Ep 102: The Art of Creative Leadership
Inspiring Your Teams Best Work
SUMMARY
In this powerful episode, Dustin Pead explores the essential elements of creative leadership that help teams thrive. He breaks down the four leadership archetypes every creative leader should embody: the visionary who sees potential others miss, the coach who develops individual strengths, the shield who protects creative space, and the bridge who connects client expectations with creative reality. Dustin also shares practical techniques for building psychological safety, a structured decision-making framework (RACI), and guidance on developing your authentic leadership voice. Whether you're leading a small creative team or a large department, these insights will help you inspire your team's best work while maintaining their well-being and creative energy.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Leadership differs from management - management focuses on processes while leadership centers on people. The best creative leaders embody four archetypes: visionary, coach, shield, and bridge.
⚡️ Psychological safety is essential for creative teams because innovation requires experimentation and potential failure. Build trust through honest feedback loops, celebrating failures as learning opportunities, and modeling vulnerability.
⚡️ Use the RACI decision-making framework (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) to clarify roles and ensure proper communication when making creative decisions.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "Quantity of ideas over quality of ideas breeds the bravery that you need in a brainstorming session."
💬 "A lot of really great leadership is not about the direct actions or direct interactions. A lot of really great leadership is just being a really great example."
💬 "Clarity is kindness. Make sure you're actually communicating decisions. Have somebody in your corner that can constantly poke and prod you and say, 'We don't know what you're thinking. We need to be informed.'"
EPISODE RESOURCES
⚡️Connect with Dustin: Website | Social Media @DustinPead
⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to the Creativity Made Easy podcast, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative coach and consultant, and I help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams so they can create with efficiency as they scale together. I'm so excited for today's episode. Today, we're going to dive deep into the art of creative leadership, not just managing a team, but truly inspiring them to create their best work.
Before we jump into that, I want to remind you that you can learn all about me and how I can help you or your team at DustinPead.com. That's D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D.com. You can also find me on all social media at DustinPeed. If you're watching on YouTube, I'd love for you to hit the thumbs up button, like, subscribe, ring the bell, all that fun stuff.
I have a newsletter that I release every Sunday afternoon to get you ready for the week. Five things that I want to share with you before we dive into the work of the week. And then every Tuesday, I release a blog post episode to that same email list. So if you're interested in that, go to dustinp.com and look for the newsletter button and go ahead and add your email address into that. I would love for you to take advantage of that for that to anyone else that you might find it helpful for.
All right, let's get into today's episode, the art of creative leadership. I think it's important before we dive too deep into this that we start right at the top by defining what leadership is. There's a little bit of difference between some management and some leadership and we do need both. And there's going to be a time in your creative business where you or your, the director level, or they're going to have to be both. Right. But let me just break this down to you, right? Management is about processes, right? That's a lot of what I'm talking about usually on this podcast, but today we're going to talk about leadership and leadership is about people. That's why I say I help lead. Help creatives know themselves. Number one, you have to know yourself in order to know, and in order to know how to lead yourself and lead other people, right? Know their processes, the management side, and their teams, the people, so they can create with efficiency and scale together, right? So management is on the process side. Leadership is on the people side. I'm make that variation very distinguished here, right up at the top. Managers handle tasks and projects, right? Leaders inspire vision and there's gonna be like I said, there's gonna be a time where that might you might have to sit in both seats And that's totally okay. But as your team grows and scales you'll begin to lean less on the management side and more on the leader side.
So let's get into the creative leaders mindset a bit. So the creative leaders mindset is about cultivating strategic thinking. Versus what it used to be when you're managing is the tactical execution of it the who's going to do it, how they're going to do all that stuff, right? The creative leader mindset as well is balancing creative excellence, right? We still want to pursue excellence, but you also have to keep in mind team well-being. You don't want your team to burn out in the pursuit of excellence. The creative leader's mindset is also developing the emotional intelligence that you yourself need as a leadership superpower. That's where we talk about knowing yourself.
And so, what I want to talk about today is these four different leadership archetypes for creative teams. It's not an exhaustive list. This is just what I've seen in my observation. So you can kind of see where you might naturally lean into and then you can fill in the gaps around you. So I think there's usually what we see and really good leaders is that they're high visionary, right? A lot of really good ideas. But their superpower here is not their ideas. Their superpower is seeing the potential in things that others don't see. Seeing the threats in things that others don't see. Think about the leader at the front of the pack. You want them to be able to see the good and steer towards it. And you want them to see the bad and steer away from it. So the visionary leadership archetype does that really, really well.
The coach leadership archetype, think we need all of these there. Again, there's just going to be strengths, right? The coach part of your leadership is developing individual strengths, right? Some of the best leaders I know spend a good portion of their week coaching their teams, coaching their teams and how to develop their, their, each, each of their individual strengths. Then there's the protector, right? The shield is a third archetype, right? That you need to need to be kind of living in as a creative leader. That's protecting the team's creative space, right? The manager wants to do, do, do, do, do, right? That's me. Love to kind of get in there and make sure things get done. But the, also the leader part of me goes, Hey, we also need to make time for creative space and, and, and understand that we can't fill our agendas so much that there's no room for it. That's why I talk a lot about renewal days and creative fuel days and this podcast on my blog as well.
The fourth archetype is the bridge. I love this part of the creative leader because what they do is they connect the client's needs with creative reality, right? Sometimes the client comes in and says, we want the world. And you're going, it's really only possible to give you the state, right? We want everything. And you have to kind of come in and say, we can give you this much of everything. Can't give you all of everything. We can give you a portion of everything. So as you're developing the creative leader within yourself, remember the visionary, remember the coach, remember the shield, remember the bridge. You need to be acting in all of those types. There's going to be parts of you that are going to be stronger in that, parts of you that are going to be weaker in that, but you really need to be operating in all four types to be a great creative leader.
All right, let's talk about psychological safety for creative teams. I know that sounds like some big like, whoa, what are we talking about here? Listen, psychological safety is a shared belief that team members can take risks, right? They can also speak up and they can be vulnerable without fear of punishment or embarrassment. Essentially, what that does is it creates an environment where people feel safe to be their true authentic selves and in creative work. Obviously that safety is critical because innovation requires experimentation and failure and creative pros like ourselves, we need to be able to feel secure enough to be able to share some kind of maybe half formed ideas that aren't fully fleshed out yet. We need to be able to question some assumptions a little bit like, I know we've always done this, what if we, right?
And propose some possibly unconventional solutions. And we need to be able to do all of that. You need to be able to do it. Your team needs to be able to do it without fear of judgment, without fear of saying, I don't really know if that's going to work or you're always this or you're not enough this or you're too much this and you get your head out of the clouds because all that does, you know, it should be true for yourself. So it's obviously true for your team. All that does is stifle their creative potential.
So I wanna give you just a few techniques to kind of build some trust within your creative teams so that it becomes a place where psychological safety is a real active thing and not just some hoped upon goal that maybe one day it'll magically happen, right? We know that we need intentionality to make things happen in order for change to be made. In order for a change to happen, a change must be made. So make sure these changes are set up in your organization to build trust with your creative teams.
A couple of things I would recommend. Number one, regular and regular honest feedback loops. This can look different for so many teams and feedback loops can be standing around a water cooler or feedback loops can be sitting around a conference table or feedback loops can be one-on-one at the local coffee shop. But having them, having them exist and using them is what matters. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's going to be clunky and messy at first, right? But being able to say, hey, looking back at this last project, how did you feel we handled that as an organization? How do you feel you handled that project as an individual part of this team? And then just be honest and transparent about it without fear of judgment. That breeds that psychological safety into major part of the art of creative leadership.
Secondly, you need to celebrate failures as learning opportunities. One of my all time favorite clips. And I've said this many times in this podcast before I've said on stage and speaking opportunities before my favorite clips of all time is from a movie called Meet the Robinsons. It's an animated film and long story short, there's a kid who's really into innovation, loves inventing things, right? And he's sitting around the table full of this family, this highly creative family. And he has this peanut butter and jelly, like dispenser gun where it can make peanut butter and jelly really quickly. Right. And he's so excited to show the family shows the family and just like what usually happens with his inventions, it blows up and makes a mess everywhere. And he's totally embarrassed. And he's so sorry. He's like, being so hard on themselves and the family's like celebrating like, yeah, you failed. And he's like, super confused. Like what is happening right now? I didn't y'all just see the mess I just made and how the thing didn't work. And they lean into them and they're like, look from success, we don't learn so much, but from failures we do. We celebrate failure. And we, as the movie goes, you know, the phrase we keep moving forward.
Third technique for building trust with creative teams is you have to actually model this vulnerability as a leader. And I really do think that vulnerability is a practiced skill. It's a skill that's developed. And so the more that you can practice that around co-leaders, around other peers who maybe aren't in your organization, the better off that you can begin to model that in your own organization. Listen, a lot of really great leadership is not about the direct actions. It's not the direct interactions, right? A lot of really great leadership is just being a really great example. Man, I wish my team was more, was more vulnerable with me. Well, are you vulnerable with them? And I wish my team would model more creative research. Do you do that? Right? If the team will, will never supersede your, ceiling that you raise as the leader, right? So if you want your team to be at 80% on something, then you had better be at least 100% on something, right? And include, include, and this includes vulnerability as a leader. Let me give you an example of this.
In our 4D creative process, the second D is dreams. So the four Ds are define the problem, right? We need to know what problem we're trying to solve and you know, the parameters. The second D is dream. We're going to talk about that here in a second in this illustration. The third D is to design like, we've, we've, we figured out what we're going to kind of blueprint this thing out. And the fourth D is to go and develop it. Right. That's where the rubber hits the road and we do the work. I want to emphasize this on the second D real quick, the dream D or the dream portion of the creative process. This is where we brainstorm. Right. And anytime I lead a dream session or a brainstorming session, I only have a couple of rules. And one of them is that quantity over quality breeds bravery. I'm going say that again. Quantity of ideas over quality of ideas breeds the bravery that you need in a brainstorming session. Brainstorming sessions are not about the quality of ideas. That's for the design. That's for the third D. That's for the design phase. Then we can analyze all the ideas on the board.
Right? But if we walk into a brainstorm or a dream session and we immediately say, only the best ideas, please. No one's going to speak. No one's going to speak because they're so afraid of it not being a great idea. And so if you want to create this psychologically safe workplace, this it's it's it can be as small as in a brainstorm session. Hey, look, there's no bad ideas. No one gives any negative critique to an idea. You can only build upon an idea. And I like one of my favorite rules for dream sessions or brainstorming sessions is to start every, every idea with the phrase, if, Hey, what if we, or what if this didn't, or what if the thing that we thought was wasn't right? What if is a great place to start? So practical exercise here, quantity over quality and brainstorm sessions be vulnerable, model the vulnerability as a leader, do some safety check-ins at the beginning of creative meetings. How's everybody feeling? we in, are we feeling safe here today? Is this a safe place here today? And if not, maybe it's time to shift up that meeting and get to a safer place. Maybe sometimes it's more important than that meeting as a whole.
All right, the next part of being a really great creative leader is a part of being any great leader, and that's decision making. And so I want to talk a little bit about the decisions that we have to make every single day as a creative leader and how to make them, right? We face the onslaught of decisions every day, little minor design tweaks to major strategic pivots. It's a constant decision-making aspect of our lives as creative leaders, and it can quickly deplete your mental energy. It's a worldwide phenomenon known as, you know it, decision fatigue. But as the day progresses, creative leaders experiencing this fatigue tend to either make impulsive choices without consideration or they avoid the decisions altogether, which lead to bottlenecks. There's a model, this is not my model. There's a model that I found online that I think works really well for creative leaders to make decisions on projects. It's called the, I pronounce it the Rocky model, the R-A-C-I. So Rocky, Racky.
However you want to say it, because it'd be rassy. I don't know. But this is a great model for anyone who doesn't know where to start and making decisions. just go, I'm overwhelmed with decisions. Go, OK, great. Let's use this model here. Number one, who's responsible for this? Not looking retrospectively, but looking forward and making this decision. Who needs to be responsible for carrying out this decision? That's the R, responsible. The A, who is it accountable to? Is it accountable to you as a leader? Is it accountable to the client? Is it accountable to another director level or another person on the team or in the organization? That's the A. So responsible R for responsible A for accountable. The C here is who needs to be consulted on it, right? This doesn't, this doesn't mean that they're going to be a part of the project, but they at least might have some adjacent identification or some adjacent knowledge that would be useful to being able to handle this project in the best way. Maybe somebody within the organization, another department, maybe somebody not in the organization at all, or not even in your field at all, but you think it would be valuable to consult them on this particular project. So R, responsible, A, accountable, C, consulted, and the I is who needs to be informed. Now this is where leaders struggle the most. I think they're really typically okay at one or all of the first three of responsible, accountable, and who needs to be consulted, but who needs to be informed because the leader has had the thought and the conversation back and forth in their own mind so many times, they tend to fail to release that information out their mouth and towards the people who actually need to know the information who needs to be informed. So if you want to model some really good decision making yourself, we talked about modeling that right. Model who needs to be responsible, who needs to be accountable, you know, who are we accountable to for this project, who needs to be consulted for this project and who needs to be informed. Make sure you're actually communicating it. Have somebody in your corner that can constantly poke and prod you and say, Hey, listen up. I know you've thought this a billion times, but we don't know what you're thinking. We need to hear, we need to hear that we need to be informed of this information is clarity and clarity is kindness.
All right. The rocky, rocky, rassy, however you want to say it model, RACI is a great model for decision-making and creative projects, responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. All right. There's another really critical aspect of creative leadership. And I mentioned it at the beginning when I talked about how great leaders are great coaches and in coaching usually happens in a one-on-one setting. And I do think you need to be having regular, fine regular is up to you, one on one meetings with everybody that directly reports to you, not everybody throughout the organization, but everybody that directly reports to you. And they need to be having one on ones with everybody that directly reports to them and so on and so on. And so I want to introduce to you a free resource that I have for you. It's called the creative leaders guide to one on one. And this is an opportunity for you to have something completely out for you that goes through the structure, progress reviews, growth planning, creative inspiration, all these different aspects of how you should be holding one on one, the who, what, when, where, how and why of one on ones within your creative team. I have it all there for you. Go to Dustin P dot com slash free and click on the giant thumbnail that says the creative leaders guide to one on ones. Make sure you check that out. I'm not going to spend a ton of time in that today, but you do need to dive into that in order to be an effective leader.
Lastly, just real quick, you need to be developing your unique leadership voice. If you want to truly embrace the art of creative leadership, you need to be embracing how to develop your own unique creative leadership voice. The key here is to be authentic. Don't try to be someone that you're not. People can smell a fake a mile away, and especially if they're less than a mile away because they're on your team. So be authentic with it, who you truly are, lean into that. That breeds that vulnerability that we were talking about before. To develop your communication techniques, right? Just communicate. There's some things that you need to gatekeep a little bit. There's some things that you need to be able to give some creative direction on. And there's some, and some or most things that you need to be communicating the why on, right? So gatekeeping some constructive feedback from clients maybe, or major business decisions a little bit, right? But for the most part, you want to be open, authentic and available and vulnerable. Give some effective creative direction and communicate the why behind decisions. And we've talked many times on this podcast before, I would encourage you to go back to an episode that I did with my friend, Darren Cooper of 1898 creative, where we talked about the power of storytelling and your creativity, the same thing in creative leadership. And we actually just covered this topic as well over on the culture based podcast with my partner over there, Blake bear, go to the culture base.com B a S E.com to learn more about that. But you have to learn how to provide, this is the delicate balance, right? You have to learn and there's it's really up to you to decide in your unique situation, but you have to put effort into learning how to provide critique that inspires and doesn't deflate. All that comes into your own unique, authentic leadership voice.
So today we talked about the four archetypes of creative leadership, right? The visionary, the coach, the shield, the bridge. We talked about the psychological safety and how to be able to do some safety check-ins and some dream session brainstorm rules and how to model that vulnerability as a leader. Talked about the rocky or rocky decision making framework, right? The RACI, who's responsible, accountable, who needs to be consulted and who needs to be informed and moving forward with how to make creative decisions. Talked about one-on-one meetings briefly. But I would highly encourage you to go to dustinp.com slash free to download your free guide to creative leaders one on once. And then lastly, we talked about how to develop your own unique leadership voice. The key here is to think about when you're going to communicate, how you're going to communicate and make sure you're communicating the why behind your decisions as often as you possibly can. Don't forget storytelling. Storytelling is key. Anytime you want to communicate a certain idea or culture value or direct vision, direction, whatever it is, stories always are stickier than just some poetic words that you can wax.
Next week we are nearing the end of the first quarter of the year. So next week we're gonna do a quarterly review check-in. We're gonna look back at quarter one and review some of that stuff with you. And then we're also going to look at a strategy session for Q2. We're gonna talk about some lessons that we learned in Q1, some achievements, and then some opportunities and actions that we can take in Q2. Again, I want to remind you about the free resource. All my free resources can be found at dustinpede.com slash free. But today go and download your guide, your creative leaders guide to effective one-on-ones dustinpede.com slash free. It's right there for you. Please take it, use it, send it to whoever who needs it. Send it up, send it down, send it sideways to peers. But I'm so glad that you are with me today. If you have any questions about anything that I talked about today, feel free to reach out to me on social media at Dustin P. E. A. D. Or you can email me D. P. At Dustin Pead dot com. I'm so glad that you are with me today. I hope you'll have an amazing week. Come back next week. We're going to talk about how to wrap up this quarter one and make quarter two the best quarter ever in our creative team. Can’t wait to talk to you then the creativity made easy podcast.