Creative, Technical, and Business leaders often don't understand each other. Intentions get lost in translation. Confusion occurs because of a lack of a shared understanding. I often overhear conversations between Marketing, Technology, Product, Sales, Finance, and Business leaders and it is like they have landed in Japan and they are trying to talk French!
I tell many stories of the brilliant ways creative, technical, and business leaders can form a symbiotic relationship in my virtual interactive experiences. If you haven't yet heard me talk about this, for the next three VAL-uable Insights, I will be sharing Five Fast Tips for increasing your understanding of your creative, technical, and business peers...
First up, Embracing Your Creative Understanding:
Experiment with new ways of working to wake up your creative brain. Ewan Pidgeon, director of Creative Services at Ingram Micro, will regularly tell his peers to write with a different pen, sit at a different desk, take a different route to work or embrace other different habits to wake up their inner creativity. Doing so will help you experience what your creative peers do each day.
Immerse yourself in the brand, design and user interface of your products and those of your competitors. Form opinions about what you experience and discuss it with your creative peers. Ever wondered why your logo is designed the way it is, or why the website landing page navigates the way it does? Everything is done for a reason and the more curious you can be, the more it will help you start to see how a creative mind works. This will accelerate your ability to speak to and gain the support of your creatively minded colleagues.
Shadow a creative colleague. Chris Capossela, chief marketing officer of Microsoft, regularly shares on his social-media channels pictures of himself being shadowed by engineering leaders. This helps set context, and lets you see the depth of thinking that goes into a creative brief. In the future, when you want to change or challenge an idea, you can practice your empathy for the work that came before it and the work that you will be triggering afterwards.
Attend a marketing event where industry experts are showcasing their work and ask your marketing colleagues what could be relevant for you. Perhaps you can take inspiration from the Farmers Insurance duo where the CIO and CMO presented together on stage at a Gartner's Evanta event I was also speaking at.
Follow creative gurus. One of my favorites is Bonin Bough, one of the youngest C-suite executives who was behind the first-ever 3D printed food product, a customized Oreo. Bough now shares his brilliance through TV shows and his social-media channels. He is perfect for bursting your usual bubble of voices to listen to. Once you have awakened new creative juices and understanding, you can then focus on how to embrace your inner technical genius...tune in for next week's VAL-uable Insights to hear Five Ways to Increase Your Technical Prowess, or if you are as impatient as I am - you can find out more in Chapter Three of Rapid Growth, Done Right.
How do you immerse yourself in the creativity of your company and industry? I'd love to hear...
To your continuous rapid growth,
Val
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