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Forbes: The Joys & Perils of Working with Creatives

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Forbes: The Joys & Perils of Working with Creatives

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Abe Brown is passionate about supporting flourishing in people and organizations. He is the founder & CEO of Certified Flourishing Coaching. The Creative Conundrum
Creativity is a crucial skill because creative people are often willing to go against the status quo in their industry and are quick to pivot and create innovative solutions. However, working with creatives can come with its own set of challenges.

As my own team has grown, I have found stark differences in how self-identified "creatives" and "analytical" employees work and relate with one another. While creatives tend to think big and enjoy coming up with new solutions, they often fall short on execution. On the other hand, analytical workers get the details and the job done, but they tend to stay inside the box.
A Different Way Of Relating
Within a team, creatives can have a strong affinity toward other creatives, which unintentionally comes across as exclusionary toward those who aren't. Creatives are passionate about their ideas and their strong opinions can diminish an openness to feedback. Despite all of this, the future belongs to those who think creatively, solve problems and come up with new solutions.

According to the World Economic Forum, creativity was ranked the No. 10 skill needed in the workplace in 2015 but moved all the way up to No. 3 in 2020.

In my company, there is an employee who we'll call Sara. Sara works in a creative managerial role. She's highly talented, ambitious and deeply skilled. One day she said to me, "I want to do my best and produce the results that you need, but I need you to adapt to the new process that I'm implementing." In that moment I had a simple choice: Seek to enforce a power dynamic that gave me positional authority or adapt to her creative strategy and believe she would produce results.

The most effective leaders first lean into strengths and then look at opportunities. Working with creatives has elevated my life and empowered my leadership in more ways than I can describe. Here's what I've learned:

1. The big picture matters. Help the creatives on your team not view their work as an 8-to-5 grind, but as a place where true innovation and transformation can occur. Creatives need to see and understand the big picture as it helps their performance. If a team member is not performing, it might be because they can't see what you see.

2. Small steps matter too. As much as creatives are big-picture thinkers, for some, the big picture can be too much. Fixating on the big picture can lead some to a sense of overwhelm. Take the time to break the big picture down into small steps. Some can struggle to see how small steps today can lead to the fulfillment of the big picture tomorrow.

3. Offer regular support. Creatives can come across as self-reliant, however, don't be completely fooled by appearances. Simple and cost-free practices such as regular check-ins, scheduled one-on-ones and open forums for conversation and feedback will help. Leaders can act as a limiting ceiling or a supportive floor. Can you guess which one creatives prefer?

4. Practice light micromanagement. Though creatives like heavy support, most dislike heavy micromanagement. What's the difference? Support tends to be emotional, logical and practical, with resources and active engagement high on the list. Micromanagement tends to be hierarchical, impractical and controlling with a heavy emphasis on policy and procedure. Be heavy on support while light on micromanagement.

5. Put people first. One thing that seems to unite most creatives is a people-first philosophy. They tend to thrive when they know that what they're doing will benefit people and make a difference in the lives of others. I have often pleasantly discovered a connection between the productivity of creatives and their perception that a project or task is putting people first. If a creative is light on production, it could be because the project is light on people benefit. When creatives see the benefits to people, it aligns with the innovative parts of their brains and brings out their best.

6. Have fun! As much as possible, keep it fun. According to research compiled by Harvard Business Review, introducing fun into a work environment has a positive impact on engagement, creativity, purpose and retention. Like Kobe Bryant said, "Have a good time, enjoy life. Life is too short to get bogged down or be discouraged. You have to keep moving, you have to keep going. Put one foot in front of the other and keep on rolling."

In the end, most creatives are just like you and me. They want to see the big picture, take small steps, be well supported and not micromanaged, put people first and have fun. Consider adopting these approaches when working with creatives to see the benefits.

Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?

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Council Post: The Joys And Perils Of Working With Creatives

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The most effective leaders first lean into strengths and then look at opportunities.

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FastCompany: Working With Creatives: A Short Guide For Everyone Else

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FastCompany: Working With Creatives: A Short Guide For Everyone Else

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HBR: Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People

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HBR: Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People

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Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps - but you can't just get rid of them. In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best. Suppressed creativity is a malign organizational tumour. Although every organization claims to care about innovation, very few are willing to do what it takes to keep their creative people happy, or at least, productive. So what are the keys to engaging and retaining creative employees?

1. Spoil them and let them fail: Like parents who celebrate their children's mess: show your creatives unconditional support and encourage them to do the absurd and fail. Innovation comes from uncertainty, risk, and experimentation - if you know it will work, it isn't creative. Creative people are the natural experimenters, so let them try and test and play. Of course, there are costs associated with experimentation - but these are lower than the cost of NOT innovating.

2. Surround them by semi-boring people: The worst thing you can do to a creative employee is to force them to work with someone like them - they would compete for ideas, brainstorm eternally, or simply ignore each other. That said, you cannot surround creatives with really boring or conventional people - they would not understand them, and fall out. In line with this, recent research indicates that teams made up of diverse members who are open to taking each others' perspective perform most creatively.

The solution, then, is to support your creatives with colleagues who are too conventional to challenge their ideas, but unconventional enough to collaborate with them. These colleagues will need to pay attention to details, mundane executional processes, and do the dirty work: Messi needs Busquets and Puyol; Ronaldo needs Alonso and Ramos.

3. Only involve them in meaningful work: Natural innovators tend to have more vision, research I've done indicates. They see the bigger picture and are able to understand why things matter (even if they cannot explain it). The downside to this is that they simply won't engage in meaningless work. This all-or-nothing approach to work mirrors the bipolar temperament of creative artists, who perform well only when inspired - and inspiration is fueled by meaning. This rule can also be applied to other employees: everyone is more creative when driven by their genuine interests and a hungry mind.

As novelist John Irving said, "the reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me". At the same time, in any organization there will be employees who are less interested in, well, doing interesting work; they are satisfied with simply clocking in and out, and are incentivized by external rewards. Companies should ensure that trivial or meaningless work is assigned to these employees.

4. Don't pressure them: Creativity is usually enhanced by giving people more freedom and flexibility at work. If you like structure, order and predictability, you are probably not creative. However, we are all more likely to perform more creatively in spontaneous, unpredictable circumstances - because we cannot rely on our habits. Don't constrain your creative employees; don't force them to follow processes or structures. Let them work remotely and outside normal hours; don't ask where they are, what they are doing or how they do it. This is the secret to managing Don Draper, and why he never went to work for a bigger competitor. This is also why so many top athletes fail to make the transition from a small to a big team, and why business founders are usually unhappy to remain in charge of their ventures once they are acquired by a bigger company.

5. Pay them poorlyDon't overpay them: There is a longstanding debate about the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Over the past two decades, psychologists have provided compelling evidence for the so-called "over-justification" effect, namely the process whereby higher external rewards impair performance by depressing a person's genuine or intrinsic interest. Most notably, two large-scale meta-analyses reported that, when tasks are inherently meaningful (and creative tasks are certainly in this condition), external rewards diminish engagement. This is true in both adults and children, especially when people are rewarded merely for performing a task. However, providing positive feedback (praises) does not harm intrinsic motivation, so long as the feedback is perceived as genuine. [Editor's note: This is clearly a controversial point; Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic has expanded on it in his new article, " Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research." In line with his comments in the thread below, we've also updated the header on this section to be more accurate.]

The moral of the story? The more you pay people to do what they love, the less they will love it. In the words of Czikszentmihalyi, "the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake." More importantly, people with a talent for innovation are not driven by money. Data from our research archive, which includes over 50,000 managers from 20 different countries, indicates quite clearly that the more imaginative and inquisitive people are, the more they are driven by recognition and sheer scientific curiosity rather than commercial needs.

6. Surprise them: Few things are as aggravating to creatives as boredom. Indeed, creative people are prewired to seek constant change, even when it's counterproductive. They take a different route to work every day, even if it gets them lost, and never repeat an order at a restaurant, even if they really liked it. Creativity is linked to higher tolerance of ambiguity. Creatives love complexity and enjoy making simple things complex rather than vice-versa. Instead of looking for the answer to a problem, they prefer to find a million answers or a million problems. It is therefore essential that you keep surprising your creative employees; failing that, you should at least let them create enough chaos to make their own lives less predictable.

7. Make them feel important: As T.S. Eliot noted, "most of the trouble in this world is caused by people wanting to be important". And the reason is that others fail to recognize them. Fairness is not treating everyone the same, but like they deserve. Every organization has high and low potential employees, but only competent managers can identify them. If you fail to recognize your employees' creative potential, they will go somewhere where they feel more valued.

A final caveat: even when you are able to manage your creative employees, it does not mean that you should let them manage others. In fact, natural innovators are rarely gifted with leadership skills. There is a profile for good leaders, and a profile for creative people - and they are rather different. Steve Jobs had better relationships with gadgets than people, and most Google engineers are utterly disinterested in management. One of the reasons for the rapid plateau of start-ups is that their founders tend to remain in charge. They should learn from Mark Zuckerberg who brought in Sheryl Sandberg to make up for his own leadership deficits. Research confirms the stereotypical view that corporate innovators - intrapreneurs - exhibit many of the psychopathic characteristics that prevent them from being effective leaders: they are rebellious, anti-social, self-centered and often too low in empathy to care about the welfare of others. But manage them well, and their inventions will delight us all.
Editor's note: We updated the headline on this post April 10 to reflect that its intent is to discuss a small subset of people who happen to be both creative and difficult to work with; not to imply that all creative people are difficult. We regret the error.

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Seven Rules for Managing Creative-But-Difficult People

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Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps - but you can't just get rid of them. In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best.

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HBR: Leading Creative People Is Hard. Here's How to Do It.

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HBR: Leading Creative People Is Hard. Here's How to Do It.

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Creativity is a crucial asset at any company, but managing it comes with a special set of challenges. How do you support and nurture the artistic process without stifling your team? How do you balance the need for innovation with the demands of running a successful, profitable business?

Embrace the creative journey. Managing a creative team isn't just about understanding their work; it's about understanding their mindset, process, and the intrinsic motivations that drive their creativity. To understand the full depth of the artistic process, schedule regular check-ins with your creative staff and ask them open-ended questions about their process.

Give creative staff space. Rather than trying to control every aspect of the creative process, adopt a decentralized management approach. Strict rules and micromanagement can stifle talent and lead to low-quality work.

Don't be afraid to give constructive criticism. Be thoughtful in your delivery of feedback. Focus on inspiring them rather than trying to control their work.

Encourage collaboration between creatives and the rest of the team. In any industry, conflicts can arise when departments that regularly collaborate aren't familiar with each other's workflows, resources, and restrictions.

Remember that you're running a business. Creativity must not only be balanced against what is possible but also against what is profitable. You must ensure that your team's support for innovation doesn't undermine the business's viability.

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Leading Creative People Is Hard - Here's How to Do It

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Creativity is a crucial asset at any company, but managing it comes with a special set of challenges. How do you support and nurture the artistic process without stifling your team? How do you balance the need for innovation with the demands of running a successful, profitable business? Embrace the creative journey.

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HolaBrief: 7 Steps to Effectively Manage Your Creative Team

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HolaBrief: 7 Steps to Effectively Manage Your Creative Team

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7 Steps to Effectively Manage Your Creative Team

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Do you want to become a Creative Team Lead? This is the Guide YOU NEED to learn how to Manage and take your Career to the NEXT LEVEL!

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Feel like you're running low on fresh ideas? Get creative with these thought-provoking TED Talks to inspire new and experimental thinking.

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You have JavaScript disabled For the best experience, please turn JavaScript on. Here's how Feel like you're running low on fresh ideas? Get creative with these thought-provoking TED Talks to inspire new and experimental thinking.

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Design Matters w/ Debbie Millman (Podcast)

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Design Matters w/ Debbie Millman (Podcast)

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In 2005, Debbie Millman started a radio show, Design Matters, the first ever podcast about design and an inquiry into the broader world of creative culture.

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Real Creative Leadership: How to Organize & Lead a Creative Team

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Real Creative Leadership: How to Organize & Lead a Creative Team

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How to Organize and Lead a Creative Team: With Kevin Frank

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Real Creative Leadership: The Secret to Building a Winning Creative Team Structure

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Real Creative Leadership: The Secret to Building a Winning Creative Team Structure

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The Secrets to Building a Winning Creative Team Structure

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HBR: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

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HBR: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

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A robot falls in love in a post-apocalyptic world. A French rat sets out to become a chef. A suburban family of superheroes defeats a power-hungry villain. Unexpected ideas, all-yet Pixar Animation Studios is turning these and other novel ideas into blockbuster films.

How? As Catmull explains, Pixar's leaders have discovered potent practices for structuring and operating a creative organization. For example, they give writers, artists, and other "creatives" enormous leeway to make decisions. They make it safe for people to share unfinished work with peers, who provide candid feedback. And they conduct project post-mortems in ways that extract the most valuable lessons for mitigating risk on subsequent projects.

The effort has paid off. Pixar's has racked up a unique track record of success: It's the leading pioneer in computer animation. It has never had to buy scripts or movie ideas from outside. And since 1995, it has released seven films-all of which became huge hits.

The Idea in Practice

Catmull suggests these principles for managing your creative organization:

Empower your creatives. Give your creative people control over every stage of idea development.

At most studios, a specialized development department generates new movie ideas. Pixar assembles cross-company teams for this purpose. Teams comprise directors, writers, artists, and storyboard people who originate and refine ideas until they have potential to become great films. The development department's job? Find people who'll work effectively together. Ensure healthy social dynamics in the team. Help the team solve problems.

Create a peer culture. Encourage people throughout your company to help each other produce their best work.

At Pixar, daily animation work is shown in an incomplete state to the whole crew. This process helps people get over any embarrassment about sharing unfinished work-so they become even more creative. It enables creative leads to communicate important points to the entire crew at once. And it's inspiring: a highly innovative piece of animation sparks others to raise their game.

Free up communication. The most efficient way to resolve the numerous problems that arise in any complex project is to trust people to address difficulties directly, without having to get permission. So, give everyone the freedom to communicate with anyone.

Within Pixar, members of any department can approach anyone in another department to solve problems, without having to go through "proper" channels. Managers understand they don't always have to be the first to know about something going on in their realm, and that it's okay to walk into a meeting and be surprised.

Craft a learning environment. Reinforce the mind-set that you're all learning-and it's fun to learn together.

"Pixar University" trains people in multiple skills as they advance in their careers. It also offers optional courses (screenplay writing, drawing, sculpting) so people from different disciplines can interact and appreciate what each other does.

Get more out of post-mortems. Many people dislike project post-mortems. They'd rather talk about what went right than what went wrong. And after investing extensive time on the project, they'd like to move on. Structure your post-mortems to stimulate discussion.

Pixar asks post-mortem participants to list the top five things they'd do again and the top five they wouldn't do. The positive-negative balance makes it a safer environment to explore every aspect of the project. Participants also bring in lots of performance data-including metrics such as how often something had to be reworked. Data further stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions based on subjective impressions.

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Reprint: R0809D Many people believe that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than good people. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, couldn't disagree more. That notion, he says, is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in developing an original product.

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Rolling Stone: How to Foster Creative Collaboration in the Workplace

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Rolling Stone: How to Foster Creative Collaboration in the Workplace

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Too often, teams work in silos with limited communication. They exist in competitive environments and are quick to shoot down new ideas from other departments. These conditions stifle innovation.

When teams break out of these patterns, however, your organization can get on the fast track to exciting new growth, and maybe even become a disruptive force in your industry. One silo-busting strategy to consider is creative collaboration.

While collaboration could just be defined as "teams working together," creative collaboration takes it one step further by focusing on brainstorming and developing new, out-of-the-box ideas. Fostering creative collaboration fuels cutting-edge concepts and can help your company stay ahead of the competition.

Fostering creative collaboration starts with the executives at the top. You can put an end to interdepartmental silos by intermixing teams working on projects together and setting the tone for collaboration.

Here are some best practices for creating a collaborative work environment, and why it matters.

Why Is Creative Collaboration Important?

"Culture is the new competitive advantage," Matt Williams, CEO of the advertising agency The Martin Agency, says, "and organizational culture is a force multiplier for creativity-it magnifies the individual's creativity by the power of collaboration and collaboration results in more competitively advantageous ideas. Those ideas will be the driving force of growth and progress."

Creative collaboration helps encourage:

Great relationships

Better workflow process

Improved morale

Higher productivity

Gone are the days of cutthroat Glengarry Glen Ross scheming, with bosses shouting at their employees; or Office Space all-work-no-play drudgery, which may spur employees into quiet quitting. Instead, to create a collaborative environment, instill the following:

Build Trust

Fostering a collaborative work environment begins with trust. Gaining trust requires a degree of vulnerability. In the workplace, trust can be achieved with open communication and transparency. This may mean letting the team in on as many process details as possible, clarifying goals, and encouraging employees to work toward them.

Having an environment where people trust each other makes conflict easier to talk about and resolve. When people don't trust each other or fear retaliation for their ideas, they're more likely to keep quiet.

Open Communication

Open communication works in tandem with trust. If people don't think others will seriously listen to them or may respond negatively, they'll be less likely to try to communicate. Employees should also know who to reach out to and be encouraged to ask for help from their managers and colleagues.

Yes, And

Comedy nerds will likely be familiar with this concept from improv comedy-it simply means to build on ideas and not negate the people you're talking to. In improv comedy, if someone makes an offer, their partner says, "Yes, and..." and then offers another idea that builds on the first. What should be avoided is negating, or shooting down the idea, which can cause people to naturally shut down.

In business, the "yes, and" method means that all ideas are respected. You may disagree with the idea, but you should validate it and thank the person for offering something.

Mentorships

Mentoring others is another way to foster creative collaboration. This doesn't necessarily mean one-on-one mentoring. It can mean letting all interested employees participate in more projects.

This is particularly easy and low-risk at remote companies-all you have to do is send interested parties a virtual meeting invitation. Who knows? Their fresh perspective may inspire something that nobody thought of before. For the employee, it could help them start building a path to promotion or a move into a different department.

Keep Meetings Somewhat Structured

Nobody likes unnecessarily long, unstructured meetings. For a brainstorming session or team meeting, provide an agenda and use a loose structure with a definite end time. One person runs the meeting and makes sure everyone is heard. The meeting facilitator can encourage engagement, and help the team be productive.

Identify Deliverables

Sometimes people equate creativity with "loosey-goosey," where ideas float around in the air or get erased on whiteboards and where due dates and expectations are vague.

No matter how creative your company is, having due dates with deliverables is still essential. This allows everyone on the team to prioritize their work, know what the expectations are so they can meet them, and set goals. It's also important to get all stakeholders and approvers on the same page before sending the project down the pipeline for others to work on to keep approval chaos to a minimum.

Standardize Processes

Creating a scaffolding for the way work unfolds is also essential. That way, people don't have to waste brainpower wondering what the next step is, who needs to approve what, who is responsible for what, and so on. So, standardizing your process and establishing a structured feedback system is immensely helpful for creative collaboration.

This will vary by department but writing down a process and sharing it with your team relieves the heavy mental load of having to figure out a process from scratch with every project.

Tools

Providing your team with useful organizational tools helps optimize both process and communication, too. It keeps everyone in the loop about who is responsible for what. Choosing one that allows for file sharing or calls is the most helpful.

Establishing which tools you'll use for communication is essential. That way, people don't have to check five different apps and compile messages from all of them.

Value Mental Health

With remote work, it's too easy to fall into a routine of only talking to your coworkers during meetings and knowing nothing about their personal lives. This doesn't help foster creative collaboration, nor does it mitigate any loneliness from working remotely.

Having an occasional fun meeting where you can play a trivia game or chat creates the kind of supportive environment you're after and allows for more casual conversation where you can get to know everyone on a more personal level. If possible, scheduling an in-person team-building retreat is another excellent way to let people meet up in person and change their routine.

If your team is remote but you have enough members in one city, schedule a happy hour, lunch, or celebration of someone's birthday. Investing in these events pays off in the long run.

Allowing your employees to take an occasional mental health day is important, too. Consider offering unlimited PTO, another way to foster trust and more communication, as employees must discuss with their team and managers how to complete their work before taking off. If a potential talented new hire has the choice to join a company with unlimited PTO or one without it, it's one more benefit that can set your company apart.

Takeaway

Establishing creative collaboration in the workplace takes some time and energy investment, but it's worth it to attract top hires, retain your employees, and encourage company growth. In this day and age, your most valuable asset isn't necessarily your customer base-it's your employees. Without them driving new initiatives and feeling like valued stakeholders, there may be no customer base at all.

Interested in sharing your thoughts on collaborative work environments? Visit Rolling Stone Culture Council and contact a Rolling Stone Culture Council representative if you have questions or would like to learn more about becoming a member. Your voice and opinions matter, and we want it all. Bring it.

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Be an Industry Disruptor with Creative Collaboration

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In our new guide, we talk about creative collaboration and provide actionable tips for creating a collaborative work environment.

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TED: How to Manage for Collective Creativity

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TED: How to Manage for Collective Creativity

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What’s the secret to unlocking the creativity hidden inside your daily work, and giving every great idea a chance? Harvard professor Linda Hill, co-author of “Collective Genius,” has studied some of the world’s most creative companies to come up with a set of tools and tactics to keep great ideas flowing -- from everyone in the company, not just the designated “creatives.”

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Ted: Why Businesses Need a Dreamer's Magic & a Doer's Realism

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Ted: Why Businesses Need a Dreamer's Magic & a Doer's Realism

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Beth Viner: Why businesses need a dreamer's magic and a doer's realism

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At work, the dreamers often get credit for the big ideas, but they can also sometimes seem untethered to reality to the doers, who are trying to ... get things done. It's when these two types of humans work in harmony that business magic happens, says culture strategist Beth Viner.

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MasterClass: Advertising & Creativity Instructors - Goodby & Silverstein

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MasterClass: Advertising & Creativity Instructors - Goodby & Silverstein

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Forbes: How to Effectively Lead Your Creative Team

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Forbes: How to Effectively Lead Your Creative Team

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Through my entrepreneurial life, I've had the opportunity to manage several teams of wonderful people in three different industries: entertainment, technology and advertising. These teams have varied in size and function, ranging from seven people in some projects to more than 100 in others. After we struggled through the all-too-common bumpy roads and challenges that any entrepreneur faces when starting a business, I realized that, without knowing or maybe without paying much attention, I had developed a different approach to leading my creative team compared to the rest of the company. My leadership morphed into a different kind when I was working with creative teams, and I believe these changes are fundamental to foster success, innovation and high-quality creativity in any industry.

So why not apply this wonderfully important, morphed leadership style to the rest of employees? Simple -- creative people are wired differently. They think beyond Excel worksheets and timetables. They don't see much value in work schedules and strict processes, and they don't know how to structure their work because, if you ask them, they don't even know how they come up with their ideas. That's why they are valuable and rare. They are not standardized or structured, and because you cannot predict those behaviors, they will create valuable, unpredictable innovations that will propel your projects or campaigns forward.

This argument does not mean that loving Excel worksheets and having detailed processes make you a less creative person, as much as it does not mean that hating work schedules and being different makes you creative. I'm simply pointing out general traits that I've seen, reflected in those working in creative positions. So my first suggestion is to identify those creative employees and then adapt your leadership style with these factors in mind.
Regular structures don't work.
Whenever I start a creative brainstorming session or have to come up with a new campaign idea, I always remove my job title from the equation. I do this because it doesn't matter if I'm the CEO or the account executive -- my ideas don't get extra points because they come from me. They are just ideas, and they have the same probability of being great or just plain awful as those of anyone else. This creates a safe environment for creatives. They can say all they want without the fear of being reprimanded for not "following the guidelines." This approach yields the best results because even though we are all equal and there's nothing to prove, no true creative person will want to sit quietly during a creative meeting. It's that rich discussion that will harvest the best ideas, campaigns and innovations.

Try to coordinate these discussions outside of the regular working environment. This adds to the creative process, reduces anxiety and is also fun. And whenever your creative team is having fun, you can be sure that you will have original results. And whenever your creative unit is engaged with you, you won't have to worry about meeting work schedules. They will work tirelessly because they will feel fulfilled with passion aimed at achieving something that they don't yet know how to solve. If you have the right people and you are not forcing structures that they don't understand on them, great work will be produced.
Worry about your team's creative dreams.
Every creative person has a creative dream. Maybe a copywriter's wish is to have a national campaign rolling, or a designer wants to use some elements in a photographic session with paint and slow-motion cameras. I don't know. There are a thousand possibilities, and as much as those employees can work toward your company's goals or a client's campaigns, they will always have a yearning to make those dreams a reality.

Ask them what their creative dreams are. Be aware of those dreams and look for the opportunity to help fulfill them while also creating value for your company. I've seen how the most amazing projects come out of fulfilled creative dreams. More often than not, a creative's dream is the path to your clients and your competition asking themselves, "How did they do that?" Doing this triggers creative power like nothing you've seen.
Don't mix creatives with executives.
Account executives and project managers are always working in a different gear than creatives. They see deadlines and bottom lines and are in constant communication with anxious clients. I've found that it can be detrimental to have executives speak directly with creatives; their thought process is just too different. What is a briefing for an executive sounds like an unnecessary anxiety-inducing order for a creative person.

Always try to have a "translator," or a creative director or manager, debrief the executives and switch gears to brief their creative team in their own terms, words and tone. This will reduce friction between departments and enhance high-quality creative productivity.
Find the right people.
Hire people based on their personality, creative dreams and motivations. Don't pay so much attention to where they've worked or what brands they have worked for. Creativity does not follow a linear process and cannot be 100% mastered. Great creativity is a collective endeavor. So having an egocentric creative who has worked with Coca-Cola and Apple is not necessarily a great addition to your team. Hire people who seem to share the same passion and values that you have, and search for creatives you feel you can learn from. And always mix different personality traits -- don't create a group with similar backgrounds and tastes.

Some would argue that giving so much flexibility to a creative crew is terrible for business and productivity, but actually, I think it's quite the opposite. Understanding creatives and their work behaviors results in an incredibly loyal and engaged team of people that will take your company or agency to the top. The best creative teams are never found. They are harvested.

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Council Post: How To Effectively Lead Your Creative Team

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Creative people are wired differently. They think beyond Excel worksheets and timetables; they don't see much value in work schedules and strict processes.

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Forbes: 9 Essential Ingredients for a Successful Creative Team

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Forbes: 9 Essential Ingredients for a Successful Creative Team

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A strong creative team can help your business develop great ideas and soar to new heights. However, simply having the most talented or innovative people on board isn't enough. They must not only be willing to make unconventional moves, but they must also place trust in their other team members.

To help you strike the right balance, we asked the members of Young Entrepreneur Council to share the most crucial ingredients needed to build a successful creative team. Their best answers are below.
1. Passion
This barely controllable emotion confers an ingrained work ethic. The passionate team member finds themselves mulling over a challenge on their commute, in yoga class, in line at the grocery store. No micromanagement required. Problem-solving fueled by passion has no time constraints and no limitations. A creative team that is blessed with passion will never settle until it achieves its objective. That makes things pretty easy for the manager. If you fuel the passion, you'll fuel the creativity. - Chad Turner, GO
2. Deep Listening
For a creative team to perform well in a fast-changing environment, deep listening must be practiced habitually. Innovation and adaptation are stifled when teams don't give every member an opportunity to pitch their ideas. However, it's equally important that every team member listen carefully to the various ideas pitched, consider what they can add to these ideas or push back against them if they must be critiqued. Deep listening can be enhanced by taking notes during meetings and by inviting commentary from team members on ideas pitched by other team members. - Amine Rahal, IronMonk Solutions
3. Consistency
In every company, there's a crucial ingredient that makes a creative team successful. In my team, I always focus and check on everyone's consistency. It is already given that each one of us has a different strength and skill set, but consistency is more important for me because it shows competence and passion in whatever you do. A consistent performer is also a good motivator. Consistency leads to habits. Those habits form the actions we do every day. Good action leads to success. - Daisy Jing, Banish
4. Unity
People are diverse, and they have different beliefs, different values and goals. When they come together to create value, unity is key, and without it comes imminent failure. So it's imperative to define and share common goals, and ensure compliance from every single person on the team. In the absence of it, it creates disparity, distortions and kills teamwork. By communicating the company's core values and objectives, you can ensure that every member on the team is aligned, and under no circumstance is anyone allowed to override those values. That creates unity and coordination within your team. - Vikas Agrawal, Infobrandz
5. Healthy Disagreements
Contrary to many people's perceptions, the strongest teams are not those that are very similar and have very little push back and disagreement. A strong, creative team is significantly different, with dissimilar talents, contrasting personalities and unique experiences. This necessarily will bring conflicting, and often strong, opinions into meetings. Weak leaders will feel threatened by new ideas that they would have never thought of; however, strong leaders will welcome divergent views and ideas. Strong leaders rally teams around new ideas and find ways to bring all members on board, even those who initially oppose them. Strong teams can fight it out and then become cheerleaders for even the decisions they opposed. - Ryan Meghdies, Tastic Marketing Inc.
6. Playfulness
Creativity isn't a paint-by-number or a formulaic ability. It is necessary to drop linear and "proper" ways of thinking to be creative. This means being willing to be silly, playful and experimental and to enter the limitless world that children so easily inhabit. A powerful way to make your team more creative and more successful is to create a time to just play. Encourage doodling, writing, moving around and just letting ideas flow. Being willing to be unconventional will get the most innovative ideas that can be harnessed into a practical solution. - Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
7. Diversity
Collaboration between people with different viewpoints, perspectives and cultural backgrounds is vital to sparking creativity and innovation. Unfortunately, these are also things that cause conflict, so your team must be one that values diversity and tolerance and is able to handle conflict in a productive way. A shared sense of purpose along with lots of listening and open communication will go a long way to help your creative team be successful. Diversity, empathy, listening and purpose are values that you should look for at the initial interview of your team members and then nurture continually as a part of your company culture. - Reuben Yonatan, GetVoIP
8. Risk-Taking
Not all risks are good, but some are definitely worth it. Your gut usually has a good idea of when an idea is worth the risk versus when it's time to give up on it. Part of being successful is thinking outside of the box and doing things differently. What you were doing before didn't help, so why not try a new method, no matter how risky? It's also a great way to stay innovative. - Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
9. Vision
All the teams that have achieved the most success in business are visionaries and great marketers. Think about Microsoft and Apple. Their technology develops pretty much on the same level, but when you think of an exceptional top-quality tech brand, who comes to your mind first? It's important to understand where you are going with your product or service and what your big goal is. How do you want people to feel when they use your product or service? What do you want them to associate it with? If you have answers to these questions, you're already halfway there. - Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS

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Council Post: Nine Essential Ingredients For A Successful Creative Team

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Building a top-notch creative team means requiring members be more than just creative. Here are a few other ingredients the team will need.