A company’s greatest assets are its employees. So, in order to build a successful company, employers must invest in their employees. Nurture your team’s talent, contribute to the company’s goals, and always look to elevate and grow your organization. These are a few of the basics to implement in order to build a happy, creative, and successful company.
These larger principles can be applied to specific teams throughout the company for more strategic growth. A report by Wrike, explores how internal creative agencies can become more strategic and work better with the entire organization to deliver world-class creative. These five tips will set your team up for creative success.
Evaluate attitude
Optimism is just as important as any other skills. Although creative talent is important (and a lot of the time required), a positive attitude is equally and often times even more valuable.
Find a good mix of creativity and optimism — this will keep them humble enough to get through the day-to-day mundane tasks like updating banners and writing ads, but creative enough to bring life to the brand.
Manage expectations
One of the main problems in retaining talent is not giving recruits an accurate representation of what the average day-to-day will be like. For creative positions, set expectations for new employees by looking at what’s in the pipeline and what specific projects they will be working on.
You should also manage expectations of the team by internalizing the larger business objectives. This is critical and should be kept at the center of your creative strategy. This means that you should have a clear understanding of how the creative impacts critical business objectives.
Develop your team
Wrike notes that 76 percent of internal creative leaders don’t have adequate time to develop their staff. This is problematic as developing and properly training new employees is vital to their success and to the overall success of the team and company. Find the time to develop new employees.
Another way to elevate your team, is to get creatives thinking like managers. The report suggests promoting potential leaders to manage smaller teams, shift work between team members, devote to strategy and leadership and make time to mentor.
Always automate
You can build more streamlined creative processes by automating when possible. This not only cuts the workload of your team, but it also secures the resources you need for growth.
Don’t know what to automate? Put your data to work for you. Use information about the clients, project pipelines, and more to identify automation opportunities. Tap into your team’s wisdom and keep end goals in mind. Clients will look to get involved and check up on progress.
Prepare for complexities
Prepare for growth in complexity and overall size of the team. Eventually your team will have to collaborate with outside freelancers and agencies to build more dynamic campaigns. Be prepared to address the challenges of working across geographic barriers and with remote employees. Consider hiring freelancers and remote workers to establish workflows to ensure success. Consider adopting a collaboration tool to make this transition smooth.
To build a world-class creative team, it is as important to invest in leadership as the creative talent that walks through the door. Follow these steps to set your creative team up for world-class success, and always remember to track your work and measure your team’s progress along the way.