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Flo Lau
Creative Leader | Marketer | Brand Builder

Flopinion on Creative Leadership

Quite often we only see the shiny part of a creative leader’s job. 


Any creative leader understands that running a creative team takes a whole lot more than exercising your creative talent and assigning work. Building process, stakeholders management, team design, career pathing, creating a platform to amplify your team’s work and value internally and externally, etc. There are days I spend hours building charts and slides, then weeks to build momentum and months to see an impact. 
Below are timelines and processes I built out for my teams to 1. connect with multiple key marketing channels' stakeholders, 2. brainstorm creative ideas and participate in a pitching process.



What makes a creative leader's role so distinctive from other leaders?

Creatives are passionate and innately emotion-driven. Their best works are prone to subjectivity and criticisms. Building a safe environment and a streamlined process for a creative team to do their best work while empowering them to thrive within the company requires an extra amount of empathy, and extra effort of strategizing, leading, coaching, and executing. (and I love it!) I design and hire my team with diversity & inclusivity in mind. More than just genders and cultural backgrounds, I also hire from different age groups and career experiences. I strongly believe getting perspectives from various angles is key to strong creative ideas, especially in a global company. Having a sound and scalable team org and career path structure is crucial to the team's success. Understanding being a manager takes an entire different set of skillset, I pave ways for creatives to select their paths as expert individual contributors or team managers.  


Measuring individuals' soft skills is a great exercise to start a healthy conversation on opportunities for growth. I have each team member place him/herself on the below map, designed based on hunter vs. farmer creative archetypes, and map their self-evaluation against their managers' evaluation of them, so they can have a conversation about opportunities and what they need to work on. At the end of the exercise, we disclose the completed map with all team members shown – I believe a strong team is built with transparency and care, showing the map to the team creates a great team bonding moment, allowing your teammates to see your strengths and weaknesses, so the team can help one another to succeed and produce their best work.


Making the unmeasurable measurable. 


As an in-house creative agency, we sell creativity and speed that elevates our products and services in the market. One of the biggest challenge I face as a leader is to prove success on performance so intangible. Besides tracking CTR and VCR on our creatives and hosting readout sessions, I find opportunities to showcase the scope of creative work we oversee.



I set up a robust project tracking system with my project manager which enables us to make headcount requests and probably measure bandwidth.



If the talent is a driver, process is the vehicle. I am the GPS.

We can hire the best-in-class creative talents, but the review process, the meetings, and the bureaucracy can be draining and prohibit creatives to do their best work. It's my job to empower them and remove roadblocks so they can focus on their crafts. A well-oiled creative engine enables us to run faster with less fuel. I am a strong advocate and believer of having a dedicated Creative Project Management team to oversee creative bandwidth and constantly refine and improve our creative process, especially as the team grows and the scale of work increases. A well-established and well-communicated streamlined process is key to create a safe environment for a Creative team. Chaos happen, it's inevitable, but a solid process will make chaos exceptions, not norms.

Ask me about creative leadership, I love talking about it!