The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Bryan Mason and Sarah Nelson of Adaptive Path addressed the challenges of getting the most out of talented people in their SXSW session titled “10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment”.

Mason and Nelson studied theater troupes, orchestras, a restaurant kitchen, a magazine and a screenwriting collective to find out how these creative groups work well together, and found some common themes:

1. Cross-train the entire team. Everyone on the team should get experience with all the other related disciplines and administrative tasks. This gives you empathy for others’ experiences and allows you to understand what’s possible in other realms.
2. Rotate creative leadership. This creates a sense of security, with people knowing that at some point they’ll have a sense of ownership
3. Actively turning the corner. The corner here is from divergence (brainstorming) to convergence (decision-making). Moving from one to the other at the appropriate time is key.
4. Know your roles. Once the corner is turned and you move into the production phase, everyone should know what they’re meant to do — what they can make decisions on and what they can’t.
5. Practice, practice, practice. Give time to improve individual skills as well as group skills, so that you can repeat the process each team. However, you have to find the right times to practice (not on deadline or at crunch time)
6. Make your mission explicit. It’s important that everyone understand the end result and define a purpose among the team.
7. Killing your darlings. Find respectful ways to remove material that doesn’t support the mission.
8. Leadership is a service. Being a leader is the ultimate support position. You’re helping others represent themselves and giving people the space to be creative. You’re a facilitator, not a dictator.
9. Generate products around the group’s creative interests. Identify tasks with what staff is actually engaged in to give people more ownership.
10. Remember your audience. Think about whether something is just part of your creative vision, or whether it would serve the audience. Consider how you will emotionally relate to your visitors and learn to anticipate the feedback.

They also threw in a bonus item: celebrate failure. There’s always something in a project that can be done better next time. People should know it’s OK to fail.