Help! Common Issues That Creatives Face and What Managers Can Do to Help Them

Creatives are any employees that use imagination and artistry to make something for an audience. They can be Visual Designers, Copywriters, Musicians, Animators, or User Experience Designers and they aren’t just found in marketing agencies. In this age almost any size company will have a design department to create and maintain their branding and marketing, their online and mobile presence, their products or services, or even their brick and mortar locations.

Being very particular about who you bring on the team should always be the cornerstone of building any team, but the reality is that building a team with absolutely no issues is impossible. The creative process itself can create problems for a business-goal oriented team. As a manager the best solution can be to know what the issues that you need to worry about are and have a strategy for how to deal with them when they arise. Managing creatives is sometimes referred to as “herding cats” because the individuality and freedom that creatives usually need to do their best work can be different from the needs of other types of employees. It is wrong to think that all creatives are the same and what will work for one employee will always work for another, but here are some issues that creatives might have in common and what managers can do to try to help:

Daydreaming “My creatives are staring off into space, taking long breaks, and appear to be goofing off!”

How you can help: Are they getting great results? If so, they may be engaging in just what they need to think through their creative process. Creative employees need time to explore and it can sometimes look like goofing off. Have you ever noticed that new ideas often coincide with taking a bathroom break? Getting up and changing your location does wonders for your creative muscles. Creatives also like to engage in mindless tasks from time to time to allow their mind to wander. The next time you need to put postage on 300 envelopes, ask a creative if they would like to do it, they might just get a brilliant idea as a side effect. If they aren’t getting great results, it might be because...

Disengagement “My creatives are not doing work as great as I know they are capable of and seem disinterested in what they are working on!”

How you can help: If they aren’t getting great results, discuss it with them, find common ground on what could be better, and see if you can discover the reason together. If they feel uninspired, help them find places to look at similar projects that have been accomplished well. Talk about what makes them great and why. If they feel disengaged with the project in general, help them find where the places in the project that they can find the fun are where they can find something to get excited about creatively.

If they are getting great results, do not disparage your creatives if they are engaging in an activity that may seem to equate to a lack of work ethic in other employees.

Devil’s Advocate “My creatives can sometimes be annoyingly contrary. It seem like they always take the other side of every discussion!”

How you can help: While some consideration of different points of view is always welcome, sometimes it can be hard to make headway on a project when it never ends. What makes a creative great in the first place is their ability to make non-obvious connections and ability to see things from different perspectives. Be patient with them, it’s their talent shining through. However, there are times when you need consensus on a project. Listen to them and their idea carefully, but if the idea isn’t a game changer for the success of the project, it may be better adding their thoughts to the backlog and refocusing their attention to making the task at hand as great as it can be.

Ego “Help! My creative thinks they’re the greatest thing in the world and won’t listen to me!”

How you can help: Creatives can often feel that their perspective is the best, which can be a real problem when working in a team environment but before you hand them their pink slip, let’s look at this situation at a deeper level. Creatives that come from a place of a lot of personal work sometimes have trouble drawing a distinction between creativity for personal use and creativity for a business use. You want creatives that create on a personal level, this is how their taste and point of view are formed, but there is a real difference in how you execute on personal and business creativity. With personal creativity, there is no wrong. The creative is the master of everything. Business creativity has a wrong solution because business creativity is geared toward reaching a specific goal.

Another issue may be that you are unable to communicate to the creative in the correct vocabulary for either of you to understand each others problems with something. You need to both speak the same language if you hope to say things that the creative will respect. You both need to listen carefully to each other and maintain an open mind. It’s possible that the problem is with you, so consider your own perspective carefully here. If the problem isn’t that the creative isn’t focusing on the business goals of the project and it isn’t that the two of you are unable to effectively communicate, then the problem may be that they are just not suited to working in a team environment and you should consider letting them move on.

Low self esteem “My creative has no point of view and can’t be relied on to lead the vision on anything!”

How you can help: The creative thought process can lead to a balancing act between low self-esteem and thinking they are the best. It is not uncommon for creatives to rarely be satisfied with their work and always feel it can be better. They are constantly comparing their work to others. Because of all this, creatives often have a strange relationship with competition, and you need to be careful if you use that as a motivator. At the end of the day a creative wants to feel that their creations have meaning and are having an impact on their audience and that is the best creative motivator. On the other side of that coin, seeing a project get cancelled can be a terrible blow to morale. Creatives are used to going the wrong direction down a path to find the right one, use that as a tool and embrace a failing fast ethos to avoid projects getting to far into development before they are cancelled. Remind yourself to give positive feedback when appropriate and be sure to keep them updated on the success of launched projects.

Focus “My creative is all over the place and can’t focus on anything!”

How you can help: Idea generation can be a very powerful strength, but sometimes it can also be a debilitating weakness. Some creatives produce new ideas at such a rate that they can’t focus on really developing anything. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, they just might need help recognizing when an idea is worth sticking with and help with concentrating on the task at hand. Daily check-ins, printing things out and putting them in a visible place, giving the creative an avenue to vent these ideas and always bringing conversations back to the task at hand can all help with this.

Many of these qualities are ones that can be permanently overcome with practice. Some of these qualities aren’t really problems and can be turned into strengths with a little bit of perspective adjustment on your part. Either way, knowing some of these common qualities of creatives can help managers develop strategies for meeting their business goals successfully. Have any ideas to add? Let me know in the comments!