How to Protect Your Creative Team from Excessive Criticism

If you lead creative people, one of the most important things you need to do is to protect them from excessive criticism. Feedback (and even criticism) from you, the client, or important stakeholders is fine – after all, we don’t want a bunch of babies on the creative team.

However, in many organizations far too many people feel comfortable offering their criticism of creative work – even when criticism isn’t asked for and is off-base. That results in a beat-up team, and creative people who grow tired of the constant disapproval.

So what do you do?

1. Define exactly who can speak into the creative team’s work. Is it the CEO? The Creative Director? Certain managers? Clients? Who on the client’s team? Define the boundaries and let your team know that criticism outside that group doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t mean they won’t hear criticism outside that group, but it does mean they don’t need to listen.
2. Make sure you have a healthy team culture. When you lead a confident creative team, they’re much more willing to make changes in their work. Here’s where chemistry is important. The Jim Collins idea of “getting the right people on the bus, getting them in the right seats, and getting the wrong people off the bus” is absolutely critical.
3. Give the team access. A designer shouldn’t have to go through 9 layers of approval to get the sign off. Streamline the approval process, and make sure your team can reach out with questions to anyone in the organization.

Remember that critics are a dime a dozen, but leaders who can help their team move from bad ideas to legendary ideas are rare. There’s a time to look at what doesn’t work, but that should be done in an atmosphere of trust. Criticism always goes down better when it comes from a trusted and respected source.