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Leadership
Great teams don’t happen by accident. They are carefully crafted through compassion, structure, and growth. I have led a number of teams to beautiful and persuasive brilliance in email, banner ads, social media posts, blogs, landing pages and videos. But my real accomplishments do not exist in my portfolio, they exist in the people I have hired, mentored and led, and the communities I have built.
My leadership philosophy is comprised of 3 essential elements:
1. Relationships
You can’t have creative brilliance without relationships. The most powerful work emerges when people feel valued as human beings - not just productivity engines. I invest real time getting to know my team. Understanding their passions, fears, and their strengths. Giving them room to excel farther than I could have envisioned, but also to make mistakes. Sharing my own vulnerabilities. This builds trust and psychological safety—key ingredients for creative risk-taking. When people feel seen, they give you their best. In this way, being a compassionate and empathetic leader actually results in better creative work.
2. Processes
Of course, warm fuzzies don’t get the work done. Clear processes keep things moving smoothly. Without structured workflows, even the most brilliant ideas wither. I obsess over the nuts and bolts of intake, prioritization, resourcing, approvals. I ensure every project has a well-defined creative brief, expectations for excellence, and cadence for reviews. Eliminating ambiguity reduces frustration for creatives and stakeholders alike. For every creative project the following questions need to be answered:
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Creative Brief - What information is needed before a project can begin? Is there a template for creative briefs to ensure no essential information is being missed?
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Project Intake - What is the process by which a project is entered into the creative team's work queue, and where is it submitted?
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Prioritization - Which projects take precedence when there is limited bandwidth? Who decides?
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Resource Allocation - Who works on which projects and why are they chosen?
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Execution - What is the expected level of excellence and expertise needed for each project?
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Delivery - Where/how/when are the final deliverables given to the project owner?
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Creative Review - When and where is the creative review and who needs to be in it?
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Revision/Iteration - How many revisions and iterations are agreed upon and when do they need to be completed?
3. Mentorship
Processes alone can’t unleash potential. That’s where personalized mentorship and coaching come in. I don’t worry about one-size-fits-all ways of measuring goals. I get to know individual's passions, strengths, and aspirations. Then I challenge each person just beyond their comfort zone - with care. The most important thing about any goal is that it excites the person who is setting it, not that it only achieves a desired outcome for the business. So the challenge of goal setting when mentoring and coaching is to find the balance between the two, so that your team members can feel inspired to achieve the goals they have set out for themselves. One of the hardest aspects of being a manager is to step away from simply giving advice and instead focus on asking questions. Real leadership tends to genuinely happen in many hundreds of tiny moments of asking good questions, or providing moments of clarity, or giving guidance about something that may seem very small.
In a Nutshell...
At the end of the day, great leadership isn’t about grand speeches or sweeping vision statements. It’s about forging human connections, fixing flawed systems, and nurturing growth through understanding. Do this patient work, and your team will astonish you. They'll take the raw materials of creativity and build something legendary - together.
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