Empowering Your Creative Team: The Importance of Leadership and Collaboration in the Entertainment Industry
Writers need a team to help foster their creativity. We must develop a successful team and business and support a creative culture in an industry marked by the bottom line (if we view writing and entertainment as a business). What I've learned from building my own companies over the years is to empower creative people whom I've entrusted with my dreams, giving them the freedom to create, experiment, and even fail. This process has made us a more innovative, energized, and risk-taking team, where each member feels valued and integral to our success.
Writers may see themselves somewhere down the food chain, but I’ve always seen creatives as the center and the start of the food chain. Without creatives, there is nothing else. No product, agent, manager, investor, PR department, editor, producer, film or stage company, or publisher exists. Without the creative, there is nothing—absolutely nothing. My task in this brief essay is to inspire you to see yourself as the starting point and the determinate of all things to come. If you consider yourself the starting point, you’ll always have to consider this a straightforward question that will always drive the point home to where you are on the food chain: who do you think is in charge? The simple answer is that there is no one if it is not you. The writer, the creative, is the leader of the team. That doesn’t mean they must do everything, but they are delegating. That is the hubris a successful creator or business owner accepts.
If the writer is the brain, does that make them in control? Not at all. Control is stifling. I've worked in those stifling environments for other employers. Their need to control ruins many projects, relationships, and a team. Instead of control, the writer, who is the brain, must let the rest of the body do its work: the eyes see, the hands create, the ears hear, the mouth taste, the heart circulates, the lungs breathe, and the feet and legs go the distance. The entire team, each with unique talents, moves the project forward. But they must be free to do that. Creativity involves risk. Risk is not only in storytelling. Risk is also in giving up control and letting others feel comfortable bringing even their most far-fetched ideas for thoughtful consideration.
The creative alone, just as the brain alone, is useless. Every other part is vital and needs freedom to be what it is. If the left hand is dominant, then why, as my mother tried with me, make my right hand superior? Let the parts themselves support the whole in its unique and vital function and work as a team. In other words, adapt the team to fit the talents, not necessarily try to change others to achieve the task. If you deal with the latter, you must find new team members. A creative with no team to lead (or having a team and not getting out of the way or having the wrong team) is a creative who will fail.
Building a supportive and creative team is not just a choice; it's a necessity. It is vital. As the team leader, do you give the other parts of your team body the grace and permission to be uniquely who they are and bring to the team the things that only they can get without judgment at all from you? This openness and safety are the keys to success. I've tried to lead our companies, not my companies, but our creative company, which I share equally with everyone I work with in this manner. The rough product may come from me, but I am only helpful with the hands and feet that paint their pictures and run their distances. Where do you view yourself in the food chain, and how do you view everyone who makes up your collective creative body? Do they work for you? Or with you? I hope the latter. I hope that you are the starting point that offers encouragement through leadership. That's the essential trait.
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