Herding Tigers

If you have talented, driven, creative people on your team, conflict is inevitable. Conflict isn't bad, it's just a by-product of the creative process. However, how you handle conflict will determine the health or dysfunction of the team. On this episode, we share three core principles from Herding Tigers about dealing with conflict in a healthy way.

It’s human nature to want to assign blame. Since the dawn of time we’ve assigned unseen causes to effects that we can’t explain. We even find ways of off-loading blame for our vices (the devil made me do it!) and our shortcomings (it’s just my nature.) When a culture of blame infiltrates your team, it can be devastating. On today's episode, we share a few ways to identify a culture of blame, and several principles for dealing with it.

After a failed project, many teams simply move forward to the next one, without a postmortem. This is a huge mistake. It’s important as a leader that you seize those failures and mistakes and turn them into growth moments for your team. Otherwise, people are likely to commit the same mistakes again. Some of the biggest coaching opportunities you’ll have are in the moments when an individual or your team has failed, and you have to seize them.

Leading creative work is like trying to organize something that doesn't want to be organized. You will face a number of unique pressures that can easily sidetrack you (and your career) if you don't handle them well. On this episode, we share three of those pressures, and offer a few questions to ask yourself to gauge how well you're managing them.

As a leader of a creative organization, your job may be to tell your client’s story through the work of your team.  Your team is in the business of positively shaping the perception a market has towards what your client is selling. If effective storytelling is so much a part of selling your client’s image to the market then why shouldn’t it be an important tool in selling your leadership to your team? On today's episode, we share a few ways to excavate and use those stories to build trust with your t

When the pressure is on, and uncertainty is rearing its ugly head, there are traps that even the most experienced leaders fall into. When you fall into one (or more) of these traps, you put an impediment in your team’s path, and introduce dissonance into the organization. On this episode, we share four common traps that leaders fall into when the pressure is on: deferring, blaming, bending, and hovering.

Staying Inspired As A Leader

If you control the work of your team, their capacity never scales beyond the scope of your personal involvement. Great leaders set effective rails to help their team members make good decisions in the face of uncertainty. On this episode, we share the elements of a good leadership philosophy and how to establish your own.  Learn more about Herding Tigers at HerdingTigers.net.

How To Protect Your Creative Team

Know What Motivates Your Team

Leading a creative team can feel like trying to build a bicycle while riding it. What worked last time might not work next time, so it feels like you're always trying to figure things out as you go. On top of managing personalities and the complexity of the work itself, there are also a few unique challenges that creative work present: opacity, insecurity, and subjectivity. On this episode, we dissect each of these three challenges and offer some practical tips for overcoming them.

On the first episode of the Herding Tigers podcast, Todd Henry and riCardo Crespo discuss the differences between traditional management and leading creative people. 

How do great leaders unleash their team to do its best and most creative work? Join Todd Henry, riCardo Crespo, and guests as they discuss what the creative people on your team need from you, and how you can help to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy.