Creative Director Skills and Tools
As a person in charge, you need to be involved in every step of the process to track your team's progress, but at the same time, efficiently detached to let them work freely and independently. You should be motivated, a great communicator, and a highly organized person.
Creative managers will benefit from communication tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack to keep in touch with their teams and clients. Since they manage a team to plan and schedule meetings, they might use various reminders and calendars to view all events, such as Google Calendar.
No micromanagement — The best way to keep your creatives is to provide a general roadmap and let them figure out how they want to travel it but develop a style parameter: technical specifications, deadline policies, and style guides. Bare in mind that constant oversights and check-ins can be bothersome. Let your team enjoy its creative process.
Minimize administration — They might occasionally estimate time remaining on specific tasks, record time, attend status update meetings, or generate reports, but that's not the primary line of work they should be dealing with. Keep your team members focused on tasks where they will show their creativity and productivity. Tools that are most useful for creative managers are project management tools like ActiveCollab, so they can keep track of their team and projects.
Teach problem-solving methods — Try to explain techniques such as human-centered design, mind mapping, lateral thinking, and brainstorming.
Allow new ideas — Avoid unreasonable deadlines and strict schedules. Instead, focus on time-bound milestones for the end of each project phase.
Encourage open communication — Ask your team to communicate with each other openly; don't make them dependent on you. Dropbox and Google Drive are frequently used to share ideas and designs with the team and clients.
Allow interdisciplinary collaboration — You should promote cross-fertilization across all disciplines, for instance, marketing, business, design, support, quality, etc.
Approve failures — Create an environment where mistakes and failures are part of the creative process and a new learning opportunity.
