Are you a creative manager or a leader?

Posted in Back to basics on October 6, 2009 at 7:29 pm

Over the years I have come to embraced that fact that I am a process voyeur and I realized it happened because it is a skill I needed to developed to be successful over the course of my career. It first started when I went from designer to art director because that change requires you to be able to stand up and present your ideas to your clients and you become aware of presentation craft, the dynamics of team hierarchies and politics that create a need to tailor your presentation based on the audience and what they will respond to. I had to grow and refine those skills again when I moved into pitching new business because I had to have the ability to understand the dynamics of a new group quickly to find the best angles to sell ideas and win new business. That skill then transformed for the final time when I became a Creative Director and had to be able to understand the dynamics and motivations of my own studio so I could get the best work and the best out of my people. In the end it has given me the ability to read and analyze group dynamics, process work flows and individual behavioral cues to see how to tailor my process, communications and presentation style to get the best results. I wanted to talk about some general observations I see all the time within creative groups and companies that are worth the time to self analyze to see where you fall and if it is an area you should spend some time thinking about and working on.

I want to start with focusing on a big problem I have consistently found with the leadership style of senior creatives through my career – managers vs leaders. The best creative directors I have ever worked for had figured out a way to have the two characteristics combine but those instances were sadly very rare. I think that the ability to combine the two characteristics is especially important when you are leading a creative team because you are dealing with individuals who all create in different ways, get inspirited in different ways and who have different latent levels but all need to work together and produce a product that is in line with the creative directors vision.

Round the table we go…

Managers do just what the name implies and sadly not much more. Their leadership style consists managing the project load for the group and the individual deliverables that have been assigned to each person. They usually hold a weekly status meeting where the team slowly and painfully goes around the room reporting in on their progress of the previously mentioned workload and concludes with a quick rundown of the highlights from the latest company newsletter. This method maybe be great for employees who do repetitive and mindless tasks but anyone who is being asked to be creative it is a slow, uninspired death where you increasingly feel like your career is going no where.

If you are in charge of a group then being a manager has to be part of your tool kit but it has to balanced out with vision and leadership. Everyone says they want to be a leader and even talking like one is pretty easy but it is your philosophy, actions and follow through that will be the ultimate judge of if that is really the true or not.

Stand for something

Leaders have a vision for the way they want to run their studio, if they will focus on ideas or deliverables, the direction and focus of the work and how they are going to grow and evolve the people who work for you. They set the tone and have a plan for moving their people and their aspirations forward and not just manage their deliverables. But this means they have to take the hard road of doing things like having unpleasant conversations as they are trying to effect a change to actually standing up for their for beliefs and vision which may not be popular inside of the company. I think the willingness to stand up for yourself and your beliefs is found far, far too rarely because it is easier to just blend in, not make waves and accept mediocrity generated by diluted mass thinking. When you stand up for something you claim a position and no longer move hidden within the crowd and it lets the small minded managers and office politicians sit in the background and judge for your views, take shots at them and try to tear it down. It’s a hard road to travel and you often find yourselves traveling it with few if any companions.

It takes confidence to be able to go down that road especially since you have to create confidence in something other than what you got into this business to do.  I got into this business to be a designer but the longer your creative career the farther you will find yourself from what you loved and got you here in the first place.  I continue to move me farther and father away from being able to actually be a designer on a day to day basis and have had to add this tools to be a process voyeur and idea filter I spoke of before. Once I was placed in a leadership position it had to be done or else the growth of the development of my group would depend on the motivation of the individual creatives which meant it would be uneven, headed in the wrong direction or even non-existent.

The creative process by its very nature is personal and emotional and your leadership style should be no different. You are not going to find the secret to your leadership style in a book or anywhere in this blog because it has to come from you. You have to use your own experience to become an inspirational spark, a career mentor and guard against mediocrity. You have infuse your experience and vision but it will only happen if you really believe it and follow through with it every day. Be introspective with you own creative process to find the insights that let create great work and use them as a guide to be able to able to set a direction and tone for everyone else. It can be a hard first step to move away from the crowd and stand for something but it is the only way you will be able to create great work, keep people for more than 2 years and build a successful team. Any other thoughts or comments feel free to but them in the comments below.