Empathy

Empathy is that quality by which you can understand others' perspectives and feelings, and for a leader that's pretty important. When you're leading Creatives, and have a pretty diverse workforce, it can also be pretty challenging.

Your employees have skills theyre most interested din using or developing, problems affecting their personal and profesisonal lives, ambitions and goals, and plenty of other things going on that are unique to them. For you to make the best use of your employees -- getting their best work from them, keeping them motivated ad enthusiastic -- you really need to understand how they view the world and what's important to them. You can't just look at what's important to YOU, you need to figure out what's important to THEM. Through the lens of their individual perspectives you can get a better idea of which skills they're most apt to use, what problems are affecting their ability to do a great job, what it takes to keep them interested and striving forward -- in short, you really need to understand things from their point of view.

It's helpful for you to have a diverse workforce, but that also eliminates the "one size fits all" approach of dealing with your employees. It's harder to step into someone else's shoes if you don't understand them. And since everyone's different -- and among Creatives, differences are often the only thing in common -- you're going to have to work extra hard to understand their point of view. Some of that will come though in direct conversation, so don't be afraid to talk to your Creatives about things beyond the office. Some will come through observation, so take note of what they're doing when they seem happiest, and watch for problems from outside the office that creep into the workplace.

This isn't all just a bunch of hand-holding, touch-feelyness...this is about doing what you need to do as a leader to help your Creatives turn out the best possible product or service and maximize your profit. If you were on an assembly line you'd worry about the quality of the ingredients that go into your final product. When you're leading Creatives, you need to think just as carefully about he qualities of your most important ingredient: your people.