Speaker 1: We tend to think about creativity as the domain of solo geniuses, but the truth is that creativity is a team sport, which means that team is gonna need someone who knows how to lead them. Hey, leader, David Burgess here, organizational psychologist and author of four best-selling books on helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. And in this episode, we're gonna talk about how to lead creative teams. You know, creativity has been a team sport for a very long time, but it's only been increasing over the last five years, 10 years, 20 years, et cetera. I mean, look at whatever domain you want, whether it's academic publishing and research, whether it's branding and marketing, whether it's filmmaking, whether it's even simple stuff like accounting or consulting or manufacturing. We've seen an increase in teams and the role of teams and organizations and an increase in the problems that have to be solved at the team level, not the individual level. All of the easy problems have been solved at this point in our existence, which means creativity is firmly in the domain of teams. So it's worth talking about how to lead creative teams, right, and that's what we're gonna cover in this episode. Whether you lead a team in the creative industries or whether you lead a team that just needs to think a little more creatively to solve a problem they're facing, we'll cover all of that right now. Let's get started. So the first way to lead creative teams is to show them the constraints. I know this is a little counterintuitive, but as you're facing a problem or a project, one of the first things you need to do is understand the constraints of the issue. You may have heard some leaders encouraging people to think outside the box, but the truth is the box is incredibly useful to us. Constraints like the amount of time we have to solve the problem or the amount of time we have to initiate our solution and implement it or the resource constraints, the amount of money that we have to pull this off or even the number of man hours or people that we have. All of these constraints help set up the box that our solution needs to fit inside and believe it or not, research shows that creativity actually thrives inside constraints. Creativity is a process of both divergent thinking, thinking of lots of different answers, lots of different possible solutions and convergent thinking, getting those ideas to work together and fit inside our definition, our criteria of success. Another word for that criteria is the constraints. And we don't wanna get into a situation where we have fallen in love with an idea only to find down the road that we can't do it because of some constraint that we should have known about ahead of time. So the first step in leading creative teams is to figure out what those constraints are and make sure you're sharing them with the team. And don't worry, because as we know, those constraints will just make them more creative. Second way to lead creative teams is to support their ideas. Make sure you're championing their ideas. Nothing stops the creative flow of an individual or a team faster than hearing, oh, that'll never work here, or we tried something similar to that, or even just, I'm not even gonna fight for that idea at the higher ups, et cetera. Knowing that it's not even worth the time to come up with creative ideas is a huge damper. I mean, why try? If you know that your idea is not even going to be judged and found wanting, but just not even going to be judged, imagine what that does to your motivation. So creative teams need leaders who are willing to support their ideas, especially in the divergent phase of creative thinking, are willing to support lots of people's ideas. The best way to get the one idea we're looking for that is the best is to get lots of ideas from the start. And that'll only happen if that team has a leader who will support their ideas, not only to make sure everybody has a voice, every person's ideas have support, but that the ideas that the group decides are worth experimenting with actually get shared outside of the group to whoever is needed to conduct those experiments. The third way to lead creative teams is to teach them to fight right. Okay, this is another one kind of like the constraints piece that might seem counterintuitive. We like to think that creativity is fun, that when we're spitballing ideas and throwing random things out there, that we're all having fun, that we're jovial. And when there is a lack of cohesion, when there is conflict, when there is friction, that means we're doing it wrong. Now, I blame Alex Osborne, the creator, the person who coined the term brainstorming, because one of his rules of brainstorming was no idea is a bad idea. Well, some ideas are terrible. And not only are they terrible, they could actually get better if someone pushed back on the ideas, challenged their thinking, and helped them refine them. And the tool that we use to refine those ideas is task-focused conflict. It's the right type of fight. And creative teams need leaders who will teach their people how to have that conflict, and also how to have it in a way that is respectful, that stays task-focused, and is done with a spirit of making the idea better, not just shooting down the person. So it's not just teach them to fight, it's teach them to fight right. The fourth way to lead creative teams is to test what you can. This kind of goes along with point two around supporting their ideas. We wanna be able to test as many ideas as we can. We're gonna think divergently inside the constraints of the problem, and we're gonna come up with a couple different solutions. It's actually a bad idea to settle on one solution early on, but what we want to do is settle on the two or three that have the best prospect of success, and then figure out how we're going to test them. This may mean, as a leader, you need to fight for some resources to conduct those tests, or some time to be able to figure that out. And it may mean that you just need to lay out the methodology by which we're gonna test these ideas, and refine them, and decide, based on feedback from the test, which one is the final one that we're going to implement. But creativity and leading a creative team doesn't just stop at brainstorming and circling the idea that we like the best. Creativity continues into the test, because after all, every idea is really just a prototype, a temporary idea that we'll put out in the world, get feedback, and refine. And creative teams need that everything is a prototype mentality. And the final way to lead creative teams, or maybe not the final way, but the final way for this episode, because everything's a prototype, and based on your feedback, we might do another one. But the final way in this episode to lead creative teams is to celebrate their failures. And what I mean here is not the colossal failures, the, oh, we tried this, and we lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and we wasted all of our time. Here's a trophy, that's not what I mean. What I mean is to celebrate the learnings that come from those failures. Creative teams are going to have to try a lot of things. Even teams outside of the creative industries that are trying to find a new solution to a problem, they're going to have to try a lot of things. We talked about that in the last segment, which means some of those things are going to be failures. And the thing about failures is we want to extract lessons from them. We want to have an honest conversation about what went wrong, what our feedback suggested that we can use to improve upon these ideas, and we want to celebrate the fact that that failure was really just a learning opportunity. In thriving creative teams, I see this in play in a lot of different ways. This could be as simple as an after-action review and an expression of gratitude that we learn those lessons, or as elaborate as failure funerals and failure wakes, where we actually spend some time mourning the loss of that idea. Whatever it is, celebrating failure sends the message that it's okay to fail on this team as long as we learn. And by the way, if that comes off as a little weird to you, why is it okay to fail? Remember our first point. Part of understanding the constraints of the problem we're working with is understanding the constraint of how much we can risk in order to learn and still not have that affect our final success. That's why all five of these, showing those constraints, supporting their ideas, teaching them to fight, testing what we can, and even celebrating failures are not a step-by-step linear process, and they are not pick one of these and apply it. We need to be doing all five all at once to help shape the culture of the team into one that is willing to fight for their ideas, test them, fail them, and see that failure as a learning opportunity and one step toward the solution that we're looking for. But you do have to get started somewhere. So think about your team and maybe which one of these your team is lacking the most and make a point to emphasize it in the next week. Then emphasize the next one in the next week and moving forward. And in five weeks, you'll be amazed at what you found. You'll find that you've changed the culture of your team. You'll find that you've moved that culture into one that can think more broadly, more creatively, and find more innovations. And you'll find you've created a team that's much more likely to do their best work ever. Oh, and one more thing. We mentioned the C word here a couple times, culture. If you're looking to lead a creative team, part of that is gonna involve the culture of the team. So you wanna check out this video here on what makes for a great team culture.