Motivation is individual to you. What motivates you won’t necessarily motivate someone else. As a leader in the baby room, a big part of the role is motivating your team and this means understanding what makes others tick and how to work with this day to day. In previous blogposts, we’ve looked together at different types of motivation and how to respond to different motivation types. In this post let’s focus specifically on creative motivation and how to make sure that creatively motivated individuals love working in the baby room you lead.
So what is creative motivation?
Individuals that are creatively motivated feel inspired and fulfilled when they are engaged in creative tasks. But these don’t need to be tasks that we immediately identify as creative – like painting or making music. It could be as simple as the creativity we have when we’re cooking, deciding what to wear in the morning or editing a photo to share on social media. Individuals high on creative motivation will feel energised by these kinds of tasks and they will feel drained by days when there are few opportunities to show their creativity.
Creativity in the baby room
You might have some members of your team who are high on creative motivation or this kind of motivation might resonate for you. If that’s the case, you’ll want to look out for ways to embrace and satisfy this kind of motivation in the baby room day to day. Here are three kinds of baby room task that creatively motivated team members will respond well to:
Planning new activities – messy play, sensory play, outdoor play; individuals high on creative motivation will take a lot of pleasure in coming up with new activities for the babies in your room. They will take inspiration from everything they see around them and come up with fun and innovative (and potentially very messy!) new things to try.
Setting up spaces – team members who are creatively motivated are likely to enjoy updating or transforming particular spaces that you use with the children. This doesn’t need to be on a huge scale – it might be as simple as breathing new life into the mud kitchen or a ‘cosy area’ of the baby room used for winding down.
Bringing ideas back from the wider world – creativity needs to be fed and nourished from what we see around us. So individuals that are high on creative motivation are likely to want to find and explore new ideas, through social media and informal connections but also through more formal professional learning. Short and practical courses on creativity or play will speak to their desire to try new things and have a chance to explore their own creative capacities.
Leading with creative motivation in mind
To support members of your team to find and work with their creative motivation, think about the opportunities that are around you at the moment that are potentially creative. There might be tasks that you think of as a bit of a chore (e.g. cleaning up an area of the garden that’s become a bit neglected) that is actually a great chance for a member of your team to show some real creativity. Similarly, you might be feeling a bit stuck when it comes to planning new activities without realising that if you engage other members of your team, they’ll have lots of ideas to bring to the table. Make a list of potentially creative tasks that your team might want to get involved in. Share the list at your next team meeting and see if anyone is keen to get stuck in.
Help your team to connect with formal and informal professional learning around creativity in the baby room. This might be sharing books, guides, blogposts and podcasts that are about creativity and play when working with babies, or you might see if a team member wants to join a workshop or course in this area. They can then share their learning as part of team meetings. Check out dates for the next BRIL ‘Creativity in the baby room’ workshop as a starting point for getting these discussions flowing in your team.
