Herding Tigers

1. Creative Leaders Prioritize Stability and Challenge

There are two things creative people need more than anything else: stability and challenge.

Balancing Act. Creative individuals thrive when their work environment offers both a sense of security and opportunities for growth. Stability provides a predictable foundation, allowing them to focus their energy on problem-solving, while challenge stimulates their creativity and fosters a sense of accomplishment. Leaders must actively manage this balance to unlock their team's full potential.

Components of Stability. Clarity is key, ensuring team members understand expectations and project goals, minimizing rework and wasted time. Protection involves shielding the team from unnecessary organizational demands, allowing them to concentrate on their core tasks. A stable environment fosters trust and encourages risk-taking.

Components of Challenge. Permission empowers team members to take calculated risks, experiment with new ideas, and push the boundaries of their skills. Faith, demonstrated through trust and autonomy, inspires confidence and encourages ownership of their work. This combination of stability and challenge creates a thriving environment where creativity flourishes.

2. Shift from Maker to Manager: Lead, Don't Do

When you do the work, the capacity of your team never scales beyond you.

Empowerment over Execution. As a leader, your primary responsibility is to empower your team, not to execute their tasks for them. While your technical skills may be superior, stepping in and doing the work yourself hinders the growth and development of your team members. Focus on equipping and resourcing others to maximize their potential.

Focus, Function, and Fire. Your role is to provide focus by ensuring the team's attention is directed towards the right problems at the right time. Function involves providing the necessary resources and processes for the team to operate effectively. Fire means keeping the team motivated by connecting their work to a larger purpose and recognizing their individual contributions.

Scoreboard and Dashboard. Track your team's progress using a scoreboard to measure concrete achievements and a dashboard to monitor team dynamics and overall health. This allows you to identify potential issues early and make necessary adjustments to maintain focus, function, and fire.

3. From "My Stuff" to "Our Stuff": Embrace Total Accountability

When you try to control bright, talented, creative people, they will eventually seek better horizons, because they’ll get tired of running into your overly constrictive ceiling.

Influence over Control. Effective creative leaders lead through influence rather than control. This involves establishing clear principles and a shared vision, then empowering team members to make decisions and contribute their unique perspectives. Control stifles creativity and limits the team's potential.

Leadership Philosophy. Develop a clear leadership philosophy that communicates your values, decision-making processes, and expectations. This provides a framework for team members to operate autonomously while aligning with the overall goals. Principles should be specific enough to provide guidance but general enough to allow for creative application.

Total Accountability. As a leader, you are responsible for everything that happens on your team, both the successes and the failures. This requires considering the impact of your decisions on the entire team and taking ownership of the team's culture, performance, and overall well-being.

4. Level Up: Establish Healthy Boundaries and Distance

When you fail to establish new and clear boundaries with your former peers, it will inevitably affect their willingness to trust you.

Power Dynamics. Promotions change relationships. Once in a position of authority, people will treat you differently. It's your responsibility to establish boundaries in your work relationships. Healthy and clear boundaries help keep potential conflicts of interest at bay and ensure that your team feels completely secure in how and why decisions get made.

Clear Expectations. Have an expectations-clarifying conversation with each team member very early in your new role so that you can set boundaries and show that you’ve thought through how you’ll handle conflicts between your work position and your personal relationships when they inevitably arise. The conversations should have three elements, in this order: (1) What has changed? (2) What’s the same? and (3) What can I do for you?

Avoid Approval Addiction. It’s not your job to be liked. It’s your job to help them do their best work. If you tend to be a people pleaser, it is possible to flip the script, but it doesn’t mean being a dislikable SOB. Rather, it means speaking truth to people in a way they can hear it.

5. Be the Muse: Coach Brilliance, Not Just Tasks

A friend listens to you, then offers advice. A coach sets the stage and helps you arrive at the answer yourself.

Unleash Potential. Every brilliant creative pro needs a coach to help them unleash their potential. You must help them become the best they can be individually while also helping them understand and accept their role within the overall team.

Builders, Fixers, and Optimizers. Help team members discover the work they are made for and that lights their fire. This doesn’t mean that they will love every task they do—no one does—but it does mean that they are generally doing work that gives them a sense of engagement and gratification.

Cultivate Discovery. As the coach, cultivate a sense of discovery and growth on your team. Allow people the opportunity to try new things, to learn from their mistakes, and to identify limiting beliefs. When they fail, take a pause. After a failed project, many teams simply move forward to the next one, without a postmortem.

6. Earn the Right: Build and Maintain Trust

You typically don’t lose trust in only one area. If you prove yourself to be untrustworthy in one situation, people tend to generalize that lack of trustworthiness to other areas as well.

Trust is Earned. In creative work, everything hinges on trust. Your creative team wants to trust you. In fact, it needs to trust you in order to do its work. If, however, the team has to screech to a halt just before a “right turn” because your direction has changed at the last minute or because things aren’t quite the way you promised they would be, your words will cease to mean much.

Don't Declare Undeclarables. It’s tempting to make declarative statements in the face of uncertainty, especially when you know the odds are good for your prediction’s coming true. This is especially tempting in creative work, where there is so much uncertainty that a little bit of solid ground makes everyone feel better for a while and relieves the pressure on you as a leader.

Don't Be a Superhero. As the leader, it’s natural to want your team to think you have all the answers. It’s tempting to think that they will trust you more if you are always the smartest person in the room. That’s why it’s challenging for many leaders to invite other people into their thought process. Instead, they feel the need to act like a superhero, invulnerable to attack and able to leap tall problems with a single bound.

7. Prune Proactively: Cultivate a Healthy Culture

With clear ground rules and a stable culture around your team, creative people know they have the support they need to take risks.

Culture is Grown. Your culture isn’t defined by a set of tenets or a plaque on the wall. It’s defined by what you do. If you say that you value boldness but always make the most comfortable decision, then people will cease to be bold.

Prune Ghost Rules. In order for your team to feel freedom to do its best work, regularly prune ghost rules from your life and your team’s culture. These are invisible limitations that people or teams place upon themselves for no good reason.

Fertilize Desired Behaviors. Consider what you are rewarding and what that says about what you truly value. If you routinely issue one set of expectations but reward something different (even unknowingly), then you are likely to get undesired results. Ensure that your rewards align with your expectations.

8. Stay on Target: Harness Collective Focus

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.

Focus is Bravery. The fear of missing out on opportunities, ideas, new clients, or a new trend often results in bouncing from shiny object to shiny object and failure to focus. It’s one of a leader’s primary functions to define what work truly matters and what’s only a distraction and to narrow the team’s gaze to the more urgent and important work at any given moment.

Be a Laser, Not a Lighthouse. Rather than telling the team where not to go, lasers give a general direction to go. It doesn’t prescribe a path, only a destination. There might be many ways to travel and eventually end up where the laser is pointing, but there is no ambiguity about the expected destination.

Hone the Focus. At the heart of all creative work are problems to be solved. How well you define those problems is critical to your team’s effectiveness. It’s easy to become distracted by attentional vortices, or organizational “attention drains,” that draw you away from the main problem.

9. Defend Their Space: Manage Your Team's Margin

If you treat your team like a machine, that’s exactly what it will become. It will crank out predictable, uninspired work.

Protect White Space. To help your creative team unleash its brilliance, you need to protect its margin. This doesn’t mean allowing the team to slack off or intentionally underperform but rather ensuring that your team has the space that it needs to go beyond surface (or first-order) ideas and get to deeper, more valuable thoughts and ideas.

Build Attentional Buffers. Attentional buffers are like gates in the wall that only allow important information through to the team. They protect your team from the onslaught of (sometimes irrelevant) information that is a part of organizational life and allow people to instead focus on relevant data that will help them deliver value.

Build Time Buffers. You are uniquely positioned to help the team avoid “meeting pinball,” just bouncing between meetings all day in reactive mode. One strategy to implement to help your team better manage its energy is to establish buffers between tasks or events that allow your team to reset, consider what’s next, and catch its breath between commitments.

10. Be a Leader Worth Following: Align Your Actions with Your Values

Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.

Define Success. Many people don’t have a clear definition of success in their own mind, so they spend their entire career—and much of their effort as a leader—chasing vapor. They navigate by gut, not by principle. They are drawn to opportunities that give them a sense of prestige or acclaim, whether that means more money, a better title, or more perks, and they lose sight of the body of work (and the life) they intended to build.

Lead with Integrity. To lead with integrity, you have to resolve your own code of ethics—a private set of principles—that guide your decision making and help you navigate toward your true definition of success, rather than chasing opportunities that could potentially lure you off course.

Create a Decision-Making Matrix. Use your core values as a decision-making matrix to filter important choices. I was recently in New York City with a few hours to kill, and I decided to take a walk down Broadway to absorb the sights, sounds, and—yes—smells of the city. As I walked past a retail shop, a handful of people poured out onto the sidewalk in mid-conversation.

Last updated: March 18, 2025