Balancing Creative Culture
I have worked with creative teams for a long time. When I first started working in an agency, I observed this weird glorification of “Creatives”. They were both excessively revered and totally disrespected. The creative teams had different spaces, with bean bags, pinball machines and bourbon. They had better computers, cool desks and lots of space to ideate. On the other hand, they were constantly being asked to pull rabbits out of hats. They were given ineffective briefs and shitty timelines. They are sometimes exposed to harsh reviews on their creative work. They stifle their protests to mutters as they bend the the knee to client feedback that eliminates precious and clever details that went un-noticed. It’s a tough job.
I think there was a mythology about creatives that reinforced the notion that a little chaos and free space is the kind of support that they need universally and that if you make them feel important enough, they will meet the most absurd expectations. I think this is false and also detrimental to the work potential and toxic to agency culture. Here is why:
It’s a very narrow view of a massively diverse workforce that deserves some nuance. Most people, not just creatives need a certain ratio of structure:space.
It nurtures a culture that sets up creative class that has different rules than everyone else. It reminds me of the Master Builders Vs. The Micromanagers in The Lego Movie . It can infect working relationships with tension and resentment.
It inherently devalues the enormity of creativity and perspective held by the entire rest of the team that isn’t designated “creative”.
It puts an un-necessary amount pressure on the creative team to always have the best ideas instead of sometimes looking for them elsewhere or focusing on articulating someone else’s idea that works.
It’s a collision course for inequity.
The structure:space ratio
Structure creates space. I have practiced yoga for over 20 years and what I know as a student and as a teacher is that when we decide on a shape to take, we know where to put the body, the bones get moved into place and then the breath moves in and out of the body creating flows and the muscles can expand. Similarly, creative flow occurs when we create a structure that the conditions to breathe into the creative process. We create structure by providing briefs, by providing timelines, by providing reliable processes, by providing meaningful supervision. These tools define the space and creatives fill it.
Without this kind of structure, direction and meaningful supervision, we are asking creative workers to pull something out of thin air. Imagine the amount of pretense one would have to manufacture to create confidence in that situation! I think that is the most likely unintended byproduct of "creative freedom” and that can weigh heavily on the culture of a team.
Give creative workers structure in the way of protocols, meaningful supervision, strong briefs, and timelines allows them to fill the space with creative flow. When these structures are held by the broader team, it can feel like support and a more integrated effort.
Master Builder Syndrome
When I saw The Lego Movie for the first time, I couldn’t believe how much it reminded me of working in an agency. There are characters who follow rules and build things as intended and there are characters who have no creativity but work in service of “President/Lord Business” and there are characters who are wildly talented and creative and live outside of the bounds of everything. Full disclosure, I love this movie. It’s good because it reflects the truth and we all recognize it even if we don’t agree with it.
When we allow for a kind of free and feral environment for creatives and everyone else has to maintain the structure of things it can really create a schism in the team. The impact of this schism can be felt in a lack of collaboration. Good creative requires good collaboration.
There is nobody in your agency that isn’t creative
Creativity is a human characteristic. Some people are encouraged and rewarded for their creativity and others are not. Everyone in my household is an artist; it’s just how my family works. Other families have academics or builders or athletes. I think my family could have organized around any of those things, but we didn’t. We put a premium on creativity and so we all have access to a creative practice and creative expression. I credit my husband for this phenomenon.
For years, I was too busy to invest in a creative practice and he kept working to pull me into one. Now, because of his constant invitation and facilitation, I have a creative practice as a painter and a potter. This fuels my creativity towards business in so many ways. Also, business is a creative practice.
It takes just as much creativity, listening and empathy to be an account manager as it takes follow through and strategic wisdom. Great media planners are necessarily creative and thinking of ways to amplify creative work and extend reach. Good strategists have to access their imagination when going through data and creating personas and situational analysis; that’s what makes a strategy good. Don’t even get me started on producers and project managers, they are massively creative in finding and manufacturing whole solutions!
I think sometimes we gift the creative team with holding the title of creative at the expense of acknowledging our own creativity. I know I have done this and I have seen others do it. Hell, I might have coached people to let the creatives feel special. I just think that any organization would thrive exponentially more if we acknowledged the creativity and of the whole team instead of reserving it for creative workers.
Creatives are just people
Creative workers are tapped to be creative. They are given a lot of space and expected to come up with something great every day. It doesn’t matter if the creative likes the topic at hand or not. Sometimes the ideas are not there and it can be terrifying.
I was working on a team once that was trying to build a campaign for a municipal gas company of a nearby city. The creative team was board to tears and stumped. I happen to love cooking and in particular love cooking on a gas stove. I could help, they could ask for it, and the outcome was good.
When we turn creative workers into hero’s instead of people, we expect them to do heroic work. They can only do people work and that means they get stumped or uninspired and that has to be ok. In my experience it’s hard for creative workers to admit to being out of ideas and needing help. This is a culture problem, not an individual problem.
Preference and Inequity
Systemic oppressions like racism, sexism, classism and ablism to name a few are hiding out in all of our institutions. It takes a lot of attention, intention, and work to create equity. There are two ways that have a creative dominant culture in an agency works against equity.
The first way is that oppressive systems favor upper class white men. Those guys can be really great and really talented and deserving of a big creative life. I love those guys, but they are disproportionately given access to just about any professional space including creative spaces. I have worked in agencies for a very long time and I have experienced three female creative directors and I gave tow of them that title. Check out the 3% movement. I have worked with a small few non-white creative directors, but they were all men. This is not a research paper, just a blog about what I observe. That said, If our hiring trends on creative teams minor observable hiring trends from most professional industries, we are prone to hiring a privileged class of person and then putting them in a privileged space in our organization. This will not create more equity.
The second way that having an elevated creative as a favored class in the agency defeats our DEIB efforts is that it becomes an exercise in practicing inequity. If we are going to practice equity, we have to begin deconstructing privileged spaces and stop practicing inequity. If we place the creative team on a pedestal, we are (perhaps accidentally) upholding a model of inequity and that will prevent a culture of equity from thriving.
Let me try and create a picture of what I am talking about. Creative teams sometimes get nicer spaces with cool comfortable furniture, they get better computers, they might have access to longer breaks so that they can think. Y’all have seen this right? But what if everyone had inspiring spaces with nice furniture? What if we all had nice computers? What if everyone had a supervisor that understood that non-productive time is sometimes very productive?
Practicing balance, striving for equity, respecting creativity of the whole work community and providing structure to creative teams will always produce the best work.