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First day: fire two or three people to show who is in charge now. Second day: throw all the ideas they had away, ask for new ones - this will be your signature move. Third day: go to vacation. Send messages from there asking to see cannes lions winners on the evening. Repeat all the moves.
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The best CDs I’ve ever worked for had one thing in common: empathy.
Being a two-year old CD, I can already give out a few advises and actions that have worked for me.
(1) Assess your creative team's capabilities, so that you can...
(2)Learn to designate tasks as per creatives' capabilities.
(3)Trust your team's creativity and Don't micromanage
(4) Be kind and compassionate, gone are the generations that scold and harass people under them through hurtful words and actions.
(5) Be results oriented, it doesn't matter how they achieved the output, so long as it satisfies the clients' brief.
(6) Be objective about concepts, always go back to the brand's USP.
Good answer. You just forgot my 3 steps: fire people, disapprove ideas and ask for lions. ;) hahahha
I know it’s cliche, but implement lessons from the best CD(s) you’ve ever had and avoid the mistakes that the worst CD(s) you’ve had have made.
Remember that you were once in your creatives’ position. Remember how the feedback you received felt - good and bad.
Yeah, don’t kill young people’s dreams.
I’m not a CD, but I appreciate the connection I have with mine. We have regular 1:1s and talk about personal and professional topics. It motivates me to do better when I see my manager truly care about my growth.
The biggest adjustment I had was balancing your teams’ solution with how you’d do it. Is your comment to make it better or to make it more like how you see it in your head?
I was once told that if the cd ends up writing it, it’s a failure on the cd’s part as much as the team.
And eventually, it’s ok to delegate things. Once you’re more comfortable with the role. You just can’t be as involved in everything like you were.
Try not to write the work for your teams. This will be hard. But you’ll learn to ‘steer’ them towards areas, if they aren’t landing anywhere themselves. If you do give them ideas, explain why it’s more on brief and interesting than what they suggested. On that note, always keep an open mind, what they’re bringing to the table may be different to wherever your head went, but it may also be better. Give regular feedback and updates, keep them in the loop. Even if not much progress has actually been made. After a client meeting, you may be tired / fed up / straight into another meeting or tryna go home, but take the time to let them know how it went. And always credit them. THEY are the team. It’s THEIR work now. You just help shape it and protect it. I’m terrible at all of this myself but trying to get better.
One of the most helpful pieces of advice was that your role as a director is to deliver an outcome of a project/business goals without being the person doing the actual work work. It’s a hard transition fr being a do-er to director, as when it gets stressful the first instinct is to personally fix. Your focus needs to be on clear comms, motivation, hiring great talent, and being able to gracefully handle unfun things like not happy clients, resourcing or firing. I do recommend watching other CDs navigate or read books bc a lot of it is soft skills now.