Real Creative Leadership

It’s easy to know what your next career step is, but it’s not so easy to know how to get there. The best way to plan your creative career is to learn from the paths paved by creative veterans. In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Adam Morgan chats with Joe Esposito, creative director at IBM — and asks him hard-hitting questions to help you pave your own way to a fulfilling creative career....

Gone are the days of traditional, linear career paths. To build a successful and satisfying creative career, you have to chart your own course — and develop a whole set of leadership and business skills that complement your creative craft. In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, host Adam Morgan shares the top 3 leadership skills you’ll need, along with other tips for planning your dream care...

To guide you to your next creative career milestone and beyond, Adam Morgan has tailored a new curriculum for Real Creative Leadership Season 2. In this mini-episode, you’ll get a detailed overview of what’s coming up, including where to find an outline of topics Adam will cover this year. Get ready for more intriguing guests and more wisdom from Adam — everything you love about RCL, with some exc...

Artist and entrepreneur Chase Jarvis says planning your creative career isn’t about the map — it’s about the compass. In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Adam Morgan shows how to plan the next direction in your creative career, reminding us that it’s not a linear journey. You might bounce all over the map as a creative, but it doesn’t matter — as long as you know where you’re going. Real...

Content experts will tell you that consumers will only pay attention to short, fast content. But our customers aren’t goldfish. That’s why anomaly matters more than other factors like length and speed, as Adam Morgan explains in this episode of Real Creative Leadership. Memorable marketing content doesn’t have to be fast — but it should be unique. Real Creative Leadership is building a community t...

Your journey to become a creative director isn’t easy. But there might be some key practices you’re missing that could make all the difference. In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, learn how to tackle learning strategy, ask the right questions, and have purpose while working toward that promotion. Real Creative Leadership is building a community to address the issues, challenges, and benef...

We’re about to take away the mystery on how creatives build successful leadership careers. We invested some decent dollars into a survey firm that polled hundreds of creative leaders … and we’re ready to reveal the exclusive results into what it takes to craft a career in creativity. In this episode we explore the research along with a panel of top creatives from world-renowned brands — Google, Mi...

It’s not enough to just be a rockstar. Here’s the hard truth: even if you’re the best writer or designer in your agency, it doesn’t mean you’re cut out to be a creative director. To lead a creative team you need to have a handle on everything from managing relationships to controlling workflow to, according to Adam Morgan, “making things happen.” In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Adam M...

It’s time to connect khakis and creatives. Professional relationships are key to better execution of your creative ideas. But it can be difficult to strengthen those relationships when you struggle to communicate effectively outside of your creative sphere. John Knightly, CMO of BlueJeans, has great insights on how creatives can better communicate with their business peers — or with “khaki,” as we...

Learn how and when to start speaking business. As a creative leader, you now have a lot of new hats. Not only that, but you have new, non-creative peers. This means you need to learn how to talk business in business terms — or “talk khaki” as Adam Morgan calls it — to make sure everyone understands you and how you represent your creative team. Talking khaki means you know how to convey your ideas...

It’s easy for creative departments to get so bogged down in delivering on requests that they lose sight of the big picture — the real WHAT behind the work they’re doing. When that happens, creativity takes a hit. Katie O’Brien saw the impact first-hand. As head of creative for luxury & specialty brands at Wayfair, Katie’s first priority was to shift her team from acting as reactive order-taker...

Get strategic with your creative team. In the old model of creative agencies, there was a combined strategy and writing team to brainstorm the brand messaging, and then a creative team to take the messaging and “make it pretty.” But with the teams being separate, the actual execution of the message suffered.  In this webinar, Adam Morgan shares all the benefits of combining creative with strategy....

Too much frustration can arise from a language disconnect between creatives and business leaders. But both the creative and business sides of a company must learn to speak each other’s language if they want to succeed.  Tune in to our next Real Creative Leadership episode to join Adam Morgan and Douglas Davis as they discuss how designers can become fluent in the language of business and strategy...

Whether you’re the one giving it or the one receiving it, feedback can be a hard pill to swallow. It’s natural to respond emotionally to insufficient work, but it’s also natural to respond negatively to your work being critiqued. This emotional clash can put a strain on creative relationships in the workplace. Luckily, the feedback process doesn’t have to be painful. In this episode, Adam Morgan p...

Every team is different, but with the right combination of talent, technology, and strategic planning, you can determine the best way to flex and scale your team for positive results and creative inspiration.  In this episode, Adam Morgan sits down with AJ Herrera, vice president of Brand and Advertising at VMware, to discuss how he structures his team and what scaling looks like for them. Discove...

Strong teams don’t develop by accident.  A good manager doesn’t control every facet of a project or try to accomplish everything themselves. In fact, that mindset is a barrier to growth. In part four of How to Scale Your Creative Team , learn how to delegate responsibility so team members take ownership of their work and learn how to gauge whether each member is feeling over, under, or perfectly “...

Make your data work for you.  Part one of Why Creative Directors Should Care About Data tackled why creative directors should care about data. Now, in part two, learn how to use that data to its best advantage. The right data can inform your creative decisions, but you have to know what the right data looks like and understand what it’s trying to tell you.  In this webinar, discover how to read th...

Get ready for change. Change can come in an instant and navigating your team through growth or scaling back, or outsourcing projects or bringing them in-house, is the sign of a great leader. Many resources exist to help you as you scale, and knowing the right option for your situation will make your job easier.  In this webinar, discover insights about the process of scaling up or down:  Why you s...

Get the talent you need. In part one of How to Scale Your Creative Team , we discussed why scaling is important and how to know when it’s time for change. Now, in part two, dive into what skills you might need to add and how to find the best new talent.  Learn about the many different avenues you can explore when scaling, and get the answers to questions like:  What skills should I focus on scalin...

Scale smart. Parts one and two of How to Scale Your Creative Team covered the why, how, and when of scaling and finding new team members. Part three tackles how to make sure your efforts to scale are most effective. Creative leaders sometimes think of scaling as linear, but really it’s a set of careful steps you take as you regularly evaluate your resources and your workload.  Listen to part 3 of...

For creative inspiration, start with your data. Creativity and data don’t have to be enemies. We all do business in an insights-centric marketplace where data can’t be ignored — including its impact on creativity and the customer experience. In this webinar, discover how to use data as inspiration for your best creative ideas: Learn how to give your creative ideas a backbone that will stand up to...