if I aim

to be a good colleague, I would need to be intuitive and creative when making decisions

(Bauer and Erdogan, 475) related to colleagues. Most of us know a lot about our colleagues

because we spend so much time with them each day. We get along with some, and not with

others. So decision making would be quite intuitive when dealing with a colleague. Also, we

do not have much time to think about what to when a situation with a colleague comes up,

since it would take a lot of work time. With colleagues, there are a lot of past experiences that

we can make use of to deal with issues, such as things they do not like being said, or that they

have a short temper. According to the situation, I would require to use my past experiences

(intuition) and think of a way to deal with the colleague depending on the circumstances and

the colleague’s mood at the time. I found this lesson interesting and helpful because it will

aid me in making better decisions that involve colleagues at work.

The part that I found most helpful from the point of view of a leader who is interested in self-

improvement, is analysing if my decision making is creative (Bauer and Erdogan, 473) and

the tool-box on ideas for enhancing organizational creativity. From all the lessons we have

learned so far, I understand the importance of creativity in a fast changing world. In order to

be a better leader, I need to motivate my subordinates to be more creative, for which I first

need to know how creative I am, and how I can improve my own creativity as well as inspire

my team to do the same. Since creativity is directly linked to the number of ideas generated, I

would encourage brainstorming among my team and encourage every member to pitch in

with ideas so that there are multiple options to consider. The part about leaderless teams was

also interesting to learn about. It does make sense because when employees have the freedom

to make decisions and act on their own, they feel empowered and responsible for their
actions. This would definitely affect their performance positively. As a role model for my

team, I would also have to keep improving my own creativity that I can now analyse using

fluency, flexibility, and originality as benchmarks.