For my last blog post, the first in my new series on “The Best Tips from the Best Books on Marketing,” we started digging into Gordon Torr’s classic Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy.
Based on my many conversations with clients and peers, one of the things I know many of us struggle with is providing enough guidance to make sure a creative project’s objective is achieved but not so much that we stifle our creative team’s ability to find their awesome-sauce.
Last week we talked about three key ideas: recognizing your team’s abilities and playing to their strengths; taking charge of the process while being flexible; and making sure expectations are clear.
Here are three final ideas from Torr on how to get the most (and the best) out of your creative teams.
- Get Emotional
According to Torr, the more “emotional” guidance you can provide to your creative team, the better. Creatives are storytellers in their own right and stories are built on emotion. They want to know what is the emotional response you want your audience to have? Do you want them to feel inspired, feel safe, feel supported. These are all great messages to communicate, but they are also very different.
When I teach creative writing, I talk about the difference between intention and execution. The reason this difference is important is that getting either wrong leads to different problems. For example, if your intention is good (that is you are agreed about what emotion you’re trying to elicit) but your execution off, then all you have to fix is the execution to get it right. But if the intention is off (you want fun but your creatives are going for serious), no matter how good the creative is, it’s going to be wrong.
Should the tone be fun or academic? Should the design be youthful, or more serious? Are you looking for something with an uplifting and inspiring message, or something that focuses on practicality? The possibilities are endless.
Suffice it to say, you got to get the emotional intention right. While emotional aspects of a campaign may be hard to quantify, thinking them through (perhaps in a brainstorming session with your creative team) will help your creatives better understand not just what you want to achieve, but how you want to achieve it. Ignoring this difference is a recipe for endless revisions and missed opportunities.
2. Trust Your Team
There is a reason why you have a creative staff—they have expertise and experience that you don’t. So, make sure you give them space to use that expertise. Establish the creative problem, but let them find the solutions.
Great creatives will have great ideas but you need to create an environment where they feel safe enough to think outside the box. Good ideas require a good amount of failure, and you need to account for that somewhere in your process.
For tricky projects, the best place to start is with a brainstorming session in which you bring the problems and your creatives offer up solutions. Doing this together gives you a chance to have a collaborative voice in guiding and refining their solutions without being prescriptive.
If you trust and empower your creative team to do what they do best, they will reward you with great work.
3. Be Thoughtful About Criticism
As a lifelong creative, I am willing to admit, we’re an oversensitive bunch. Our problem is, when we’re younger (or just new to the practice), we can often misconstrue criticism of our work as criticism of us. So, while it’s not your job to babysit our feelings, you do need to be thoughtful about how you critique our work.
Seems silly but start with something you like. Just letting us know that all of our ideas don’t suck is enough to validate the effort we’ve made. It’s hard to not start shutting down if everything you’re hearing is negative.
Next, differentiate between intention and execution—this allows us to understand where we got it wrong. Was our idea wrong, or just how we brought it to life?
If the idea was wrong, we’ll need to go back to the beginning. Not a big deal, but good to know so you don’t waste time fixing superficial issues when the real problem goes much deeper. On the other hand, if the execution is wrong, then we just need to tweak refine what we created. See the difference? Understanding this difference will help you help your creatives because the more concrete you can be in your criticism, the more precise we can be in our revisions (and the less time they’ll take!).
As Ernest Hemingway famously said, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.” What he’s saying, on a basic level, is that all creative pursuits are imperfect—they require failure before they can be successful. This is something managers often fail to account for. Your creatives need space to try and fail so they can succeed. Understanding that this is part of the creative process illustrates why learning how to critique creative work is so critical—critique is inevitable and required.
But the good news is this, learning how to critique work in a way that is thoughtful and effective will go a long way to creating the kind of environment that your creatives need to thrive and you need to succeed. It’ll also lead to better collateral!
