Managing a Strong Creative Team

The key to managing a strong creative team involves hiring the right people for the culture of your business and empowering them. Empowering your staff creates ownership and shows them that you respect them. It produces work that reflects the level of commitment your staff has to the business.

When you create a nurturing environment that respects good work and sees bad work as learning opportunities, it helps build a culture of innovation that is inclusive and inspiring. It's important that your people feel (and know) that you have their backs.

Understanding that the ultimate goal is to create an efficient and profitable workplace, protect your staff from things that waste everyone's time or create unnecessary situations. Doing this shows your employees the quality of their work environment is a priority to you.

Be aware that you are being observed. The vastness of a leader's responsibility can sometimes cause him/her to lose touch with the emotional sensitivity of employees. Realize your performance is always being judged.

And lastly, remember that everything you do affects everyone on your team. Your bad day can ruin their good day. Your goofy dance can break them out of a creative slump. We're all human, we're all friends. Remember that and you'll always have success.

The Wicked Tusk of the Narwhal

“You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal, and I reply by describing to you how the sea unicorn with the harpoon in it dies.”
 – Pablo Neruda from the poem the Enigmas

In the poem Neruda speaks of the narwhal, that is an odd looking whale with a tusk that protrudes from its mouth. An animal feared and once thought to be a monster. The creature is used to illustrate how we make snap judgment. The answer is relative to the asker. People live within their own values and morals. We are all slaves to our own experiences. A person who lives a peaceful life is affected by cruelty differently than a person who had never known a life without cruelty. It’s natural to see how difficult it is making judgments on choices or what is right and wrong when the fact that all of us are so tightly wound in our experiences and fears that it makes highly improbable that any of us will ever see things the same. Understanding people instead of vilifying them for believing differently is instrumental in the evolution of humanity and the key to the development of our own understanding of our creative capacity.