Controlling the Use of Teams

Some people just aren’t happy unless they’ve got a whole team of people assigned to a task. But your use of teams needs to be balanced against the requirements, and the culture, of your firm.

The proper use of teams is one of the trickiest aspects of leading Creatives. In the right circumstances, organizing your Creatives into teams encourages a kind of synergy that provides results far beyond what any individual could accomplish. But under the wrong conditions, insisting on group work can hurt not just a particular project, but your overall organizational culture as well.

When you assign someone a project, ask yourself what they need to be successful. If an assignment requires multiple skills sets to be integrated in a complementary fashion, then yes, you should consider forming a working group to bring all those skills together. In advertising, for instance, the copywriter, the artist, the marketer, the client account manager, the lawyer...all of these have a role to play, and its generally better to get them together from the start rather than doing the work piece by piece.

But if all your Creative needs is information from others, then you should consider having them run solo and simply collect the inputs they need from others.

Why? Well, much of it comes down to the issue of control. When you have an individual working on something, they decide what the end result looks like and then pass it up to you for approval. When you form a team, though, everybody in that group gets a vote. It doesn’t come to you until everyone’s reviewed it and approved it. This not only slows down the creative process, it also leads to mediocre results as the group tends toward the least common denominator in order to gain consensus and move on.

Frankly, you often don’t need this. Creating unnecessary hurdles for Creatives stunts their innovation. If all you need from other people is information, why give them a say in decision making? Don’t create hassles for yourself when you don’t need them.

Insisting on teams can also affect your Creatives’ morale, and their interest in doing good work. A colleague of mine used to work for a boss who ended every assignment with “now, you’re going to need a working group...” “The implication,” says my colleague, “was that none of us were capable of accomplishing anything on our own. I don’t think that’s what he meant, but the message that came across was that he didn’t think much of our abilities.” As a result, a lot of the more motivated people left, leaving behind a group of employees who preferred not to accept responsibility. If you want a successful creative firm, these aren’t your ideal employees.

So be judicious n your use of teams. Don’t let a working group be your default position. If you can, let your people do the work you hired them to do, and maximize the creativity coming up from the ranks to you.