Leading any team effectively is a challenge. And managing creative teams well is a different ball game altogether.
Between cross-team collaborations, developing assets, getting buy-in, implementing feedback, and more, creative employees often have the work cut out for them.
They work at the intersection of strategy and creativity to plan, design, develop, and execute marketing and branding initiatives one after another. Naturally, they must constantly push the boundaries of creativity while facing the pressure to innovate.
It’s never an easy day at work for the creatives!
So, how do you support them to stay inspired and do their best work? How do you manage expectations while letting creativity thrive?
Whether you’re leading an in-house team of creatives or providing creative services to multiple clients, the following suggestions, tips, and templates can help you manage creative teams better.
Structuring and Leading Creative Teams
A creative team is only as good as the synergy between its members. To ensure you’re setting up your team for success, follow the steps below.
1. Identify what roles to hire
When deciding what roles to hire, consider immediate business needs and skill gaps among the current teammates.
If you’re a small team, it’s best to go for generalists who can wear multiple hats. You can start hiring specialists when you start to scale.
The ideal structure for a creative team will include the following roles:
- Project Manager/Team Manager: Overlooks execution of projects, streamlines creative operations, and boosts employee performance through feedback
- Strategist: Researches and executes marketing and advertising campaigns aligned to the needs of the target audience
- Copywriter: Creates clear and on-brand content for different types of media and marketing channels
- Graphic designer: Turns ideas into appealing visual concepts , or protocols, you unknowingly create friction points.
By offering flexibility in how your creative team approaches work and letting your team members take charge through self-management, you can cultivate a culture of accountability, collaboration, and mutual trust.
Common Mistakes While Managing Creative Teams
Despite your best efforts to align your team members and keep creative operations running smoothly, you may still make some common mistakes.
What are they, and how can you avoid them? Let’s find out.
Mistake 1: Not giving constructive criticism
When a piece of feedback is opinionated, negative, lacks specificity, and doesn’t provide enough reasoning for the identified weakness, it’s not constructive. For instance, a critique like, “I don’t think the introduction is good.”
Such a comment may seem harsh and undermine the individual’s abilities. Moreover, if such a practice persists unchecked over time, it can severely dampen your team’s morale and stifle independent, creative thinking.
Constructive criticism, however, will shed light on the creative work’s positives and negatives. For each concern raised, it will offer clear explanations and improvement suggestions, delivered with empathy and understanding.
For instance, “Since the audience is K–12 students, we should use simpler words in the introduction. Please rework accordingly.” is better feedback since it’s clear and actionable.
Improvement areas:
- Listen to the team members’ perspectives first: Let them explain their approach, thinking, and process behind the creative output. This can help you better understand the gaps in their understanding before offering feedback
- Be direct without being hurtful: Stay objective and prescriptive when addressing the mistakes they’ve made. Point out what works and what doesn’t while suggesting actionable steps
- Consistently explain your thinking: When offering criticism, provide logical reasons and justifications for every comment you make. Additionally, ensure these justifications connect to issues with audience understanding or project needs
Mistake 2: Not offering clear and detailed creative briefs
According to Lytho’s 2023 Creative Operations Report ) , 94% of stakeholders say they clearly communicate their creative requests. However, only 69% of creatives agree that they do. This apparent disconnect and mismatch in understanding is not as obvious as in the case of creative briefs.
Creative briefs that lack clarity or details can cause unnecessary project delays, strain working relationships, cost resources, and leave you with a very unhappy team of creatives.
In contrast, you also don’t want the brief to be too restrictive with strict guidelines. Stress key details like brand messaging and tone, but leave some room for creativity.
The key here is balance.
Improvement areas:
- Ensure the brief covers project objectives, intended audience, timelines, and metrics in detail: It should have complete information about the project for creatives to get started quickly
- Templatize the brief creation process: Doing so ensures all details are provided to the team quickly and in a streamlined manner. Just fill out the project details in the creative brief template is a great resource to get the job done fast.
Use the ClickUp Creative Project Plan Template to outline tasks for your creative projects efficiently
You can use it to quickly and efficiently create timelines, establish deliverables, and assign and monitor task progress for your creative work—all in one place.
Since creatives are often burdened, they can use this template to break projects into smaller tasks and prioritize the important ones.
Inaccurate analysis of the quantity of creative work needed
You shouldn’t judge the productivity of a creative team based on the volume of work they produce, as different creative projects have different needs and challenges.
You’ll underestimate project timelines if you try to standardize the creative process excessively to increase output volume. This often causes frustration and lowers productivity.
Effective Techniques for Managing Creative Teams
Now that you know the common problems creative teams face, let’s look at creative techniques to combat them and lead creative teams better.
Provide continuous feedback
What exactly is continuous feedback? It’s the practice of sharing constructive and constant feedback through formal and informal conversations between the project managers and team members.
Hence, instead of waiting months to schedule performance review calls, start giving feedback now.
You can make regular check-ins and informal conversations a part of the feedback process to address various topics, including work expectations, employee performance, and more.
Give feedback regularly using the ClickUp Chat view
Wouldn’t having a chat feature on the same platform as your document be nice? ClickUp Chat view can help. While reviewing a file, you can quickly message your employee about what works well and where you suggest improvement.
This gives everyone context and saves time instead of drafting a formal email.
Here are a few team collaboration features of the ClickUp Chat view.
- Centralized team communication: Bring all team communication together in one place. Share updates, link resources, and collaborate seamlessly without switching between different platforms
- Real-time collaboration: Keep your team on track with real-time chat channels. Mention team members directly with @mentions and assign action items will help you document those standards. Use Docs to add or create samples and share access with relevant employees. Its real-time collaboration feature also enables your teammates to add content or inputs as well.
With ClickUp Docs, you can effortlessly manage all your documents and work processes in one convenient location as follows:
- Tailor your documents to suit any project with nested pages and various styling options. From embedding bookmarks to adding tables, you can format your documents to meet the specific needs of your team, whether you’re outlining roadmaps or building knowledge bases
- Collaborate with your team in real-time, editing documents together and tagging colleagues with comments. Assign action items directly within the document and convert text into trackable tasks to ensure nothing falls through the cracks
- Link your documents directly to your workflow, ensuring seamless access to all related tasks and updates. With customizable widgets, you can update project statuses, assign tasks, and more—all without leaving the document editor
- Keep your work organized by categorizing documents for easy access and searchability. Whether it’s important resources or company wikis, you can place them anywhere within your workspace for quick reference
- Ensure the security of your documents with customizable privacy and edit controls. Create shareable links and manage permissions to control access levels for your team, guests, or the public. With ClickUp, you can confidently share your work while controlling who can view and edit your documents
With the above features, you don’t have to resort to plain, boring documents. Keep it interesting for your creative team members!
Further, highlight how you’re meeting and raising the agreed-upon standards as a regular practice. This will provide a healthy challenge for your employees and facilitate a culture of lateral thinking while ensuring efficient collaborative work.
Encourage collaboration within the team
Managing creative teams goes beyond meeting deadlines. As the leader, you should promote team collaboration to create a highly productive team.
When a team engages in open and meaningful dialogue to bounce new ideas off their teammates, irrespective of hierarchical or departmental boundaries, they often produce their best work.
To build such a team, start by grounding the ideas of collaborative relationships into team philosophy by rewarding teamwork.
Secondly, instead of being dismissive, invite and encourage diverse ideas and perspectives so your teammates can contribute without fear of criticism.
Rethink project management with ClickUp
Tools are to creative teams what cleats are to soccer players. You can play the game without them, but not with the same efficiency.
You don’t want your creatives to waste time looking through Slack and email threads to find instructions or feedback instead of doing the actual work. As the project team manager, it’s your responsibility to supply your team members with the right set of tools to streamline project management and enhance the creative process.
Have one place to plan all your work and manage teams with ClickUp’s Creative Agency Project Management Software
Whether you’re serving multiple clients as an agency or handling projects across teams in-house, ClickUp’s Creative Agency Project Management software can help you organize projects in one place.
It provides a customizable workspace where your team can manage tasks and projects with simple drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy for you to figure out which resource should go to which client.
You can also visualize the project progress to catch bottlenecks and manage resources well. ClickUp lets you visualize your task flows through 15+ customizable views, such as Gantt charts and Kanban boards.
Use ClickUp Whiteboards to visualize and break down creative projects into manageable workflows
If you’re working extensively with designers, ClickUp’s Design Project Management Software is one you should consider.
It’s a tool purposefully built to meet the needs of creative teams across roles. For example, track employees’ workload to see if anyone is overworked or underutilized and manage resources accordingly.
Empower your creative team to achieve peak performance and deliver exceptional work using ClickUp’s Design Project Management software:
- Seamlessly coordinate the planning, creation, and presentation phases within a single platform
- Visualize project timelines, track progress, and foster teamwork dynamics
- Efficiently streamline creative production processes and workflow management
- Accelerate collaboration and feedback loops to expedite project completion and improve outcomes
When brainstorming, use ClickUp’s AI Writer for Work to create design personas and user stories. This will help speed up the process and give you new ideas, which you can modify based on your needs.
Use ClickUp Whiteboards to visualize and break down creative projects into manageable workflows
Moreover, with ClickUp Whiteboards , you can help your team collaborate and visualize creative projects in real time. Your teammates can use the canvas to create roadmaps, add notes, or link to tasks, files, and more for additional context.
- Brainstorm collectively, jot down notes, and amalgamate innovative ideas
- Seamlessly convert ideas generated on Whiteboards into actionable ClickUp tasks. Enhance task clarity by associating them with relevant context such as files, documents, etc.
- Equip yourself with an array of creative instruments—from freehand drawing to shapes and notes. Connect your ideas to ongoing projects within your team’s workflow
What more can a creative team ask for?
Effectively Manage Creative Teams with ClickUp
Managing creative teams is half art and half science.
It takes a mix of leadership skills and the right technology to bring together a team of creatives and produce quality work. The job isn’t easy, as creative teams can face a diverse set of challenges.
As a creative team manager, you can ensure your team operations flow smoothly, and everyone stays at the top of their game. Start managing your design projects and your marketing and advertising materials using ClickUp. It’s an all-in-one productivity platform with all the flexibility your creative team will love. Sign up for ClickUp here and get started for free!
Common FAQs
1. How do you manage a team of creatives?
To effectively manage a team of creatives, you should encourage independent thinking and collaboration, enable open communication, provide constant feedback, and invest in project management software to streamline operations.
2. How do you structure a creative team?
When structuring a creative team, you should consider the size of the organization, the requirements of the projects at hand, and the skill gap in the current set of employees.
3. What is the role of a creative team?
A creative team brings together individuals from creative disciplines like copywriting and graphic designing to ideate, plan, and execute marketing and advertising campaigns for a company.