5 Keys to Successfully Manage Creative Employees

1. Make teamwork the priority.
Giving negative feedback to creatives is the hardest part
of this job, but it can’t be avoided. To make it easier,
move away from a culture that emphasizes individual
accomplishment and focus instead on the value of
teamwork. In this context, recommendations to change
specific elements of a piece or even reject it outright, are
always phrased in terms of “How can we make this
better?” Feedback, then, isn’t about calling out losers.
It’s a rallying cry to the team to pitch in on a new
solution.
2. Cultivate non-attachment.
While you want to bring out the best in people, you also
need to encourage them to be open minded. After all,
they are creating for the business, not to satisfy their
personal muse. What’s more, whatever they come up
with will undergo inevitable changes and might get
scrapped altogether. Adopt an agile approach: Produce
ideas quickly, provide timely feedback and push for rapid
iterations of concepts. It’s much harder to get attached
to ideas that are produced in this fashion than to
something you slaved over for two weeks.
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Leadership
3. Hiring is key.
This approach to creative work is not going to be for
everyone. To create an egoless team, you need to find
and hire people who are talented, but they also need to
be open to dissenting opinions of their work and willing
to experiment with alternate directions. The real super
stars here are those who are more interested in finding
solutions to problems than in holding on to the belief
that they have already found the one right answer.
4. Don’t point fingers.
The approach I’m describing here only works if you stick
to it. You can’t encourage teamwork while things are
going well and then single out people when things go
awry. You also have to remember that you are part of
the team; you share success and failure with them.
When things go wrong -- and sometimes they will ---your
response can’t be “What were you thinking?” or “Who did
this?” Instead, it has to be, “What have we learned?” and,
more importantly, “How can I help?”
5. Customize your praise.
I realize that great teamwork depends on the individual
efforts of the talented people that I’ve hired. As much
joy as people may get from collective achievement, they
will also appreciate being recognized for their
contribution. I’ve found, however, that most of the time
direct feedback from me or one of our clients means
more to them than public accolades. There’s no one
right way to recognize employees. Ask your team
members how they prefer to be recognized and then
show your appreciation appropriately.
Obviously, the success of this approach will depend a lot
on the culture of the organization. It’s one thing to
structure your agency along these lines, as I have done.
It can be quite another thing to try and put the team first
within a larger organization where the praise of
individual accomplishment and the assignment of
individual blame, is the norm.
I strongly believe great and effective creative work is a
group effort. And you can consistently produce that kind
of work if you prioritize teamwork through a supportive,
collaborative environment where talented people are
encouraged to take risks, solve problems collectively.