Eugene Chrinian walks through 5 keys to successfully manage creative employees. These keys were originally featured on Entrepreneur.com

1. The 5 Keys to
Successfully Manage
Creative Employees
Eugene Chrinian

2. According to Nelson Rodriguez,
Vice President of Global
Marketing of Aquent and
Contributor to Entrepreneur.com,
managing creative employees can
be challenging.

3. It’s a steady balancing act of
maintaining a nurturing
environment that encourages
employees to take risks and
explore new directions, and
pushing your employees to ensure
work is produced on time and on
budget.

4. Rodriguez seems to have found a
happy medium and has come up
with 5 keys to successfully
manage creative employees
without creating a restricting
environment.

5. Make teamwork the priority. Negative
feedback is always tough to give. Giving
negative feedback to creatives is even
harder. To make it easier as well as
promote constructive feedback, focus on
the value of teamwork as opposed to
individual accomplishments. This way you
aren’t singling anybody out; you are
rallying your team to pitch in and
collectively find a new solution.

6. Cultivate non-attachment. Encourage
open mindedness. It’s important to
remember that at the end of the day, they
are creating for the business, not their
own personal fulfillment. Also,
realistically, whatever they come up with
will ultimately undergo edits and in some
cases even be thrown out. Rodriguez
advises to “adopt an agile approach:
Produce ideas quickly, provide timely
feedback and push for rapid iterations of
concepts.” This will make it less likely to
become overly attached to ideas.

7. Hiring is key. Hire people that possess
the mindset you need and can
function on an egoless team. This can
be tricky to find because you need
individuals that are both talented and
able to take constructive feedback
when it comes to their work; someone
who is open to trying new ideas. Key
traits to look out for here are
individuals that are keen on finding
solutions and looking at a piece of
work from every possible angle.

8. Don’t point fingers. The key here is to be
consistent - in sickness and in health.
You can’t encourage teamwork while
things are going well and then point
fingers and blame specific people when
things don’t go as planned. You have to
be all in when you’re part of a team; you
share your success as well as your
failures.

9. Customize your praise. This may
seem hypocritical, following the
previous statement; however, it is
also important to recognize
individual efforts. As much as
people enjoy celebrating collective
achievements, they also appreciate
and deserve recognition for their
personal contributions. Approach
your team members to find out
“how they prefer to be recognized
and then show your appreciation
appropriately”.