As a modern day society, we have been conditioned to study trends, trends on what clothes are popular, what's trending on Twitter or the latest food craze.We love to follow trends an emulate them, even in business...especially in business. Hip companies like Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Starbucks and others have proven that leadership through corporate culture and employee morale are essential to success in a twenty-first century business climate. Zappos' Tony Hsieh's leadership style of delivering smiles not selling shoes has been the topic of college courses and a best selling book.
What we learn from dissecting new school leadership is that the concept of the creative team is at the heart of every successful business. If you read from the industrial revolution handbook of leadership you'd be told to cherry pick the smartest and brightest of the Ivy League to run your team. But somewhere around the time that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out that this paradigm started to shift.
In advertising, the team chemistry is essential to winning and keeping business, but just how are the best ones ones built? While not an all inclusive list, here are a few tips on how to construct the perfect team.
There were very few people that loved working with Steve Jobs, however even fewer of them would claim he didn't improve their position professionally. He was brash, abrasive but brilliant. Combined with others at Apple, Pixar and NeXT, that were not like him collectively they revolutionized our lives. A poor engineer himself, Jobs managed to surround himself with his polar opposites, bringing into play constant tension and polarity. Perhaps unintentional, he created an atmosphere (especially his second time around at Apple) that refused to be happy, one that perpetually curious, in search of the products that would improve EVERYONE's lives.
In business, there's safety in the known commodity. Creativity, by nature, is the unknown and in effort to control the known variables we are conditioned to stick to the script, do what we did before. Creativity has no sequel and no two creative teams are the same but they are made of people. The more creative, you as the leader, can be in setting the scene for creativity, the more creatively lucrative... your rewards will be.
