Creative Fire Can Propel Credit Unions to Greatness

Cirque du Soleil creative director shares how to ignite the spark within.

Credit union employees can compare themselves to the artists and athletes who launch themselves beautifully, almost magically, through the air on a Cirque du Soleil stage, says Lyn Heward, Cirque’s director of creation and author of “The Spark: Igniting the Creative Fire that Lives Within Us All.”

She’ll address CUNA’s America’s Credit Union Conference next month in New York City.

Heward tells News Now that, for their own good and the good of the credit union movement, credit unions must kindle their employees’ creative fire to set them apart from the competition.

In some ways, she says, Cirque is like any organization. It attracts both tough-minded practitioners—athletes with years of training behind them—and creative artists, who have the same amount of determination as the practitioners but a “broader focus on the world around them.”

It is the diversity of tools that these employees bring, Heward says, that builds a successful operation. And it is every manager’s job to recognize “we are all creative” and to help open employees’ minds to the idea of pushing boundaries and “using the tools of the past to build a better future.”

That, she says, is why employees’ creativity is so vital to every organization.

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