No matter what the creative field, if you mention the word “structure,” you’re likely to get a few sour faces. Creatives thrive on autonomy and independence in their work. They exercise their freedom to explore ideas and express themselves without the constraints of rigid structures.
So when they hear the dreaded term, the reaction is something like letting all the air out of a balloon.
But some structure is key to managing a creative team effectively. While creative teams flourish in environments that nurture exploration and independent thought, the role of management extends beyond mere oversight. It involves fostering that atmosphere of exploration and creativity — while also navigating things like last-minute deadlines, unforeseen project needs, and scopes that evolve halfway through a project. Good leadership can solidify your organization’s reputation as a creative powerhouse.
So, while “structure” might be a term that elicits moans and groans, it’s also crucial for addressing roadblocks that could otherwise upend your creative team’s ability to tackle new work with good quality.
If you lead a creative team or design team, the tips and strategies we’re about to cover will empower you to make a positive impact.
What we'll cover
Table of contents
Who manages the creative team?
Depending on the organization, the creative team captain is often the creative director or creative operations manager. A creative operations manager wears many hats, sometimes all at once. They manage the creative process from project intake to final delivery.
As copywriters, graphic designers, photographers, and other team members collaborate, the creative operations manager clears a path to the finish line. Along with reviewing assets, they often attend review meetings with stakeholders and consolidate feedback for the team.
The creative operations manager also plays a role in managing the workflow and processes. They help create and manage timelines, schedules, and deadlines for creative projects. When urgent project requests come in, they prioritize tasks and allocate resources, ensuring workflows and communication flow smoothly.
Creatives spend their time immersed in projects. Creative operations managers are the glue that holds the creative team together while the creatives themselves focus on delivering exceptional work.
The unique challenges creative teams face
The path to creative glory sometimes has potholes and rough patches. That’s why creative team management is foundational to project success. Obstacles are avoidable if you have the right leader to help the team steer clear of them.
Here are a few of the most common challenges.
Balanced speed and control in asset production
Creative teams produce high volumes of content under tight deadlines. Striking a balance between speed and control is a common challenge. On one hand, brands need control over the creative process to maintain a consistent, risk-averse image.
On the other hand, too much control can be suffocating for creative teams. They need agility to produce creative work that helps brands stay relevant. For example, TikTok thrives on creativity and its trends change constantly. Stifling your team by trying to maintain too much control, particularly when working on a platform that requires speed, could result in subpar assets that aren’t relevant by the time they go live.
Straightforward creative processes and workflows
A poorly defined creative workflow is like a symphony orchestra without a conductor. Each member of the team can play their part well, but have a completely different playing style and nuance — resulting in 30 unique performances instead of 30 players creating one powerful performance.
Likewise, poorly defined creative processes lead to failed projects. When roles and responsibilities are unclear, team members step on each other’s toes and miss important steps in the workflow. Multiple versions of a deliverable may float around before teams identify the correct version. They waste valuable time just trying to do their jobs, emphasizing the need for defined processes and workflows.
Enhanced cross-functional collaboration and communication
Creative teams and stakeholders frequently have separate (sometimes clashing) priorities. Creative people are fueled by innovation and pushing boundaries, while stakeholders are focused on meeting business objectives and mitigating risk. This misalignment of goals can create conflicts and misunderstandings.
Efficient deadline and high workload management
Juggling multiple projects with strict deadlines is a superhuman strength. But continuously operating at max capacity is a recipe for stress and burnout.
Creative teams that jump between projects with different requirements drain their batteries, making it difficult to focus deeply and maintain high levels of creativity. For example, going from one all-hands-on-deck project like a complete site rebrand and redesign straight to another for a completely different client is a good way to get everyone’s wires crossed.
It’s also a surefire way to ensure that the quality of the second high-workload project isn’t quite as high as the second, as your creative team’s innovation and energy has been zapped by the first.
When every minute is accounted for with no time to debrief, creative teams have little time to play with ideas and take calculated risks in their work.
Complex workflow management
Keeping projects moving through the project workflow is often a major frustration for creative employees. Many creatives cite too many rounds of revisions as their biggest workflow challenge. Each round involving a new cast of stakeholders further complicates the workflow, introducing errors, miscommunications, and inefficiencies.
Streamlining or automating your processes can restore everyone’s sanity and save a significant amount of time. Teams with optimized creative workflows report a 40% reduction in time spent on project delivery.
Regulatory and brand compliance
Whether it’s a simple social media graphic or messaging for an ad campaign, creative assets must comply with external regulations and internal brand guidelines. Violations are usually detected during the review process. But if an organization lacks a meticulous review process, violations can fall off the radar.
Non-compliance comes with a slew of legal issues that can harm a brand’s image and reputation. Some violations are serious enough to permanently sever consumer trust. For example, coffeehouse giant Starbucks faced a deceptive advertising lawsuit in early 2024 for falsely claiming its coffee was ‘100% ethically sourced.’
Improved collaboration and communication
Remote work is now the norm — and is even a significant selling point for attracting top creative talent. Today’s teams are spread out across cities, states, and continents, which makes effective collaboration and communication vital. Without a centralized communication hub, creative teams resort to scattered emails, messages, and meetings. If they don’t have a platform to share creative assets, the team may also encounter inconsistencies in the final deliverable. There’s also the challenge of aligning diverse stakeholder viewpoints.
Best practices for effective creative team management
Addressing challenges is a solid first step to managing a creative team. It will allow you to move forward and begin implementing practices that help everyone deliver their best work.
Here are a few best practices to help you lead creative and design teams more effectively.
1. Use the right tools
The right tools can streamline your creative process and make collaboration feel effortless. Collaborative proofing platforms, project management software, digital asset management systems, and communication platforms are powerful tools that drive efficiency and high-quality work.
With these tools, teams can manage their workflows, centralize assets, and maintain the consistency of the creative work they produce. Rather than individually assembling the pieces of the same puzzle, they can collaborate in real time.
2. Lead by example and foster a culture of collaboration
Leadership shapes teamwork and collaboration within a team. Successful creative teams look to their creative operations manager or creative director to model these behaviors.
Leaders who foster a culture of collaboration embrace teamwork by actively participating in brainstorming sessions, leading with humility, and viewing disagreements as opportunities for growth.
For example, a creative director may take the time to ask a designer to explain their thought process rather than simply steamrolling over it because they have a higher rank. This can open up opportunities for discussion that may be educational for one or both parties!
While urgent deadlines and a relentless flow of projects will test their leadership skills, an effective creative operations leader or creative director knows collaboration reigns supreme.
3. Create a forum for open communication
Creative teams thrive on open communication. Your creative team management process should encourage team members to express their ideas, opinions, and feedback. Create a culture of transparency that allows every team member to share their thoughts without fear of criticism or judgment. This will foster a collaborative environment where teams can create innovative designs and solutions.
4. Establish and standardize creative workflows
Team productivity hinges on defining and standardizing creative workflows. Standardized workflows eliminate guesswork and confusion so teams can focus on completing projects. When they know the steps and handoffs in a process, they can transition between project phases without delays or redundancies. This streamlines the creative process, reduces rework, and optimizes time management.
Never sacrifice creative team ideation. We recommend separating the creative review and stakeholder review phases of your project. This allows creative team members to ideate and collaborate without revealing their raw ideas and previous iterations to stakeholders and clients.
5. Centralize creative feedback
Feedback propels ideas to polished deliverables. But when it comes through multiple channels and from different team members, feedback can create confusion and prevent progress. This is why creative teams need a centralized system for providing and managing feedback.
With Ziflow, you can streamline feedback on any creative asset from concept to completion. This allows your teams to deliver exceptional work faster. By centralizing feedback, creative team members no longer have to go searching across different locations. They’ll have access to feedback on every campaign, project, and asset at their fingertips.
By the time a project hits your client’s desk, they’ll see the polished version without all the internal creative work or decisions that went into the process. With creative collaboration automation, you can standardize this workflow so stakeholders only see a version of a creative asset after the creative team completes an internal review.
6. Automate as many creative project administrative tasks as possible
Is your team constantly repeating tasks when setting up review workflows? Automate your creative process so your team doesn’t get bogged down by mountains of administrative tasks. You can free up your team’s creative bandwidth for the work that matters.
With Ziflow, your workflow capabilities can be as broad or as detailed as your team needs. If you have creative assets that require heavier regulation, you can create multi-stage review processes with executive signoff.
Checklists help teams ensure assets meet security and compliance needs before moving on in the production process. You can also build single-stage approval workflows for less complex projects.
7. Set realistic deadlines
Creative teams need time to develop and refine their ideas. Realistic deadlines allow your team to work efficiently without feeling rushed or overwhelmed.
However, everyone has a different idea of what ‘realistic’ means. For a client, the ideal deadline may be now. A designer waiting on related assets before they can hit a deadline would need more time. Realistic deadlines depend on a variety of factors including a team’s bandwidth and team members’ strengths and limitations.
The best way to gauge a realistic level of effort needed for a certain project or task is to monitor average team-wide bandwidth and creative output throughout the creative production process. This includes tracking:
- The average number of versions per project or asset.
- The average number of comments on an asset before it reaches completion.
- The average time it takes to get a project or asset approved by specific stakeholders.
- The average time per project workflow phase, from internal creative review to client review.
8. Recognize and celebrate creativity
Celebrating wins — whether they’re individual or team accomplishments — is a key aspect of boosting team morale. When leadership recognizes team members for their hard work and contributions, team members strive to perform at a higher level.
By acknowledging achievements, leaders also inspire team members to push themselves and strive for excellence. They set more ambitious goals for themselves and have greater confidence to replicate success in future projects.
9. Encourage personal development and growth
A team is only as strong as its weakest link. Monitoring and supporting individual team members’ personal growth and development is key to maintaining a motivated team. When a team member’s goals align with the team’s overall objectives, this synergy fosters a greater sense of purpose for everyone.
Continuous monitoring will allow you to identify skill gaps and areas for improvement. From these valuable insights, you can tailor training, coaching, and support to help the creative professionals on your team nurture their skills.
10. Set clear goals and expectations
Successful projects start with clarity. This includes having clearly defined project objectives, timelines, and roles. To deliver high-quality work, team members must understand what’s expected of them and how their work fits into the larger project.
Clear goals and expectations also reduce confusion and help speed up the creative process.
11. Adapt processes to fit the team
Your team will evolve and may reach a point where old processes no longer work. Rather than rigidly enforcing those procedures, remain open to constructive feedback.
Tailor processes and workflows that fit your creative team’s needs. This empowers creative professionals to work in ways that best complement their skills and creativity. Think about your big-picture goals. Then evaluate your processes based on how they align with those goals.
12. Organize the team by discipline
Depending on the size and skill set of your team, it can be more effective to organize your in-house creative team by discipline. At Ziflow, our motion design team works as one sub-department, while our static and web designers work as another sub-unit.
We’ve found that by organizing our own creative team by discipline, we see improved synergies within the team and an overall better product.
Flawlessly achieve creative team management with Ziflow
Managing creative teams is significantly easier when you have the right tools. By incorporating clear objectives, encouraging open communication, setting realistic deadlines, and automating time-consuming tasks, you can create a truly collaborative, innovative environment where your team can thrive.
