Article 2

Name of article: Creative Leadership: it’s a decision

Name of journal: Leadership

Name of author(s): Robert J. Sternberg

When and how did you locate this article? I found the article using the schools EBSCOhost database. To narrow my search I used the key words “creative leadership”

Two paragraph synopsis of what you learned in this article:

The idea that good leadership is in large part a decision, a decision to think creatively, analytically, practically and wisely. A creative leader is someone of vision, who proposes ideas that are original. For example the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts, promoted for a teaching center at the university that provides continual in-service to help teachers reach all students, not just the ones they are most comfortable teaching. Great leaders are also analytical, they ask if their ideas and the ideas of others are good ideas and if they are appropriate for the circumstances. As an administrator, one should ask themselves 1. What is the best possible outcome of the course of action? 2. What is the worst possible outcome? And 3. What is the most likely outcome of the course of action?

     Good leaders lead by moral authority. Leaders who blatantly need to show their position authority quickly lose it. Great leaders need tremendous emotional/social/practical savvy. It requires them to think about how they can successfully execute their ideas and how they can bring others along with them. It merely isn’t enough to have good ideas. Good leader are also wise leaders. They use their creative, analytical and emotional/social/practical skills for the common good. They balance their own interests, other people’s interests and institutional interests, and they think for the long-term as well as the short-term. Most individuals think we are inborn with these various skills, and that one is fated to have certain level of them. However, we develop our creative, analytical, emotional/social/practical and wisdom-related skills by using them.

How will you apply this knowledge to your professional development?

One thing that I will take away from this article is that a great leader, who is also creative and wise, is someone who has developed their creative, analytical, emotional/social/practical and wisdom skills by using them, not because we were born a great leader.

Would you recommend this article for other TR students?  Why or why not?

I would recommend this article. I think this article was very informative about leadership in general and what it takes to be a great leader. Even though this article is geared to creative leadership in schools I think as TR’s we can implement almost everything the author was speaking about.