Be Upfront, In Front

As a leader, your main job is to make decisions. There are plenty of other things you do that provide guidance to your Creatives, but the bottom line is, you need to make the decisions that take your firm in a particular direction and turn opportunities into realities. I like to say that sometimes the best way to lead is to get out of the way, and I think that's true, but you still need to find the right path upon which your Creatives should tread and push them from behind even if you aren't holding their hands and guiding from the front.

The best thing you can do to help your Creatives out is give them clear, accurate guidance early on. One of the most important things you can do is give them all the facts and deal with reality at the start of something rather than letting them wander down a path under one set of assumptions and then change the rules on them.

This is particularly important when you're leading Creatives. Your employees are trying to think outside the box (or at least, think inside a bigger box) and even though you want to encourage creativity and innovation, sometimes you need to rein them in a bit. There are often limits on what you can do -- there are deadlines, resource constraints, skill deficiencies, and other things that take a good idea out of the realm of the possible.

We may think we're dampening creativity if we remind employees of these limits, but the truth is, those limits exist whether we want them to or not. They're going to have an effect, and we need to decide how far we want our employees to go before they crash into the wall of reality. By deciding early what's not possible and communicating that, you can move your employees toward what IS possible, and increase their chances of success. If, on the other hand, you keep some facts from them and let them do what they want without guidance (or with inaccurate guidance) they're going to waste time before they realize that what they're working on isn't going to work, and there's a good chance they'll resent you for it.

Remember, too, that if you're willing to identify your limits and make decisions within those limits, you can then decide if the resulting actions are good enough or if you need to try to change those limits in the future. If you aren't honest with yourself early on, if you aren't willing to make the decisions that restrict what plans your Creatives pursue, you'll never address those limitations and you'll always be stuck with them.

I've got a bit of personal experience with this. We had an international partner ask us for help with a problem and I came up with three options for helping them out. Plans A and B involved other organizations, while Plan C involved an expenditure of resources from my office. My leadership approved of all three plans at first. During the next week, as my attempts to help with the problem faced resistance, it looked like Plan C was going to have to be the one. On Wednesday, my leaders approved the plan as an option if we needed it; on Thursday, when I told them that was the answer we needed to go with, I was told "we don't have the money to support that." Now, had they told me that upfront, I would have created another Plan C, and I might have successfully fixed the problem. As it turned out, the problem went unsolved, and we looked pretty bad as a result. Sadly, because my bosses weren't willing to make a decision when we first discussed the various options, I wasted time on a solution that never would have worked and gave up the chance to to possibly develop another one that would.

Here's the hard truth: if you aren't prepared to make decisions, you have no business being a leader. And if you feel like you can't be open and honest with your employees when they start going down an unrealistic path, you're going to see a lot of failure in your firm. And nobody wants that. Well, except for your competition.