Creative director or creative dictator?

There’s a surprisingly fine line between being a creative director and becoming a creative dictator. And the annoying thing is, you probably won’t notice when you cross it. It starts innocently enough. A little feedback here. A small adjustment there. A headline you’d phrase differently. A photograph you’d crop slightly tighter. Nothing dramatic.

You’re just improving the work. After all, that’s your job, isn’t it? Before you know it, you’re involved in every decision, reviewing every detail and giving your opinion on things nobody actually asked you about. Congratulations. You’ve successfully built a creative department that can’t function without you. And somehow, you’re proud of it.

As you become more experienced, your judgement generally improves. You’ve seen what works, what doesn’t and what tends to go horribly wrong. You recognise problems earlier and often know exactly how to fix them.

That’s valuable.

It’s also dangerous.

Because when you know how you’d approach something, it’s incredibly tempting to tell someone else how to do it. And frequently, your solution might actually be better. But there’s a bigger question worth asking. Are you trying to improve this particular piece of work, or are you trying to build a team capable of producing better work without you? Because those two objectives don’t always lead to the same decisions.

Congratulations. You’ve created twenty versions of yourself. When you constantly interfere with people’s creative decisions, something interesting starts happening. They adapt. Not necessarily by becoming better creatives, but by becoming better at predicting what you want. Instead of asking themselves, “What’s the strongest idea?” they start asking, “What would my boss like?” They remember which photography you prefer, which headlines you tend to approve and which creative directions usually survive your feedback. Eventually, they become remarkably good at presenting you with exactly what you expect. Which is wonderful, if your ambition was to start a personality cult with a payroll. Less wonderful if you were hoping to build an innovative creative team. Because you’ve gradually replaced independent thinking with approval-seeking. And the worst part is that everyone might appear perfectly happy. The work gets approved. Meetings become shorter. There are fewer disagreements. Everything runs smoothly. Except the creativity.

I genuinely believe that one of the most important responsibilities of a creative leader is allowing people to make mistakes. Not catastrophic mistakes, obviously. I’m not suggesting you let someone accidentally spend the annual campaign budget on a helicopter because they thought it would look cinematic. There are limits. But within those limits, people need room to experiment, make decisions and occasionally get things wrong. They need to discover why

something doesn’t work rather than simply being told it won’t. And they need the opportunity to surprise you. That last part is particularly important. Because if you’re always the person with the final creative answer, your team can never become better than you. And shouldn’t that be the ambition? To build a team capable of producing work you wouldn’t have thought of yourself?