to the Herding Tigers podcast. My name is Todd Henry. I am the author of the Rainbow Herding Tigers, be the leader that creative people need. And then should we talk about some of the unique dynamics of leading creative works and the challenges of being a creative leader and how we can position our team to have the time, the resources, the focus that they need to be able to deliver great work in the create on demand work.
Because listen, we do exist in a create on demand world. We have to go to work, deliver results by a certain time, under certain budget, in order to please our clients or our organization. Those are some pretty difficult things to accomplish on a consistent basis, especially when you have to do it over and over and over again. And often the reward for accomplishing a big project is, hey, here's another project.
So on this show, we're going to talk about some of those dynamics. What we can do is leaders to position our team to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy all at the same time. If you want to know more about Herding Tigers, the book, you can visit herdingtigers.net. Now you can download the first couple of chapters, as well as see a video that kind of explains some of the unique dynamics involved in leading creative people.
On today's show, we have Back With Us Ricardo Crespo. Many of you know Ricardo Ricardo Ricardo, as former global creative chief at 20 Century Fox, Mattel, many other organizations. And he's going to talk with us today about how we protect our team, protect their resources, their focus, and all the things that they need to have in order to be able to deliver consistently great creative work. I think you're going to enjoy it.
I am here with the brilliant, the energetic, the world famous. Let's just call you the world famous, Ricardo Crespo. Ricardo, welcome back to the Creator Podcast. Thank you, Todd.
Would you mind recording that again on my outgoing voice and also when my mother calls you here, is that? I would really, really appreciate that. All right, so as you know, Ricardo, we've been asking people to submit questions to ask us some things that are asking us about some things they're struggling with as leaders of creative teams. And one of the most common questions that we received is how do you protect your team?
Okay, let me contextualize this a little bit. Let's say that you're leading a group of people you've been working on a long arc project over the course of many weeks or maybe even months. And then your manager comes in after the weekend and says, you know, I've been thinking about that project that we made decisions on a month ago. And I would like to take it in a completely different direction, right?
Or your manager comes in on a regular basis and continues to pile little projects or little bits of work onto your team that you know are largely unnecessary, that these aren't really terribly urgent things. But because the manager thinks it's important to them, it becomes important to the entire team. And so it becomes a fire drill every single time the manager comes in and asks for something. And your team is already obviously working at a pretty high capacity.
How do you as a leader, how do you play the role of protector of freedom fighter for your team so that you're A, able to satisfy the demands of the organization? But B, also protect your team to do its most important and valuable work. Do you have any thoughts on that? Sure, sure, yeah.
And that hits home very, very closely in that. One of the things I'll say right off the bat, Todd, and those attributes that you talked about is, whether or not use the word protect, the way that I would interpret that is, protecting your team is allowing them to be prolific, allowing them to flourish in what they do, right? The thing that was very, very intimate and resonating with me was working in these large organizations when I shifted to the client side was, there was this, there was always this opportunity where, and forgive me, I'm just gonna be very candid here. I call it Segal Management, Todd, have you heard of this phrase?
And if you haven't steeled it, so forgive me. The paraphrase here is that Segal Management was, people would come in that may have had higher titles in you or your peers, but because they were unknowingly commenting on things without full context, they would come in and what I call Segal Management, where much like a Segal, they would fly in shit on everything and then fly away. And that's it, right? And so I was observing this and I was looking in the mirror going, geez, am I a Segal Manager?
Am I doing this to my team? Am I coming in and saying to do this and all this intendance later walking back into the studio and saying, no, no, drop it, you're doing this now. To me, the way that I want to avoid being a Segal Manager, as well as being able to manage it so that you are mitigating it and avoiding the development of Segal Managers within your structure is exactly that word structure, is to find ways to implement structure that allows a sense of formality so that creative is developed and the way that I would do that is to understand what I call a North Star, Todd, which is as you develop as a leader, you've come up as a creative yourself and now you're holding a leadership role. So you need to shift and be aware of this concept of the creative business, which is the hard skills, the design, the layout, the writing, the editing, everything that is in the craft of design and creativity.
Those are the hard skills. That's what I call the creative business and as you nurture as a leader, shift very seamlessly, very discreetly into the business of creative. And this is leadership. This is the management of processes, this is the management of communications.
This is very literally the applied ability. In order to manage expectations, you need to set them. So it's a very simple concept. In order to manage expectations, you need to set them.
So set the expectations with your team about a process, a workflow, a paradigm of how we flourish as a creative team and then set the expectations and how you communicate with people outside of the creative group so that they're not going around you to go to their favorite designer or they're not going around you as creative leader. They're going to you because they understand that your role is to optimize and enable everything that needs to be done to their objective. So that's what, yeah, that's right. Well, I was gonna say that's one of the challenges, right?
Is that you have to help your own manager, your own leadership understand that they're not helping, that they're actually inhibiting. They think that they're going around you or that they're doing something that's gonna make things better or get results faster. But they don't realize is they're actually harming your team's ability to produce the exact results that they're hoping to go for, right? By going around you that the process has to be honored.
If the process isn't honored, then they will lose the team's trust, you will lose the team's trust. And over the course of time, the team will just take a wait and see approach. They'll just wait until whoever comes in screaming the loudest with the most urgency is gonna get their work done. But until somebody comes in and screams at me to get something done, I'm just gonna wait until somebody tells me what to do.
Because I know that the game's gonna shift in a week anyway. So why should I put a lot of time, conceptual effort, all of that into doing work that I know is just gonna change because somebody doesn't come to me and tell me it has to be different. So I'm just gonna wait until we're absolutely short on time and somebody comes to me with urgency and tells me what to do. And unfortunately, a lot of organizations create this culture where there are so many shifts, there's a lack of accountability, there's a lack of willingness to make dangerous critical decisions at the right time, when there's political capital to be lost.
So people don't make decisions until they have to make a decision. And by that point, everything is urgent. And the team is trying to scramble to get things done. And so as a leader, to your point, I think part of that, driving the process, part of that is making sure that people understand here are the key decision points in the process.
Here is when we're gonna make the decision, here are the ramifications of that decision. Here's the accountability for that decision. And then we're gonna honor that process and we're not gonna go back and relitigate every decision we make along the way. Because if we do that, we're just gonna create chaos within the organization.
Absolutely. And to your point, look, I'm gonna be real, we can't sugarcoat any of this. And I know it's gonna resonate with people listening. Everything is urgent.
Everything. Everyone's definition of urgency, it may be different, but when they use the word, they mean the same thing. And so to me, Todd, what's interesting about, let's just use hypothetically that one of many multiple scenarios but that one scenario as a leader where people are well-intended but inadvertently going around you because they feel like they can get things done quicker. To me, that is a direct symptom of the fact that, well, they feel like they're more productive without you, so they're gonna go around you.
Or they don't trust your ability to lead, so they're gonna go right there. And then what happens is unconsciously, or maybe consciously, that person coming into that studio, or that room with the bigger title, just drops the title before they make a request. And they lead with that. And what happens is if you can see that very first, second, third time, you've essentially created a precedent within your organization as order-takers, right?
You're not there to take orders. You're there to understand what the objectives are and then help prioritize what is the right objective, what needs to be done first, and how do I rally the team that's surrounding me to get to your objective, right? So avoid every, about every instinct to concede because you don't wanna rock the boat. You have an expertise that this client, whether internal, internal, does not have, and that's why they're coming to you.
But if you're not able to effectively communicate your value versus you're just responding every single time with, you want us to jump high, then what you're doing, you're setting a precedent for that relationship that you're gonna perpetuate that. But if you say, I understand that's urgent, let me go back to the team and let's, we'll get back to you as soon as we can, and give us an hour and we'll give you a plan on how we'll help you achieve that. That is a great leadership answer. Okay, so the community solution, without actually doing it right away and compromising other projects in the pipeline.
So let's talk about how to have that conversation then, because I think it would serve the people listening to get really tactical about that conversation. You've got somebody with more organizational leverage than you have, somebody who, maybe you, somebody you report to, somebody who holds the loaded gun, they can hire and fire, they can make your life miserable if they want. How do you have that conversation? What kinds of things do you say to your manager to create that space so that your team isn't always feeling the pressure of just one more thing?
Just one more thing, let's just change one more thing. I love it, I'm gonna give you a top secret, and everyone should steal this idea because it worked for us. That very scenario you described, Tom. When I was in this organization and we led a team of 60 people around the world, I got a little creative and I was inspired by traveling home one day from a flight from Europe and I looked at the arrivals in the departures board and I realized how this board was flashing the most urgent things about a flight change of flight delay and the concept of an arrivals board was what I adapted creatively to apply in our system.
And so if you can picture on your mind's eye, the arrivals board was something that I put as a hierarchical cue, an urgency. And there was never any more than 10 things on that board across my team of 60. There was always 70 things being asked for, but what we did was retry-age ahead of time to be able to say, these are the top 10 things that need to have happen here because we understand the nuances and then to your point, when somebody comes in and well-intended, but is in effect, seagull managing, what we would do is I would say to that person, hey, Jim, do me a favor, you want your job higher on the pole than these guys and then these 10, what I'd love for you to do and I'm happy to help you connect is call Judy who's number two and call Bill who's number one and you guys decide which one of your projects gets pushed back. And that's what I would do, I was enable those people to discuss with one another, hey, Judy, I really need my job before yours.
So what I would do is I would lead the creative infrastructure without making a decision that said, oh, I like Judy today, I like Bob tomorrow. I would empower and I would enable the people who are the clients to say, you guys decide which one you wanna go down and you know what would happen 99% of the time, Todd? They would actually come back and go, okay, well then when can you get it done? But had I not prompted them to communicate with one another to decide because we're all the same company, which one of your projects is most urgent?
What would happen was most of the time they would never call the other colleague and say, well listen, my job's more important than yours. And then when they did do it, guess what? It was all above board, it was all strategic, no love loss and everyone was able to communicate effectively. Yes, I understand, yes, move your job back, move my job back and put yours in front on the tent.
And then we would get that phone call. And that's how we managed and mitigated no political favoritism, that's how we negated the idea like somebody has a higher title than the other. We used deadlines and strategy to be able to determine the triage list, that was the top 10. That's such valuable advice because I think often the leader, the leader allows everyone else in the organization to force the urgency upon them and to put them in the place where they have to make the difficult decisions instead of pushing those decisions back on the organization and saying, hey, I'm working with limited resources here.
I have a limited amount of time focused energy to spend against organizational priorities. You determine which are the most important because I have a finite amount of resource here to spend. So don't dump all of that on me. You decide amongst yourselves and then come back to me with your priority list and then we'll tell you what we're able to get done.
That is so valuable and it's so, I mean really on the face of it, it's so obvious but nobody does it, right? Because we feel the pressure, we adopt, we tend to absorb all of the dysfunctions of the organization upon ourselves. But that's only because we refuse to stand up and say, no, I'm gonna be the protector of my team. So therefore I need you to come to me with a clear set of priorities so that we can do the work that we're required to do.
Yeah, and then just to split here a bit, Todd, it was never the mindset that, okay, you three client, I'm gonna air quotes here, you three clients decide which is priority. It was never about turn around and go back and you figure it out. It was about let us in our process and we displayed the science of our process, our development workflow. We displayed that many, many months in advance where everyone was aware of it.
So then we were able to objectively point to something and say, look, I'm not making it up today. You're very familiar with this. So I wanna work with you with these three other internal clients to determine which is priority. But the benefit of all of that, Todd, is the consistent benefit.
There are three things that are happening. You are demonstrating an applied leadership up and around the organization and then you're applying a defined leadership to your team because what they're saying is, to your point, you're protecting me to do what I do. You're protecting me to flourish in my craft so that I'm not having a shift from two minutes of here to two minutes there. You're applying that leadership, you're showing that, you're being able to show communication and you're not doing it subjectively, you're not showing favoritism.
And then what you're actually doing is what I was alluding to earlier, you're seamlessly going from the creative business to the business of creative and you're using strategy and tact and diplomacy to be able to tell the organization, here's how we're gonna approach all of those projects. It's a wonderful, wonderful way that you demonstrate and you earn the rapport and eventual trust of colleagues below you, around you, above you, all of the above. And then- That's great. I think we have sufficiently answered this question.
So I think we probably can go ahead and wrap this up. But I think that's fantastic. And trust, I say this often, trust is the currency of creative work, right? If you don't trust your colleagues, you don't trust your leader, you don't trust your client, then it's gonna be really, really difficult to do great work because you can't have everything infused with uncertainty.
There has to be some stable ground and stable ground requires trust. And so what I love about the advice you just gave is that it is all about earning the trust with your team, with your superiors in the organization and also with your client or your stakeholders or whoever, it's all about earning trust by clearly communicating expectations and also clearly communicating what resources you do have available. You're telling your team, I'm not gonna use an abuse you for my own political gain by agreeing to work that I know that we don't have the capacity to do right now, which is a lot of leaders do. They sort of see their team as their personal machine to crank out work that is to their favor or their benefit politically within the organization, right?
So I love that your advice definitely does not do that. Sorry, I'm not know cause it's just back and forth. What's incredible what you just said, which is unfortunately very real is you will unfortunately come into organizations or be introduced to organizations where people have been putting to leadership roles who are not ready by virtue of the fact that they've served so many years or you're due now. And then what happens is when they're putting to leadership roles, creative leadership roles, where they're not yet have the applied ability to truly understand that, then they unintentionally or maybe intentionally are using their team to your point as their tool.
It's their toolbox and that's how you lose the rapport. You can't do that, you don't earn the trust. And also what I would trust that you said, trust is something that is so key. Once you earn it, you can't get comfortable with it.
You have to adopt mindset. Like I have to constantly nurture and continue this trust versus I've earned the trust now, I'm just gonna walk in the park and do that. That's right, I always tell people trust is, you people think of trust like a bank account, you make it deposit and you earn a little bit of trust over time and then you can make it withdrawal and that's okay, you still have some left. They say no, it's more like a water balloon, right?
You fill a water balloon and you can fill it as much as you want, but at any point, if you puncture that water balloon, all of the water is gonna flow out. And yeah, and that's kind of how trust is. If you compromise trust in a small way, it's gonna affect you in a big way. It's gonna take a long time to earn that trust back, no matter how small the breach.
So little things that you do, like you said, little things you do to communicate the value of your team and protect your team and go a long way toward ensuring you have the massive amount of trust you need when you're taking your team in an uncomfortable direction. So that's great. Ricardo, thanks so much for taking the time. This was awesome and we will see you on the next episode.
Thanks, Todd, talk soon. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you'd like to ask a question, you'd like us to address here on the show, you can send them to interact at accidentalcreative.com. We'll do our best to get around to it.
We'll give your question a lot of deep thought before we answer it. Also, if you wanna know more about Herding Tigers, just visit herdingtigars.net, there you can download the first two chapters, you can download a workbook and many more resources to help you as a leader of Creative Teams. Until then, be a leader who makes Echos. We'll see you next time.