Tell Them What You Want, Not How You Want It Done

You can't do everything yourself, and you shouldn't have to. Your Creatives need to focus on creating while you focus on leadership. If you have 20 people working for you, can you worry about all the details that each and every one of those 20 are dealing with? Of course not. You need to stay above the trees rather than down in the weeds.

Which means, when you give someone a task, you really shouldn't be telling them how to do it. Tell them what you want them to produce, but don't dictate how they should produce it.

It's hard sometimes for leaders to let go. When you've come up from the "worker bee" level it's easy to slip back into that role, especially when you're getting started at the whole leadership thing. It's natural to return to something comfortable, especially when we're facing new challenges. For Creatives it's especially tough, because you have a style and a certain set of skills and you know how you would do something, so when you see your employee doing it differently it may grate on your nerves. But accept it as simply something different, not something bad, and realize that when you were at that point in your career your boss (assuming you had a good one) stepped back and let you develop your skills, so you really should do the same.

One thing that will help calm you down is if you have a diverse workplace and recognize the benefits of that. After all, if you were directing every little detail yourself the work would be based only on your style, but if you allow different people with their own ideas to move forward, you'll see a lot more great concepts emerge, and that's good for your firm. Take advantage of the breadth of ideas your Creatives can share.

Along those same lines, realize that with a good workforce you shouldn't have to be looking over their shoulders all the time. Trust your people to do what they're employed to do. Either you've hired good people who can do the work without a lot of supervision, or you've hired incompetent people and, well...that was dumb.

It helps to create a climate where your Creatives know what you expect and you know what skills and ideas they bring. This helps to avoid a lot of bad surprises and will make you feel more comfortable about letting go of the reins and allowing them to move forward on a project. We often want to get involved with the details because we feel no one can do it quite like we can, or as well as we can, but if you know what they're capable of, and if you know they know what you want, you'll realize they can do it just fine.

One of the most aggravating things for a Creative is to have someone dampen their creativity by being very specific in how they want things done. Don't be that boss. You hired Creatives, now let them be creative.