By Jim Mikula, President/CEO
The fall season is a busy one for all our businesses in Gillespie County. Tourism picks up as the annual festivals attract visitors and the Ag community wraps up another growing season plus preparing fields, orchards, vineyards, and animals for winter. As mentioned in a previous column fall is the chamber’s busiest season each year.
While reading a few articles this week one caught my attention. The article, written by Duncan Wardle, the former VP of The Walt Disney Company in charge of innovation and creativity, was about a playful mindset at work. One study in 2023 found that playful leaders were more likely to create a positive work environment. It is no surprise that the article referenced the playfulness of children and that this is a part of their friendships as well as their creative thinking.
There are plenty of studies proving that playfulness increases creativity, collaboration, and is good for your health. Laughter is good for the respiratory system and supports the immune system. Who doesn’t want to laugh more? I also believe that laughter in the workplace is part of a comfortable, safe, and productive culture.
Wardle’s article offers an intriguing idea: incorporate playfulness strategically. In other words, be intentional about playfulness—use it as a tool when needed. At work there is plenty of plain old hard work that needs to get done: ordering inventory, feeding livestock, trimming vineyards, closing the books each month, etc. The timing of injecting playfulness is important to energize the team, generate new ideas, or to get through a stressful period of time. Also, playfulness can be part of prioritizing the well-being of our teams/businesses which increases the odds of accomplishing long-term goals.
I remember visiting a company once and finding an assortment of toys there - squeeze balls, a nerf basketball setup, Legos, tinker toys, and other items for use in simple playful activities engaging hands and minds. When asked about the toys, a team member told me they use the balls to kick off meetings. One person holds the ball and introduces something that would be important to review in the meeting. The ball is then thrown to another person who shares her/his important issue to be reviewed. This is repeated until everyone has spoken.
People who facilitate creative thinking for teams often bring toys, colorful images, or craft supplies to meetings that they use to help teams engage their “whole brains” in thinking of novel ideas or doing Blue Sky thinking about the future. They send teams on scavenger hunts out in nature or the marketplace to spark “out of the box” thinking. You may have noticed that many teambuilding activities involve play that leads to collaboration, new ideas, or problem-solving. Play and playfulness can be highly productive if used strategically.
Going forward we will add some “play” to our weekly meetings and then intentionally have some playtime when we need to focus on key issues in meetings or even the all-important “hallway meetings” when many ideas come out of these ad-hoc meetings.
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