5 Ways to Get the Best Work from Creative Professionals

Creative professionals do their best work when very specific conditions are met. As a Creative manager, it is important for you to be aware of the environment that you are creating, in order to get the best results from your Creative team. 

The following are 5 ways to create the optimal environment for excellent Creative output.

Protect their time – Dedicating focus to projects and challenges is extremely important for Creative professionals. This is especially challenging in an agency setting. However, creating a protective shield around your team is your job, as manager. It takes proactive resource forecasting, management and communication with other managers who are looking to utilize members of the Creative team. Your effort, here, will be rewarded with in-depth problem solving, as well as energized and calmer team members.

Protect their egos – Creativity is all about ego. Being inspired is the key to Creative excellence. It is nearly impossible to be inspired with a hurt ego. When providing feedback, criticism, and instruction to Creative professionals, it is best to be mindful of your delivery and tone. The ego is fragile, but capable of producing amazing things. Respect large and small egos on your Creative team.

Give them a stimulating work environment – Inspiration has much to do with environment. Environment doesn’t just refer to work environment, although that’s important…but also to the culture that you’ve created in the workplace. Since behavior is also related closely to environment, you can engineer the type of behavior you wish to encourage by creating the right physical spaces to influence positive behaviors. For example, if you, as we all do, aspire to encourage collaboration amongst team members, create open spaces where people can see and interact with each other on a daily basis.

Inspire them with strong strategic direction – While time may not permit you, as a manager, to produce the detailed deliverables that are required for project delivery, you need to establish the broad strokes that set direction for your Creative team. If you are used to generating big ideas and strategic concepts for business development efforts, you should be regularly pitching innovative ideas of strategic value on your existing accounts. Your Creative team will begin to riff off of your thinking and think through the details. Your team should depend on you for higher-level conceptual thinking. 

Give them plenty of context regarding business objectives and likely end-user behavior – Strong Creative concepts for clients requires business and end-user context. Conduct brainstorms with your team by giving the proper set-up and context about the client’s specific needs and the likely behaviors of the client’s customers. Insist that every idea that is produced from your Creative team can support either a business objective or a customer need.