Five Trends Every Creative Leader Should Follow in 2023

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December 5, 2022 Brand Leadership Business Growth Career Growth Creative Agency Design Leadership Strategy

Creative leadership is having a moment.

It’s clear that business has turned a corner. For a brand to survive and thrive today, it has to provide exceptional customer experiences — and this is where creative shines. Drawing on their training in understanding customers, creative teams and leaders make CX and UI happen by creating opportunities for people to connect with a brand for the long haul. This is the new power of creative, and it’s the new way of business.

This special episode of Real Creative Leadership is a session host Adam Morgan presented at Adobe MAX 2022. As a popular virtual session at the conference, we’re excited to share it with you here, including Adam’s timely insights on how creative leaders can seize this marketplace tipping point and give creative its very important seat at the business leadership table.

Please join us.

mentioned in this show:

Adam Morgan

Creative Leader and RCL Host

The Stoke Group

Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency

Transcript

Adam Morgan:

Hello, I’m Adam Morgan, Executive Creative Director at Adobe, and I’m here to talk to you about the five trends that every creative leader needs to follow for 2023. You may be wondering, why does Adam know the five trends? Well, let me give you a little bit of context. So for the last three years, I’ve been the host of a show called Real Creative Leadership, and the premise of Real Creative Leadership is that we have so many websites and shows out there that talk about the craft of creativity, how to design better, how to write better, how to make better videos. But there’s very little out there in terms of how do I become a better leader? And creative leadership is a completely different thing than the craft and just the hard skills. It’s more focused on the soft skills. So we created the show and the format is that sometimes we’ll have individual learning settings, and other times I’ll bring on guests on the show.

And these are creative leaders from around the world in the top companies of the world. So we’ve got people from Disney or from Google or from Apple or Meta, and we bring all those creative leaders in and talk about the trends, talk about the things that are happening. They talk about how they help scale teams, how they help learn and grow their creative leaders. They talk about how they can improve the quality of the content for their business. So through all of these different conversations that we’ve had on the show, we’ve kind of gathered a few trends that we see as important things that can help you grow your team and your career.

Now, before we get into these five trends, I want to give you a little context because we really are in a new era of creativity. Ten years ago, it was all about data and people were just saying, “Oh, we don’t need creativity. We don’t need all that fluffy stuff because we’ve got the data, we’ve got the science behind it. We can figure it out.” But a while ago, the Design-Led movement actually opened the door for businesses to understand there really is value in design. And now today we are in the middle of the Experience Era where if businesses want to thrive and grow, the way they’re going to do that is by creating amazing customer experiences. It’s no longer about just a better product or better operations. It’s really about that customer experience. And who better to help with those customer experiences than creative leaders? Because we understand customers, we step into their shoes. We walk into their experiences, and we create emotional and connected experiences because we’ve trained ourselves to do that. And so we are in this new opportunity, this new moment where we really can bring more to the table as creative leaders, and there’s a chance for us to bring 10x thinking and to make a bigger dent in business around creative leadership.

Trend One: Find Your Voice and Vision

So let’s get into these five trends. First of all, four of them are trends. And one of them isn’t so much a trend, but it’s one of those things you just need to do. So let’s start with that one. So the first trend is you need to find your voice and your vision. There’s a lot of talk these days as we’re coming out of this pandemic and people are returning to the office. It’s been this whole balance between extroverts and introverts. It’s like before, all the extroverts loved it and the introverts hated to go to the office. And now it’s been the opposite, where the introverts are loving working from home and the extroverts are struggling. Regardless of what you are, I think there’s just an opportunity for us to really find out, no matter who we are, how do we find our voice? I think that’s an essential part of being a creative leader. So go out there and figure out what do you stand for? What do you care about? What are the things that are important to you? And really, really focus on those things.

The second part is finding your vision. So something we’re doing right now at Adobe is we’ve had a couple on-sites where we’ve brought together the different creative leaders and we’re really focused on what is our vision for next year? We’re talking about setting up a team declaration of what do we make, who do we work with, how do we collaborate, how do we get all these things done? What’s really important to our team? And even though you may have done some of this work in the past, maybe you have a vision statement, maybe you have a mission statement, it’s really important to do it again because as the saying goes, What got you here today won’t get you to tomorrow. So as part of being a great creative leader, it’s really about assessing the situation, saying, “What are the needs for my team, my company, for me today? And how are we going to get there?” And really making a plan, goals, programs, platforms, whatever you’re going to work through, just make sure you spend the time to get it done. Okay, that was trend one, finding your voice and vision.

Trend Two: Own the Agency Relationship

Trend two is to own the agency relationship. So traditionally you’ll have your creative team and they’ll report up through to the marketing director. And the marketing director, or the CMO, they’ll have the run of the whole marketing organization. And one of those elements is a relationship with your outside agency or vendors or other groups that you work with. The trend that I’m seeing right now is that the creative leader needs to own that relationship with the agency. Here are some of the reasons why.

In the past, the issue has been that sometimes the in-house group and the agency are pitted against each other. It’s like a competition where, “Oh, we’ll see what the agency does and then we’ll see what you guys internally do.” And that’s a really, really bad situation. It doesn’t foster great creativity, it just fosters bad feelings. But more importantly than that, I think what creative leaders need to do is own the execution of the brand. Not just be there if there are certain tickets that come in or certain projects you need to do, but it’s really that you need to own the entire execution of the brand, the expression of the brand. That’s the creative output. How do we express all of these campaigns, ideas and programs in light of what our brand stands for? So if you can work and push to own that expression of the brand, the outward facing execution of the brand, then it’s only natural that you also own that relationship with the agencies.

Now another benefit is that when you do own that relationship, suddenly the agency becomes an extension of your creative team. And moreover, you’re all on the same page. You speak the same language, you can communicate better together because you’re doing the same work. That way it’s just together, the agency and in-house agency team own the expression of the creative and work together as an extension of each other. It’s an important thing to do. And not all companies have it that way, but many are trending that way. So that’s a big trend. Own that relationship and own the execution of the brand. All right, so that’s trend two, own the agency relationship.

Trend Three: Change the Org Structure

Now, trend three actually goes right along with trend two, and that’s the idea of changing the org structure. Now, I mentioned a little bit earlier how there was an old model, and that old model was the marketing director was on top and you had strategy and planning, and then the creative team and agency relationships, all of it was under one umbrella. But this trend I’ve seen in many companies, and I’m actually seeing positive change. The way it works is instead of having that structure, this is where you’re going to have the marketing director as a peer to the creative director.

Now the marketing director still owns strategy and plans and metrics and brand strategy and operations, but the creative director will own the creative execution, which basically, like I talked about before, the execution of the brand. They’re going to own the voice and style, how to express the brand, the pictures, the images, the words. They’re going to have the relationship with the agency partners, and they’re going to bring in creative strategy. And what’s creative strategy? Creative strategy is where you’re looking at problems in creative ways and looking at ways to solve marketing problems through creative strategy. Now, this structure is really important because it brings all the strengths of the creative people to the table and all the strengths of the marketers to the table and have them work as strategic partners.

Rather than one working underneath the other and being obliged to follow their plans, they’re going to be partners and work together to create a better experience so that the marketers can figure out who we’re going after, what’s the data, what are the plans, what are the goals, what are all those things? And I actually went out and got a master’s degree in integrated marketing strategy. And I know that’s what they’re taught really well is to do all of that integrated marketing stuff. But they don’t learn how to create great creative, because creative people have trained themselves their whole careers to empathize, to understand the customer, put themselves in their shoes, find emotion, and really draw that out in great experiences. And they’re experts at that. So to bring these two together where the marketer figures out how we’re going to get this done, how we’re going to have a great plan strategy, and then the creative leader is going to come in and say, “Here’s how we’re going to do it, here’s how we’re going to execute it,” and then work together, that’s a better combination than doing this.

I’ll tell you honestly, in the companies where I’ve seen this happen, and it’s the way we work at Adobe, the marketers actually welcome it. They want that partnership. They want someone to come in and say, “Here’s how we’re going to handle that creatively, here’s how we’re going to execute on that.” And then they can worry about their other stuff because they haven’t been trained in all the same stuff as a creative leader. So that’s trend three. Try and go out there and see if you can adjust the structure. Change it so that you can be a better partner. And the truth is, it’s not going to be easy. You have to step up. You have to show your value. You have to show that you can lead and be a strategic partner with the marketer, otherwise, they’ll just treat you as just, “The creatives go back to the creative cave, and do their thing, and we’ll take care of the real marketing business.” So this is a huge opportunity for creative leaders to change that structure and that role so that you’re actually a peer to the marketing director.

Trend Four: Change the Way You Measure Creative Value

Now let’s move on to trend four, which is changing the way you measure creative value. Now, traditionally in the past, there’s kind of a progression here that I’ve seen over the years of how companies measure the value they get out of creative ideas and creative work. The first phase is all about time. And I did this for almost 20 years of my career, and that is, let’s use timesheets to show how much time they’re putting towards a project. That’ll show how much effort or how much value we’ve given to certain projects. The way we look for new resources. We’ll go back and look at time sheets and say, “Oh, we have too many people that are too high on time, so we need to get some more resources. Or we’ll say, “Oh, someone’s not working. Let’s use time to figure that out and make sure we can replace them.” There are so many problems with time sheets, and I wrote a huge, long, Medium article. If you want to go find it, you can read more about it. But the gist of it is it really demoralizes creatives. In fact, the title of that paper was Why Timesheets Are the Enemy of Creativity.

But there are better ways. And in fact, I’ve seen the same trend when we’ve acquired a few companies, and the way the creative team ran is they were always just measuring time, like input, input, input. And that’s the problem, is you’re measuring input instead of output, which leads me to the next phase of measuring outputs. This is a much better way of doing it. So instead of just measuring how much time and effort we’re putting into things, let’s measure what we actually did, right?

That’s what you want out of it. You want a video, you want a webpage, you want an email. Those are the artifacts of creativity that you want to use for your marketing efforts. So instead of measuring inputs, let’s measure outputs. Let’s measure projects, not people. Through any modern project management system, you can figure out all the right data to see and track how many different projects you’ve done over time. You can say, “Okay, this year we got this many projects of this type of project.” Maybe some projects are a lot more complex than others, and you can still rank the different types of projects against each other. So that’s a much better way of finding value. How many good things, artifacts did we get from the creative team this last year?

But there’s an even better level, and that is customer engagement. So instead of just measuring projects or time just the way we do in marketing to show value of marketing efforts and marketing campaigns, let’s attribute customer engagement back to our creative ideas. And we have all the tools to do this today. We could easily say, how much engagement from customers as far as on a webpage? We can do sales lift. We can figure out how much cost savings we have by certain creative content rather than other creative content. We can measure engagement, behavioral data. All these great things that we use for marketing, let’s use those to attribute it back to our creative craft. Then we can use that as the measure of how much value do we get from the creative department? It’s a much better tool, a much better, more modern way of looking at it without just saying, “Oh, we’re just going to treat the creative team as a group that just needs to clock in and out. We’re going to track their timesheets.” And instead we’re all lifting together. Again, back to that earlier trend of being partners, this is a great way to be partners. It’s just together with the marketer, figure out what the value is you bring to the company through all of your creative efforts.

Trend Five: The Creative Leader Maturity Model

Now we’re at trend five, the creative leader maturity model. Now I’m about to show you a little bit of an eye chart, and so just take some time to get into it. And again, as always, with all of these trends and topics, if you want to dig in deeper, you can go check out a Real Creative Leadership episode on this. I know I’m just blazing through five of these in 20 minutes, but the creative leadership maturity model is really important. So a few notes before you look at it is number one, this is not based on title. So it’s not a matter of if you’re the ECD or the Chief Creative Officer that this only applies to you. It applies to anyone in the creative department. It’s really about assessing where you are on this maturity level and where you need to go. And it’s a great tool for both individual careers and team careers. So let’s dig into it.

There are five phases in this creative leadership maturity model. And again, this is based off just experience of me seeing different creative teams, creative leaders, what we talk about. But usually, where it starts out is level one is all about the creative work. It’s all about guiding and inspiring great work. You’re focusing on managing yourself. It’s all about your vision, and you’re really focused on yourself. Early on in most people’s careers, this is important. It’s all about the craft, right? You want to get better, you want to make great creative ideas come to life. That’s what Phase One is all about.

Phase Two is the creative team. And usually as someone who moves up to be an ACD or a creative director, they’re all about inspiring their team and focusing on the systems. We got to get organized, we got to make sure that our files are all saved the same way. Or back in the day, it was figuring out your fonts and how do we make sure that we’re all using the same ones? This is about having a vision for your creative department and managing down. Most creative leaders land in this phase.

The next is Phase Three, which is all about a creative vision. And this is about moving beyond just your team. It’s about inspiring the company leadership, especially the marketing and sales leaders. You’re skilled at selling the work. So it’s not just helping your team down, but you’re pitching to the CEO or the CMO, or really trying to elevate the craft and make sure you build this great environment for creative teams to thrive. And you’re focusing mostly on managing up. You want to get leadership to understand the value of creativity, and you’re really, really pushing all those creative ideas and selling that up.

The next phase is all about creating a creative company. And this is where you’re not just inspiring leadership or your own team, but you’re inspiring the whole company and you’re really building broadly an environment that helps creativity thrive. You’re working with peers on the side. You’re working with finance. You’re working with operations, and you’re really trying to create this structure where creativity has an opportunity to grow, and people believe in creativity across the board. It’s not just leadership. So you’re really trying to make creativity a differentiator for all your products and services. It becomes something you sell. In this one, I’ve talked about earlier, you had a vision for your creative department and then for your creative strategy, now you have a vision for marketing strategy. You’re really trying to say, “Here’s the big story that we’re trying to tell the world, and we’re focusing on managing sideways and building this momentum across the company.”

And finally, the last part of the maturity model is the creative industry. This is where you move beyond your business. You’re guiding and inspiring businesses and leaders outside of your organization. Just like today, at a thing like MAX, you’re going out there and learning and growing and trying to figure out the vision of how you can make a better world. You want to become a trusted voice in creativity. You’re focused on building all these skills for everyone and in the whole world. And it’s really that 10x thinking of how we can help creativity make a bigger impact on business. In this phase, what you need to learn how to speak is business strategy. You can’t just talk creativity. You can’t just talk about pixels and kerning and action verbs and all those things. You really have to understand what is business value, how am I creating businesses that really thrive under creativity? And you’re focusing on managing out as much as everything else.

So those are the five levels of creative maturity on the creative leadership maturity model. And what’s the value of this? Well, first of all, again, I said this has nothing to do with your role or your title. It’s a matter of just what you’re thinking about. And here’s another truth. You’re not always just at one level. You may move down and up. One day I may be living at a two and the next day I’m working on a four, and that’s okay. But the beauty of this is you can go back and look and say, “Okay, where am I growing in my career as a creative leader?” If I’m just focusing on the craft, I’m only sticking around that level one. And if I need to move and start building alliances and working with people across from me, across the aisle, I need to really start thinking about money and finances and how creativity impacts that. I need to start thinking about how do I speak marketing and work with other leaders. And it’s really a good guide to help you kind of make new goals every year and grow and mature in your creative leadership.

It’s also a great tool to help your team. For example, if you have someone come in on a one-on-one, one of your leaders, and they’re talking all about just the things that are living at a level one or a two, you know there’s an opportunity to help push them towards, all right, how are you helping sell this up to the top of the organization? Or how are you working with peers? Just help guide them in ways that they can become a better creative leader.

Now, I know that was a lot to take in. Again, you can go back later and look at it, or look at an episode on Real Creative Leadership and get more depth on this and all of these trends that I’m talking about today. But the important thing here is just that there are things that we can look out for as creative leaders. We can start to understand how do we create better vision? How do we change structure so that creativity has a better opportunity? How do we improve ourselves and our own team and our own careers in order to mature and become better at being a creative leader? Because being a creative leader is more than just becoming a creative director. It’s more than just being great at creative and being a great designer or writer or videographer. It’s really about leadership. And a saying that I use all the time on the show is, you have to read the lead. And this is kind of a way of reading, right? It’s a way of learning. You’re just going to need to always be a student looking for ways to become a better leader so that you can make a bigger impact on your team and your company.

I hope learning about these trends has helped because the whole point of me coming here today is just to give you a taste of different ways that you can learn and become a better creative leader. Because that’s one of the big important goals of Real Creative Leadership, is to create a group, a community, a way for all of us to learn together and grow and learn more about creative leadership so that eventually we can make a bigger dent in the business world through creativity. We can use 10x thinking to find new ways and new opportunities to bring better and more creative ideas to the table.

If you found this helpful, I encourage you to go to realcreativeleadership.com and sign up for our newsletter. It’s a great opportunity for you to stay up on the latest trends. And whenever we have new episodes that come out, you’ll be the first to know. I also want to thank The Stoke Group. They’re the ones who help produce the show. And if you ever need help creating great content or business strategy, go to thestokegroup.com. Thanks for listening.

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