Leadership As A Gift
A New Model for Creative Direction
We've all heard, or experienced, the horror stories: the tyrannical Creative Director throwing work in the trash, yelling across the room, stomping around the office, perpetually unsatisfied. It's a caricature that persists in movies, TV shows, and sadly, in too many real-world agencies. The CD as judge, jury, and executioner - an archetype that somehow keeps getting recycled despite its obvious flaws.
But these days are different.
Yes, hierarchies still exist on paper, but they've been fractured, flattened, reduced to a pile of gravel on the ground. For those of us fortunate enough to hold Creative Director titles, judgment can no longer be our purpose or method. The market is too tumultuous, projects come and go - won, lost, paused, restarted - and settling with any particular approach is no longer valid. That is now out-dated.
Creative leadership isn't about "getting your way" anymore. It's about guiding the way.
Creative direction is more of a guide than a demanding boss. The line between means and ends has blurred. I'm not making high-end commercials on expensive sets. I'm in the content game, and in content (which is most of the game these days), control is largely out of our hands. Agencies are bit players in the grand scheme, with tech, social, marketing, experiential, and countless other disciplines carving up ever-larger slices of the pie.
As this pie dwindles, so does the "kingdom" of the Creative Director.
I think the best way to describe the purpose of a creative director today is to provide “non-authoritarian collaborative leadership.”
Non-Authoritarian
There is no such thing as creative authority in our modern market. This shift away from authoritarian creative leadership aligns with the natural creative process itself. There's an inherent messiness to how ideas develop. They don't follow a linear path from conception to completion - they dip, rise, encounter obstacles, and transform. An authoritarian leader who demands straight lines and predictable outcomes fundamentally misunderstands how creativity works.
Creative work involves a delicate balance between raw ideas, creative exploration, and practical reality. The traditional Creative Director often positions themselves as the guardian of reality, the one who must rein in wild ideas, or push ideas to outlandish proportions. But this creates an adversarial relationship that stifles innovation. Non-authoritarian leadership recognizes that these forces need to work in harmony, not opposition. The true creative potential often lies in the imperfections and unexpected connections.
When we embrace a non-authoritarian approach, we understand that creative work isn't about perfecting every detail but about how all the elements come together to create something greater. We look past the individual pieces to see the big picture and focus on how the work makes people feel when they engage with it. This must include the team doing the creative work.
Non-authoritarian leadership also means acknowledging our own creative limitations. My unconventional path to creative leadership—through farm fields and construction sites—taught me how growth and building require patience, nurturing, and respect for natural processes. These lessons stand in stark contrast to the demanding, desk-pounding CD archetype.
Instead of imposing a singular vision, non-authoritarian leaders create space for collective creativity. They recognize that in today's fragmented media landscape, no single person can possibly grasp all contexts and connections. They understand that what's left out is as important as what's kept in. They limit their own ego to make room for the team's collaborative vision.
Collaborative
The "director" in Creative Director is misleading. The role isn't about directing so much as facilitating, mentoring, finding, inspiring, leading, shifting, recovering, and making the entire process feel like it's on rails - that it has direction. The title is a sleight of hand, a deliverable for clients more than an accurate description of what’s really happening.
True collaboration means recognizing that creative work follows its own natural rhythm, much like seasons changing. There's a time for growth and a time for pruning back, a cycle of expansion and contraction that can't be forced into the linear timelines that project managers crave. When we collaborate authentically, we honor these rhythms instead of fighting against them.
The creative process inherently involves both creation and destruction. For every concept we build, something else must be discarded. For every direction we pursue, others must be abandoned. This creative-destruction cycle is fundamental to developing meaningful work, and collaborative leadership embraces this duality rather than resisting it.
The collaborative spirit, for me, is always essential. If I could do everything myself at a high level, I would, and I wouldn't be thinking these thoughts - I'd be off in some solitary state of genius. But that doesn't exist. Collaboration is both the means and the end. Working together is the way to work, to reach one goal as a single team, where everybody directs in their own way.
In our modern creative landscape, we're not just collaborating with each other but with our audiences too. Our work exists in both physical space and mental space, occupying the complex intersection where individual imaginations meet collective understanding. The most successful collaborations recognize that creativity isn't just what we make, but also what people do with it once it's released into the world.
Leadership
In this context, does leadership even exist? The question takes us back to the idea of the CD as the lead decision-maker, and my stance is against this need to own both process and outcome.
When it's truly leadership, leadership is a gift. It gives others the ability to steer the course and make the right decisions in the parts of the process intricate to their practice - design, writing, UX, production, and many, many more. All these roles should be given to, fed, and allowed to lead their full expression. If creative direction can facilitate this, then the creative process becomes one of cyclical and iterative growth.
The most effective creative leaders understand that the real power lies in presence, not control. True leadership acknowledges that the creative process will always change, shift, and bend. Initial progress often dips low as we struggle with complexity and doubt. The best leaders don't panic during this dip or try to artificially accelerate through it. Instead, they trust the process, creating space for the necessary destruction that precedes creation. They recognize that negative momentum is often building the potential energy needed for a breakthrough.
Creative leadership requires a certain comfort with discomfort. The unknown, the uncertain, the unfinished—these are the territories where innovation happens. While other stakeholders may demand predictable, linear progress, effective creative leaders protect the team's ability to explore, stumble, reconsider, and evolve. They translate between the language of business (with its straight timelines and clear deliverables) and the language of creativity (with its meandering paths and unexpected discoveries).
The goal is to give up leadership to get it. This is the paradox. Leadership becomes not something you possess but something you release—and in that release, it returns to you transformed.
Beyond Authority
Non-authoritarian collaborative leadership follows a different path and leads to a different result. Yes, the deliverables will still be social content, video, print, digital - whatever the brief states. But the work will be more open, unique, calm, non-destructive, non-extractive, non-colonial.
The outcome won't demand attention; it will invite and engage. The entire outcome becomes the gift instead of the graft. And in this approach, it will be more capable of reaching people.
This is the goal, after all, from the very beginning: to reach people.