Henry - Herding tigers: be the leader that creative people need

There is always a well-known solution to every human problemneat, plausible, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Southern heat will make you do crazy things. In this case, the sweltering locale was Disney World, and the act of crazy was ducking into a gift shop to catch a break from the sun. I dont know about you, but I tend to avoid gift shops at all cost. I believe that they are designed solely for the purpose of grabbing me by the ankles and shaking me upside down to claim whats left in my pockets, after Ive already spent the equivalent of the price of a nice compact car just to get into the park.

My family strolled the aisles, and I discreetly slid to the side of the store to get out of the way. I found myself standing directly beneath an air-conditioning duct, and as I basked in my personal igloo, my eyes were drawn to a bright red T-shirt a few feet away. At the top of the shirt were the words How to Draw Darth Vader, and underneath were step-by-step directions for sketching the Sith Lord. (If youd like to see it, go to toddhenry.com/darth.)

Panel one: Start with a head and body. (Above was an illustration of a crude body and a simple trapezoid for the head.)

Panel two: Add a cape. (Again, a crude illustration of Darth Vaders cape.)

Panel three: Draw the face, gloves, and boots. (A third crude, cartoonish illustration showing the rough outlines of these things.)

Then, the final step.

Panel four: Add details and some shading. FINISHED!

Above these words was a perfectly photo-realistic drawing of Darth Vader, light-years (ha!) more sophisticated than the previous three panels. I still laugh to this day when I think about it.

I find the T-shirt funny not just because of the surprise ending, but because it is a great analogy for how leadership advice is often dispensed:

Have a clear vision!

Hire talented people!

Listen more than you speak!

And voil! Brilliant work pops out the other side, no?

Well, no. The actual mechanics of leading creative work are way more complex than our neat, plausible clichs can handle. There is very little black and white, or even shades of gray. Challenges to leaders of creative teams appear in shades of browna blending of multiple colors to the point that its difficult to discern what the original colors even were. Creative work must be figured out as you go, and the most sought-after people are those who can shape the chaos into form, meaning, and value. There are no easy steps or magic principles. The magic happens between panels three and four, and its really just the result of a lot of hard work by super-talented team members (who make it look easy).

If youve picked up this book, chances are that you are responsible for leading the kind of work I just described. You have talented, creative people on your team, with all the extreme highs and (occasional) frustrations that accompany them. You spend much of your day figuring out how to harness their collective focus, energy, and creativity to produce value for your organization and your clients. When everything is going well, you love your job, but when the work starts going off the rails, you start wondering whether you should look for a more sanity-friendly line of work. (I wonder if the post office is hiring? Or the DMV?)

Youve probably heard it said that leading creative people is like herding cats. I strongly disagree, and I find the analogy demeaning. If youve hired brilliant, driven people, its more like herding tigers, powerful beings who cannot be corralled but must be carefully, individually, and strategically led. However, many creative leaders I encounter dont have a clear framework for how to do this. They are promoted from within their organizations and suddenly find themselves leading people who were once their peers. Their only example of how to lead is their former manager, who was a total jerk (or a pushover, or a brownnoser, or if they were lucky maybe was a great leader). So regardless of how talented they might have been as team members, once promoted into a leadership role they find themselves asking: Now what?

This book strives to answer that question.

At the risk of telling you something you already know, there is tremendous pressure that comes with leading creative work. You have to juggle multiple stakeholders (your clients, your manager, your team) while somehow discerning the right strategy out of a thousand and one possibilities. You have to manage the egos of the highly talented and opinionated people on your team while simultaneously holding them accountable for their shortcomings. You are asked to stretch limited resources into something (Superb! Amazing! Stupendous!) that the worlds never seen, all while keeping your team sane and prepared for the next project kickoff, which is in, oh, a few days. And, as an afterthought, you also have to somehow manage your own career aspirations. In short, you are asked to do the near impossible.