To tackle complex challenges, we often assemble a team of ambitious & creative people.
However, bringing the group together doesn’t guarantee success. You’ve likely seen teams of smart individuals struggle with slow progress, frustration, or tension.
What can we do as leaders to foster thriving creative teams?
Todd Henry’s book “Herding Tigers” offers plenty of actionable advice for people who find themselves leading creatives. These were a few of my favorite takeaways.
1. Provide what creatives need: stability and challenge
“Much of the dysfunction and tension that exists in the workplace is the result of highly creative people’s needs not being met.”
– Todd Henry
While there are plenty of myths out there about what creatives want, Henry asserts they are really looking for stability and challenge in their work.
Stability means that the work environment and objectives are relatively predictable, which allows creatives to focus on the work: solving complex problems.
You can establish stability by being clear about the direction and protecting the team. If you’re sensing a lot of anger and frustration within the team, look for ways to increase stability.
Challenge means that team members are engaged in stimulating work.
Increase your team’s ability to take on challenges by giving permission to take risks and expressing faith in their abilities. Create space for creatives to explore and design and provide them with tools and inspiration. If you see a team that’s bored or stuck, amp up the challenge.
2. Lead the work with focus, function, and fire
Focus helps the team pay attention to what’s important right now and remove distractions. It clarifies these three questions: What are we doing? What are we not doing? And when are we doing it by?
Function relates to the resources and processes to help the work run smoothly. How will we do the work? Do we have all of the tools and resources to do it?
And fire means establishing urgency and motivation. Why does the work matter?
3. Align team members with the work they’re made for
Your creative team likely has a mix of what Henry calls builders, fixers, and optimizers.
Builders love the early stages of a project and creating something new. They like exploring the unknown, coming up with ideas, and building prototypes. However, they’re less effective at running existing processes because they’ll always look for ways to start over from scratch.
Fixers enjoy diagnosing problems and designing solutions for them. They thrive with a specific problem to solve. However, they don’t do as well with problems without clear parameters.
And optimizers enjoy taking existing systems and improving them. They’ll make processes more efficient and reduce waste. However, they may be less comfortable with uncertainty and prefer clear objectives and ways to quantify their performance.
Many people can play multiple roles, but staying stuck in a sub-optimal role for too long can feel like creative quicksand.
Which roles do your team members prefer? Are they working on projects aligned with their strengths?
Do you have the right personalities on the team for the mix of work that you’re doing right now? Will that mix change in the future?
4. Track lagging and leading indicators for your creative team
For lagging indicators, you could track if the team’s objectives were achieved, if you maintained your values in the process, and if you’ve set yourselves up to repeat the success.
By making these indicators public and reflecting on them often as a team, you can determine if changes to focus, function or fire could help in the future.
Leading indicators for the creative process might include the pace of work, the energy of the group, engagement, enthusiasm for the work, psychological safety, and efficiency of communication.
By monitoring your team’s health over time, you can quickly step in to make adjustments. Is the team moving too fast and on the verge of burn out? Or are they bored with the pace? Are they struggling with process inefficiencies? Do they not feel comfortable enough to share hard truths and controversial ideas? It might be time to step in.
5. Tend the team culture
“Because cultures are grown, you must treat yours like a garden. Just like a good gardener, you aggressively fertilize the aspects of your team’s culture that you want in abundance and diligently prune the things you want to get rid of.”
– Todd Henry
Along the theme of less control and more influence, you can’t dictate a culture and expect it to come to life. Instead, Henry encourages us to think of culture more like tending a garden. Prune the behaviors you don’t like and reward the ones you do.
That means questioning limiting beliefs or what Henry calls “ghost rules” that your team is following and may or might not be aware of, such as assumptions about what will and won’t work. Have a team discussion about them and replace them with productive alternatives.
It also means questioning why meetings and artifacts are happening before getting rid of them. Perhaps there was value in a portion of that activity that could be addressed in a different way. He also suggests not accepting small deviances, such as missed meetings and skipped deadlines to encourage team discipline.
On the other hand, clearly reward the behavior you value and would like to see, perhaps by building them into your leading indicators. Whatever you decide, Henry suggests that the rewards be predictable, consistent, and something that people actually want, whether it’s words of affirmation, a new project, more autonomy, or traditional tangible rewards.
The book was full of other practical tips and mindset shifts to help us step outside of our own needs and act like the leader that creatives need to be great.
How will you apply the advice from this book?