The Secrets to Building a Winning Creative Team Structure

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December 21, 2023 Leadership Management Mentorship Team Management

Guest Speaker

Adam Morgan

Executive Brand and Creative Leader

Adam Morgan is an Executive Brand and Creative Leader named to AdWeek’s “Creative 100” — the top inspiring creative minds in marketing, media, and culture in the world. He’s the author of the book, Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business, Emotions Drives Business, which proves the value of creativity and design with hard science. He’s a keynote speaker at conferences and events on the topics of creative leadership and content creation.

Currently, Adam is the Senior Director of Brand and Creative at Splunk — leading brand strategy and campaigns as well as all creative content and design systems. You can learn more about his book and speaking topics at adamWmorgan.com.

Nurture an environment for your team to make the best creative possible.

Designing the ultimate creative team means knowing how to structure it — and that’s not always easy. Join Adam Morgan as he recaps his standing-room-only session from Adobe MAX 2023, with an inside look into how to design a creative team that sets both individuals and organizations up for ultimate success (and paves the way for true creative genius).

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Adam Morgan

Adam Morgan

Creative Leader and RCL Host

The Stoke Group

Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency

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REAL CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Season: 4

Episode: 9

Episode Title: The Secrets to Building a Winning Creative Team Structure

Guest Title: Adam Morgan, Executive Brand and Creative Leader

Hello and welcome to Real Creative Leadership. This is a really exciting episode. Today we’re going to talk about the secrets to building a creative team for the future. So why does org structure matter? How can it ladder up to business goals? How can the right structure create fulfilling experiences for creatives no matter the size of your team?

I had the opportunity to present this at Adobe Max recently, and today we’re going to dig deeper so I can share these insights with this community. For this presentation, I talked to creative leaders around the world, and in partnership with The Stoke Group, we also sent out a national survey to hundreds of creatives to better understand how creative teams structure themselves and how they value work. I think the results are pretty interesting and I hope you think so too. So join me. Let’s talk.

Just so you have a little bit of context of why I am speaking on this topic; so I have been leading teams for many, many, many years. You know, I started my career in the mid nineties. And by, you know, before 2000, I was, you know, a creative director of managing teams. So I’ve managed large teams of, you know, 50, 60 people, small teams of just a couple of people. And so I’ve really had a lot of good experience in both. Nineteen years in the agency world. And then also, you know, more than a decade in, in large brands. So I’m going to bring a little bit of my experience into this conversation, as well as the research that we got from a lot of the other creative leaders.

So at the end of the, to start out, at the end of the day, what do we want? We all want great work. I mean, you may be thinking, “Man, really? We’re going to be talking about org structure. I mean, that’s kind of geeky and not really that exciting and not really sizzle-licious.” And that’s totally understandable. But if you’ve listened to many of the presentations or the sessions we’ve had here on real creative leadership, you know, there are a lot of this, a lot of these topics such as org structure or learning to speak khaki or understanding, you know, relationships like they’re really important for creative leadership.

So it’s not just a “nice to have,” but this is really, really, really critical stuff. In fact, we went out and, and actually asked this question to a lot of creative leaders and they came back and said, “Yes!” Like, 85 percent of them feel that creative structure helps them create great work.

So it really is a critical and an important part of this, of this process. But before we get into it, so, cause I’m going to get into like actual art and, you know, just little diagrams of how you organize people. I want to just talk about a few high level things that are really important. First of all, I’m going to be talking generalities and mostly this is going to be around in-house org structure, but it also will apply to agency or your own company, whatever that may be.

It’s for all teams and all sizes. But the most important thing is like, before we get too deep into this, is that you really need to know your team and adapt all this information for you, you and your team. Cause not everything is going to be a silver bullet and it’s not going to be absolutely, you know, applicable in all senses to every team. So I just want you to understand that right at the start. So I’m, I do have that caveat.

Number two is knowing your business. You know, some businesses, cause I’ve talked with a lot of people. You know, after presentations or after the show of like, Oh, but my business has this problem and this problem and that. And it’s important to know that, yes, like, we all have different businesses. There are different business strategies and this may not work for everyone, but this is just some good knowledge that I’ve gained from all this research and just personally around, you know, how you can help your business. So understanding that is really important.

And finally, size matters. There are big teams. There are small teams. There are specialty teams. Obviously a lot of this information is not universal. So just keep that in mind as you’re, as you’re thinking about how this applies to your company.

All right. So why does this matter? Why do we, why do we care about organizational structure? If you stop and think about it, like it’s critical, it’s a critical component to building that environment where your team is set up to make the best creative possible. Just like your management style, like, your leadership style could change the way people feel safe or feel like they can shoot for the moon with big ideas. Like, it’s the same as, like, your environment. Like, are you, are you building that right environment where creative people feel like they can, they can, you know, just take off the handcuffs and really try anything. So we’re going to structure org structured matters for all of that.

Next is this idea that businesses constantly change. So you may say, okay, you know, we’ve got our organization figured out, lock it in and we’re good for a long time. And that’s not true at all. Um, in my experience as a creative leader, I feel like orgs are constantly moving. Let me give you a few examples. What happens if a consultant comes in and says, “Oh, you’re, you know, your span of control needs to change from managers. Instead of managing one or two people, they need to manage five and make a flat organization.” Suddenly you have to change things.

Or what if you acquire a new company and you have to integrate them into your team? That’s going to disrupt everything. Or maybe your marketing plans change. I know for me, it’s like one year we’re all in on industries and the next year it’s all about, um, maybe we’re talking about different cohorts or different audiences that we want to go after or different business topics.

So it’s like things change all the time and big projects and stuff comes in at you from sideways and you just need to be ready for it. So I think knowing that—just understanding that—you have to just be on top of this is super, super important.

And then finally, one last point on this of why it matters is it matters deeply to your team having lived through, you know, creative teams, both as a individual contributor and as a leader, you know, I know that it matters because you start to own, you know, certain projects or certain divisions or, you know, having relationships with certain people and clients and stakeholders.

So the structure matters for a lot of that and also who your manager is and how they’re giving you good guidance or good mentorship. So this is an important enough deal for me that at one point in my career, I remember that the orgs were changing, like, every two or three months or every six months. And it was just like, some people were like, “You just barely gave me this opportunity to really, you know, spread my wings and try something. And then you just changed it on me again.” So I remember I actually presented a presentation to our leadership team of like, why we can’t change the org structure. We got to give it at least six months, hopefully a year so the people who will like, we change it up and we say, “This is your new role. These are your new responsibilities,” they have enough time to actually dig in and settle in and make a difference because if you’re changing it too often, you’re not giving them a fighting chance. So, make sure you give your team time to adapt.

Alright, so, the other thing I want to talk about are some principles.So, how does this help with better work? First of all, if we think back on, you know, Bernbach and how he came up with this idea of, like, pairing a writer with a designer and making these creative teams, like that made a huge impact on the whole industry.And those are the types of things that that matter when you’re making organizational structure. Do you have those pairs lined up or are they sitting on different silos far from each other, and it becomes this waterfall where they toss work over the wall and hope that you know that it turns out okay. Or how are you organizing your team in a way that is creating opportunity for those, those moonshots? Or are you just keeping it all run-the-business? Is there a need for some organization to be more production focused and some more concept focused? Like, there’s, there’s just so many principles that help for better work by the way you structure your team.

Next is individual growth. So it’s not just about your team. It’s also about the people in it. Right? And that’s important to say like, all right, how am I giving members on my team opportunities? How am I giving them variety? How am I giving them leadership growth? Or even retention, like if they’re stuck and they feel like they’re, you know, pigeonholed down in some little area and they’re not getting opportunity, they’re just going to leave. So the way you’ve organized your team is going to help with all of that.

And finally, the business itself. I mean, this is such a critical part of a creative leader is understanding your business. I remember one of my old bosses in an agency, he said that, “One of the most important things you need to understand, Adam, is how that business makes money.” When you’re working for a client or you’re working for a company, how does your company make money? And we as creative leaders need to then go back and interpret and say, okay, if we understand how they’re making money, how are we working with those systems to create better creative, to make, you know, that company more profitable?

So we need to make sure that we’re not just, like, going off and be like, “Oh, I’m only focusing on these, this random thing that’s going to turn into an awesome award show piece,” or “I’m going to just like do these cool videos that I think are awesome.” But it’s really like, what is important of the type of work that’ll help your business grow and be profitable and then re-engineering it all and making sure you have an environment that works towards that. It’s really, really critical. So critical of fact that one of our recent shows with Michelle Stuhl, if you haven’t watched it, please go watch it. It’s an awesome one. And there were so many big insights, but she talked about how when she’s recruiting for big lead, you know, creative leaders, such as, you know, the chief creative officer or a VP of brand or whatever that may be—there are a lot of creative leaders who just think that, “Oh, this org structure or whatever, it doesn’t matter.” Like, and this is a quote from her. I’m going to, I’m going to flip to this. Now she says, “It’s crucial that the organizational structures are aligned with your strategic business mission. Creative leaders need to ask themselves, ‘Am I setting up my team in a way that truly serves what needs to happen?’” Because as she’s recruiting, she finds a lot of people just want to do cool work. And they’re not really concerned about these bigger picture questions of like, how is this helping the business? And so this kind of stuff or structure is critical to making sure you have a team set up for success.

All right, in this next section, I want to just go through some of the basics of how we organize teams internally. And then I’m going to talk about the more macro structures of how we organize them based on the work and the different teams that we serve.

So the first one of some of these basic structures is a very common way that we’ve done it is how we divide your team is by product, meaning that maybe there’s in your company, three different big products or three different, you know, services that you offer and you kind of divide the group into sections where they’re focused on that product. So you have a creative leader or creative director. You may have a writer, designer, project manager, video person, perhaps. But they’re all focused on that one product. And then if you have other products, you build those same teams out. So you’re really slicing it by product. And I’m going to talk a lot about it because, you know, through my experience of building teams, oh man, we sliced them this way, that way, and then every other way.And so there are a lot of ways to organize, but I just want to go through the different ones and then you can see what’s right for your business. So by product is an interesting way.

So the pro of this way of organization is that the team really gets a good understanding and a deep knowledge of the product, meaning they’re experts. So anything that comes their way, they can quickly, you know, understand what the messaging is and how we’re talking to this audience and how we’re doing this now. And they’ll be able to get content created faster. Because they truly understand the product in a great way. It also is amazing because they’ll be able to build relationships with a lot of the key stakeholders or people on the team. And so there’s a lot of goodness that comes from that.

What are the cons? The cons are maybe people feel like if they’re stuck on that account or that product for a long, long time, that it gets a little boring or they’re not getting the right opportunities for growth, or maybe their creative director doesn’t have all the same, you know, discipline experience. Like, they’re a writer, but the creative director is a designer and they’re not getting as much, um, creative feedback that they want. So that, those are the pros and cons of by product. Now let’s move on to by channel.

By channel is very similar in that instead of organizing your team by, you know, those different products or clients or things that you own. And it’s kind of like with the product, it’s like you create all the content for whatever that product is. This is a way where you’re making people who are experts instead of the product, you’re making them experts in those channels. So someone may be on the web team and they may work on all the products or all the services, but they’re really, really focused on what’s the best way to write and design and create experiences on the web. And another team may be all about events. And so they’re really, really deep into making these big experiential moments and someone else might be on the blog or they may be on whatever other channel it is in your business and they get really, really good at that one thing.

So benefits, you’re an expert at that channel and that gives you good skills that can turn into future growth or whatever you can become, you know. Someone known as the best in the business at that specific thing. The downsides are that, again, you’re kind of pigeonholed into one category and you may not feel like you can try other mediums because you’re like, all I ever do is web. So anyhow, very similar, but just a slight difference in, in what skills the team gets from it.

And this third, uh, direction is by discipline. And I see a lot of teams and I’ve done it all of these ways. In fact, and this is where you say, okay, I want to put all the writers together. I want to put all the designers together, all the video people together, all the project managers together. And you really are dividing the team by those disciplines.

And the benefit of this is that the people on the team feel like their creative leader really knows their craft and can give them great advice and great feedback and great mentorship. And when we change one thing in writing, we change it for that whole team. Like they’re really, really tight. So they’re, they’re great benefits in that. It helps you get better at that specific discipline.

Now, the cons are, there’s all these silos and walls, right? Like, they’re not as tight. Like, you can still pair up team members on projects and things, but they may not feel like they’re as deep into, you know, a certain discipline or a certain channel or a certain product, whatever it may be. So there are trade-offs either way.

Now, what’s interesting is when we did that survey, across the nation to talk to a lot of creative leaders, we asked them, “How do you divide your team up?” And as you can see here on the chart, it was pretty evenly spaced, like, almost like a third in each of the categories. So it’s pretty common that a lot of people choose one or any of these different ways to divide up their team.

All right. Now let’s talk about some other common structures that I see in businesses and that I’ve used in the past. And the first one is called the pool model. And the way this works is, maybe it’s an agency that you have a lot of different clients and it’s very ad hoc work, or maybe you’re a young in-house team and you have to do everything. Like you’re not even big enough that you can split into different disciplines. So the way this works is you have a couple of creative leaders, and then all the creative people are in this big, huge pool. And then when it comes time for project A to happen, one creative leader will go out and pick. Like, “Here, you know, I’m doing a blog thing. I want to take these two writers and that’s the team for this project,” or another creative leader will come in and say, “Okay, wait, I’m doing this other, you know, big ad campaign; I need this writer and this designer.” And the reality is, it’s like, whoever is available in the pool first-come, first-serve or whoever, you know, has less on their plate. You just kind of pick from people from the pool and have them work on certain projects. The benefits of the pool is that the workload is balanced really well, because things aren’t in a silo.

Everyone’s working together. Like, it’s really an opportunity for giving a lot of variety to the work and a lot of opportunity. I think creatives love that, especially younger creatives. It’s just like, this is a good way of getting experience in a lot of different ways and working with a lot of different people.

The downside to it is that you kind of feel like you don’t really own anything and you’re just kind of floating out there in the pool, hoping to get picked up, or you just, you just don’t feel like you have accountability or ownership on anything. So as part of interviews that I did for this presentation, I’m going to show you a few clips from different creative leaders who have talked about these topics. Like I said, in the beginning, I went out and interviewed a lot of creative leaders to get some good content for this.

So I want to show you a clip from James. He’s the VP of brand and creative at Yahoo, where he talks about the pool model and some of the downsides of, you know, if you’re left swimming in the pool for too long.

All right. The next structure is what we call the pod model. And this is similar to some of the earlier structures that I talked about—about discipline and by product, but this is the idea of like, you have these small individual pods where you have a creative leader and all the different disciplines are represented in this pod. You may have writers and designers and a video person, a project manager, a strategist, whatever it is that fits in your pod. And the benefit of this is then that pod will go off and focus on either a channel or that pod will go focus on a product, whatever that may be. And then as the company grows, you just create a new pod for a new product or channel or another pod for another product or channel. And in cases of, like, my team currently, and in the past, it’s like we have. Bigger pods that focus on all sorts of things. And maybe I have a pod that’s focused on a channel and a pod that’s focused on a product. And it’s really versatile in that all of these different groups can just have their expertise and ownership.

And as far as the benefits of this, I see a huge advantage of this because as a member of that pod, you get really, really close with those stakeholders. You get really close with the people working in that pod with you, and you really understand the product of the channel and you become deep, deep experts. So while you’re working in that pod, it’s a great opportunity for you to build up amazing expertise, amazing relationships. So, really, really great structure.

So now let’s listen to one more person. So this is Jess Kirkman. She is the global director of brand and creative at Mattel. And she talks to us about how the pod model has worked for her team.

All right. I just want to talk about one more common structure. And that’s the agile approach. I have people who just love it to death and they’ll come up and just fight, like, it’s the most important, best structure that you could ever have. And almost always the people that I’ve worked with are using this for a large, massive website or a specific technical project where there’s a lot of hands in the pie. So the difference between agile and pod is that agile is basically a version of a pod, but it’s larger and it encompasses more people. So instead of just being the creative team, you’ll have a, uh, scrum master. You may have technical leads. You may have product marketing managers. You may have product owners. There’s just a lot of other people that are involved in this big agile workflow.

And then the big difference is instead of it just being like, “Hey, we all work together. There’s a structure to it.” So you actually have to go out and get training on becoming a scrum master of how to run an agile team. And the benefit of it is, it’s like, they’re like, we’re not just going to have one team work on something and then throw it over the fence. We want us all working together and being agile and adaptive and quick. It is a model that is really, really focused on productivity. Again, if it’s very technical, if it’s very complex. It’s great to have an agile workflow So if we’re talking pros and cons, the pro is it’s about efficiency and velocity.

So, which structure is best for you? Let’s bring it all together again. Like I said in the beginning, every company is different. You’re going to have to figure out what’s right for you or what you need to accomplish. But in my experience, here’s kind of what I’ve found.

If you have a small company or a startup or your, or your creative team is very, you know, young in their careers, the pool model is amazing. The pool is great because you can get a lot of stuff done. You, it’s really tight. You’re sharing the workload. You’re, you’re just moving along, but as you grow and grow and you get to become a bigger company or a large team. The pool model just kind of falls apart and that’s where the pod model comes in.

I really feel like the pod is a great option and the only negatives to it is that you may have. You know, there’s different pods in a large organization and they’re not talking to each other. And therefore people feel like they’re pigeonholed and stuck. So that is obviously a negative for the agile. I would say it’s only for select focus teams like web or technical teams that are really focused on a very efficient model that they’re trying to accomplish.

So for me, I think the best model, the sweet spot is a hybrid flex and pod, meaning it’s a pod structure, but you build in things where people are only there in that pod for a year, and then they swap them out or people have opportunities to have stretch assignments and move into other teams and and share the workload so that you can make up for those issues of workload balance across teams. And the way that works is you just have to have all your team leaders having a common—I don’t know if it’s weekly or biweekly meetings—to just talk about all the work and make sure that you’re sharing resources in the right way. So I think that’s the sweet spot: pod model with some hybrid flex.

Next I want to have Bridget Esposito talk to us. She’s the VP group creative [00:28:15] director of Prudential. She’s going to talk to us about how the pod model really helps her team have ownership.

That was awesome advice from Bridget. Another clip I want to share with you real quick is from Cato and he is the senior creative director on the Carolina Hurricanes, a hockey team. And I just wanted to point this out because his team is a little specialized in that most of the people on his team were video, videographers or people who are good with photography. And so he had a little different, uh, a little different angle on how getting the right people in place and organizing your structure by that specialty group can really make a difference.

Now I want to talk to you about how you extend your team, because even if you have the perfect structure, eventually, some big, huge project is going to come at you from the side and you’re going to have to scale. And the biggest way that we scale is through agencies or freelancers. In our survey, when we went out and asked all these creative leaders, we found out that 93 percent of creative teams outsource at least some of their work. That’s a large amount. That means this is an important topic that when you’re figuring out structure, you’ve got to think of agency, not just as some other player, but really an extension of your team. They are part of your team. It’s just the way that you scale. It’s like one team—long hallways is the way we talk about it. So if you think about it in terms of that, you really need to find what are the right ways for your business to outsource to agencies. And here’s a list of different ways that I’ve found of like, either augmenting skill sets that you don’t have, maybe you need full service to extend your brand because you know, you may not have those skills you want to go big with a big campaign. You need the extra horsepower. Maybe you want to keep the team on a certain project and not get them distracted and you need to bring in other people. Or maybe it’s a quick sprint for an aggressive deadline, like you’re under the gun or strategy insight for big, difficult problems that you aren’t able to solve.

Whatever it is, there are a lot of great reasons to find an agency. And I’m bringing this up, not more because I’m trying to give a pitch for agencies, but more to just consider that in your structure. Like what are the things that you’re going to give to agencies? What are the things that you’re going to keep in-house? What are the things that you can have both sides working on?

And then finally, there’s a lot of other specialties out there. There may be some that are just focused on brand. Maybe you have brand strategy issues you need help with or media or event or experiential. And you’re just, it’s all about building this big moment at your next trade show. So finding the right agencies that fit your needs is really important.

I’m going to cut to another clip here from Tabitha on why we should still consider specialists.

All right. That was really interesting because it’s not just, you know, we all have this mindset of like, I can do it all. I can do everything. Why do we need to go outside and get help from anyone else? Like, why not just give me some more time? But the reality is that when you’re running a team, sometimes you need to realize that there are specialists out there that are really, really good at something. And why not take advantage of that? Because I may be able to do it, but it would take me three times as long and more often than not, we don’t have all the time in the world. We have to, you know, balance our resources in the right way. So I think that’s a really critical point from Tabitha is to focus on the areas that matter.

So again, when you’re building your org structure and you’re really understanding the business, what are the things you can outsource? What are the things you can extend? What are the things that you want to keep in house that really matter, that may require special knowledge or special skills and making sure you’re creating an organization that gives an opportunity for everyone to create awesome work.

All right, this last section that I want to talk about is a little different than org structure. So it’s not just the way you structure your, your team, how you measure your team can make a big impact on great work. So again, in the survey, 68 percent of creative leaders believe their team is undervalued in their organization. So that’s a lot. That’s pretty sad, actually, that if most of us feel like. We’re just a set of hands, which is pretty unfortunate. So how do we get past that?

First, let’s talk about the ways that we as creative people measure success, right? If I went out and asked you, what are the different ways that we measure success? I want to show this interesting chart first because it’s not a shocker. Like, we all want to measure our success on great work, right? Forty percent of them out there say the quality of the work is what mattered most.

And then there were other things like, you know, business goals or creative vision, and finally time. Like, I mean, that’s, that’s a reality. There are three common ways that people measure success. They measure it from time. Like, how much time I spent on something or the project; how many cool things did I make; or finally customer experience, like how, how great did the, the thing turn out and how did people react to it?

When you talk with creative leaders, they’re more about like, yeah, I want to create value. In fact, here’s a good quote from James again, from, from Yahoo on what mattered to him and his team. It’s not just about stuff. It’s not about time. It was something else.

Thanks, James. That was awesome. Like, it really is about the value we bring is what impact we can make or what great, you know, change we’ve made in the world because of our creative work. And that’s where we are. But here’s where I want to just change your perspective a little bit. I want you to stop and think about how does upper management or company leadership see your value, because it may be completely different.

And just, you know, we’re all about like, yeah, let’s go make great creative. Let’s do it. It’s awesome. But when we look from the perspective of just the leaders of the company, the CEO or the board of directors, they may see it in a totally different way where they’re seeing it as like, that’s a necessary expense. Like, I have to spend that money. I don’t want to, but I’ll do it. Or another thing is. “Great, I’m doing, I’m spending this money because I want to own something, a video, a website, something that I have to, I have to have that thing.” And so they’re thinking of it as an owned asset. Or even better, they can see it as a growth opportunity.

So the first thing I would talk about is the trad- off triangle, because this is a critical principle that’s followed me throughout, you know, almost 30 years of my career, and it’s this idea of like, you can either do it fast, you can do it cheap, or you can make it good quality. And you can’t have all three. Everyone in the world wants to have all three and thinks, oh, you can make things fast and cheap and it’ll still be amazing. And that’s not true. That’s why it’s called the trade-off triangle. It’s usually pick one. Maybe you can get a little of something else, but if you’re going to make it fast, you’re going to cut corners and it’s not going to be quality. You may do something cheap and it’s still not quality. And maybe it didn’t, it wasn’t even fast. So it’s like, it’s really a matter of money, time or, or effort. But if you think about those three things, now let’s go into like the three different types of three different ways that I’ve seen people measure and put value on their team. And I think it’s pretty, it’s pretty interesting.

So the first one is this idea of ticket-driven, and this is when it’s all about money, right? Ticket-driven structure is where I see it. A lot of these in younger companies that are not as mature or like a young startup or something where it’s like, they’re really focused on everyone puts in a ticket. We quickly get something done. It’s all about the cost and the budget when they’re showing their value. They have everyone using time sheets so they can put a cost analysis against it. A lot of agencies do this where it’s like, okay, we got the timesheets in. We know how much people have been working on it. We can turn those timesheets into money and value and report it back up to the company heads. And just really, it’s all about showing how, you know, we’re very time driven and money driven. Right? And the problem with this is there’s a lot of heroics. Like, it’s a lot of like, “Oh crap, people just keep putting in more and more tickets and they just expect it all to churn out.”

And it’s like, they don’t care about anything, but just put in the money and give me my thing out. Whether it’s a video or an ad or whatever it is. And so people, a lot of creative teams that run on this model, first of all, they show their value by showing time. They say, here’s how much time we’ve spent on things. And then there’s a lot of heroics in that they’re like trying to save. And do amazing things, even though they’re short on time because it’s all, like, budgeted away. So it’s a challenge.

The next level that I see people measure their value is through projects, which I think is better. So instead of measuring time, they’re measuring projects, meaning the output instead of the input, they’re measuring the output, which is better. And the way that they’re different, they’re still going to have that intake and all those different projects, but the difference is they put the value on, okay, the outcome. So they’re going to say, instead of like, this is how much time we spent on X, they’re going to say, these are how many videos we delivered, or this is, you know, how many pages on the website we delivered, or this is how efficient we were and all the different things. You know, this month we got five more X than something in the past. So they really measure their value with the list of deliverables. And the good news is I see a lot of times when you’re in this position, you’ve gone through, and instead of just like anyone and everyone can give you a ticket and you just respond to it, you do prioritize things. So you have looked at all the things and said, “Okay, if I want to deliver. I can’t do everything,” and so you have to set up some boundaries and some priorities, and therefore you’re, you’re really all about being efficient. So it’s not about doing everything. It’s about doing the right things. And that’s a better place to be in than, than the first that’s a better place to be in than the first example.

Now, the third example is more vision driven. And I think this is like the ideal, but it’s hard. It’s really hard to get here. And in this system, it’s more about, it’s not—you’re certainly taking all the projects in and you’re prioritizing things, but you’re really focused on what’s the big vision. What’s the big idea? What are the big impacts that we’re going to have on the customer experience? And in this model, I see people taking a lot more ownership as a creative department and they really own business goals and they’re initiating projects and giving a vision out to the rest of the company. And it’s really interesting when you see that switch where they move away from just intake to kind of pushing out the vision because they’re focused on, here’s how we’re going to change our business and use creativity to get there. Here’s how we’re focused on big opportunities and how we’re going to help you get there.

And what they’re really measuring is the value of those experiences. So it’s not, you’re not being measured by timesheets. You’re not being measured by the number of video or videos or projects or things you did. It’s like, you’re measured on the type of experiences you create. So if we get back to this, you know, trade-off triangle, do you want to be ticket-driven and focus on being cheap? Do you want to be project-driven and focus on being fast or vision-driven and focus on quality? And the next question you may ask is, okay, great. We all want quality, but I’m in this company and it’s a startup and it’s just like, I have a thousand tickets coming in and I’m just constantly just trying to manage time to try and get through it all. How do I move from one step to the next? It’s a great, great question and I may not have the perfect answer here, but let me just talk about some of the ways I’ve done it to help move a team from one system to the next.

So the first thing you need to do is start with your basic structure. Obviously you need a ticket system. You need a project management software or something where you can manage all of it and bring it in. So, you know, actually all the things that are coming rather than a whole bunch of emails and a bunch of slacks and whatever it may be like you have to organize things and that way you can start to measure it.

Next, you need to prioritize it all. You need to look at all that work that you bring in and say, “You know what, here’s the line.” And I’m going to give an example, because a lot of times people just want to say, “Hey, we can only have so many hours in the day. And this is how much we get done.” And then you’ve got to draw a line in the sand. And I actually feel like you have to draw multiple lines in the sand. So recently, when I started in a job eight months ago, we were having this problem. I came in, the creative team was overwhelmed. There was a lot of heroics. They were stressed out. And so instead of saying yes to everything, we just came in and said, here’s our tiered operating model.

If it’s a tier one, you’re going to get all the support you want. We’re going to do all of those things. We’re going to project manage it. We’re going to create it. We’re going to design it. We’re going to write it. We’re gonna do all of it. Right? Full service.

If it’s a tier two, maybe it’s important, but it doesn’t make, if we make that priority list, it’s just under the cutoff. We’re still going to do it, but you have to bring budget and then we’ll help outsource and extend with an agency and we’ll still project manage it, but we’ll make sure it gets done.

Maybe at this tier three level, it’s like, you know, someone in another theater or, you know, in APAC or EMEA will say, you know, we can’t give you all that support, but here are some, you know, some agencies that are trained on all of our templates and our brand styles and everything like that. And you’re going to have to just work directly with them. And then we’ll check in, you know, once a quarter and make sure things are all good.

And then finally, maybe it’s self support. Maybe it’s like, we’ll take Adobe express and here’s some templates or some Google sheets, and you can just build your own thing. And the templates are already there and you just put in the words and then go crazy.

So that’s one way that I’ve done it is just, like, build those priorities with different layers and different lines in the sand. And that way it gives you an opportunity to own the things that are important and own, you know, where you can make a bigger difference, because if you’re just inundated with everything and trying to do everything, you’re just, you’re just going to get crushed. And then finally, if you can do that, get to that space where you kind of put out those levels and put those walls in place. Then you can start to focus on, okay, now, now I can put some of my efforts and people on looking for a bigger vision or looking where the brand needs to go.

We’re starting to come up with ideas or programs on your own that you can pitch up to management to get more of that brand ownership. Cause the moment you own the brand as a creative, you really can give a bigger vision of, of where things can go. And you’re no longer just beholden to like, everyone’s putting in a ticket and you’re just going to have to listen to him and get it done. Now you can start to say, this is on brand. This is off brand. This is the vision. This is where we’re going and really get everyone behind you and to trust you. And I think that that just opens up a lot of opportunities. And then you can get to that place where now we’re just measuring great experiences instead of just measuring how much time I spent on stuff.

I know that was a lot. Thank you so much for listening. Again, at the end of the day, why are we talking about org structure? Because it’s all about the work—everything that you do, your leadership, your environment, your org structure, all of this comes together as a creative leader to help make that opportunity for, for great creative work to shine.

All right. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode. It’s really exciting, uh, to talk about some of these topics with you and I hope you’re learning a lot from it. This episode marks the end of our fourth season of Real Creative Leadership. I’m so grateful for the community we’ve built and I hope you stick around for season five, where I’ll be talking to amazing creative leaders from brands like Comcast and PayPal and Delta and more.