Leading talented creatives
At Playful09 on Friday, Kareem Ettouney, Art Director at Media Molecule, spoke eloquently on the challenges of leading creative teams - and becoming a servant, rather than the head honcho. The difference between a small team who know each other well and where you can each do everything, and a larger team, where you are hiring in new specialist talent, is huge. Kareem emphasised that people will always moan about their work; and when you become the person in charge, or start a new business, you intend to create an environment where people don't feel the need to gripe. But that is an impossible dream; and when you become a leader, you see the big picture in a way you didn't before, and you see how the apparently easy changes which would improve things often aren't as simple as they initially appeared. All you can do is minimise those moans, and hope to get great designs out of the world class people you've hired (more than the 2% Kareem quoted as a common level of output for insufficiently fulfilled elite skill creatives). You can't let these brilliant people each do their own thing, because you'll get an incoherent whole; and you can't run with the traditional hierarchical model, like movies (with an art director at the top, and specialists working in a tree structure further down, and doing what they are told). This (probably) won't work because you've got people with broader talents than just one area, the work doesn't divide neatly into areas anyway, and they are not going to respect the person at the top unless they are an acknowledged god in the field. So, you need to give your creatives ownership of specific areas of work, and also share enough of the big picture "pragmatics" that they can understand the impact of their work on the whole project. Ownership needs to include responsibility, and answerability - if they screw up, they will have to answer to the entire team.
This is all a genuine challenge for someone who has previously worked on some specialist area themselves, and who now finds themselves trying to manage a team of highly skilled creatives towards an overall product vision (which is created through the team and their work together). Kareem insightfully identifies this as being the phase of one's career where you stop spending time at your own desk, and start spending all your time at other people's. When you are hanging out with these other people, you should avoid giving "input" or just reviewing their work. You should be sharing the journey with them, seeing the problems and figuring parts of them out together, bouncing ideas off each other, and connecting them to others.
This is all well and good, and reassuringly chimes with my current managerial style, but still we have an open question: where is the cake? What is the reward for talented creatives in this model, where they are not imposing their vision on the overall product? You have to clearly identify success in a final great product as coming from each of them, but also, make sure everyone has their own personal projects too. If they work solely on team projects, and work well with others, there is a risk that creatives will become precious about their own input. An interesting idea, and one I'll reflect on some more.
This is all a genuine challenge for someone who has previously worked on some specialist area themselves, and who now finds themselves trying to manage a team of highly skilled creatives towards an overall product vision (which is created through the team and their work together). Kareem insightfully identifies this as being the phase of one's career where you stop spending time at your own desk, and start spending all your time at other people's. When you are hanging out with these other people, you should avoid giving "input" or just reviewing their work. You should be sharing the journey with them, seeing the problems and figuring parts of them out together, bouncing ideas off each other, and connecting them to others.
This is all well and good, and reassuringly chimes with my current managerial style, but still we have an open question: where is the cake? What is the reward for talented creatives in this model, where they are not imposing their vision on the overall product? You have to clearly identify success in a final great product as coming from each of them, but also, make sure everyone has their own personal projects too. If they work solely on team projects, and work well with others, there is a risk that creatives will become precious about their own input. An interesting idea, and one I'll reflect on some more.