I was recently looking back at old team photos from holiday parties and summer outings, in building lobbies, buses, or bars after pitches, on launch days or at festivals and conferences over the years. The further I go back, the less likely it is that these pictures are on my phone, but in folders, on Flickr, or they’re actual photographs in albums.
I have this collection of pictures of teams I was part of at AOL, at Disney, my teams at agencies big and small. And these pictures feel a lot like the pictures from my childhood — not the class pictures where people in the front row are doing that awkward semi-squat thing with their hands on their knees and their faces are frozen in a pseudo-smile because everyone’s saying “Cheese!” No. These pictures feel like the ones with school friends after exams, or of the cast of a play, or at a student union event: they’re mostly disorganized gaggles of people with tangled limbs and faces caught mid-sentence or laugh. The photos I have of my teams aren’t those staged, “hey! let’s get a nice picture of the whole team” images. Instead they are all tableaux of what it felt like to be part of that team, in that moment. And they’re all THE BEST.
I calibrated how often I’ve said over the years, at different places, “My team is best team.” I’ve had people tell me, “Oh, everyone wants to work on your team.” I have in every company felt like I had an entourage of excellence. And when I’ve parted ways with a company or a project has come to its natural end, I’ve always felt like I got to keep all the friends in the divorce.
To be clear, being the best team doesn’t mean the most awarded, or the ones who never lost a pitch, or the cast that didn’t kinda bomb that one performance. But at the eleventh hour, in the weeds, after the thing, and in the weird in-between down time when we just want to hang, and someone cannot get their shit together because they’re giggling so much, and someone else is having an ah-ha that they’ll bring us all in on in a few minutes… why does it always feel like the best team? How could that be?
How is it plausible that when I was at Disney, launching the first ever social network for kids, that project just happened to attract the world’s best project managers, animators, creative directors, and brand managers? How likely is it that when I worked in tech companies and agencies I just happened to be surrounded by the absolute best community managers, content creators, strategists, developers, designers, writers. Like, really?! Can it be feasible that by some kismet every time I’ve found myself on a team, it’s always been with the people at the top of their game, the best in their field, the most-skilled, best-trained, craftspeople in the world?
What if something else was at play…
Not to undersell or take anything away from any one of the people I’ve been on a team with but what if it had less to do with the individual people on a team having the best resumes and actually had more to do with the conditions we created together that enabled us to solve challenges through creative excellence? What if something about the way we came together made people feel welcome, feel safe to be brave, feel just enough intensity to know that now was the time to push, and that we — our team — had an inside joke, a set of secrets that only we knew, an audacity, a language only we could decipher that somehow invited excellence into our inner circle, our gang, our team?
My mentor recently shared with me, “People genuinely love working for you because they know you want to propel them forward to be their best.” And when I asked one of my creative partners of more than eight years what it’s like to work with me he said, “GiGi is always first through the door, which means she is willing to take the bullets. She owns what she is responsible for but she also holds others accountable so they can understand and grow. And she is so well versed in what everyone on the team does that she can talk intelligently and be informed about how they can help improve to betterment of the collective team.”
Now, if you’re still with me this might be sounding like some next-level horn tooting. But I assure you, I am humbly yet highly motivated in this moment in my career and life to figure out, deconstruct, and distill the complex alchemy that is the business of creativity.
A Beautiful Constraint, Creativity Inc., Where Good Ideas Come From… I read and reread all the books. (Send me more if you have great recs.) These dogeared, underlined, and travel-weary tomes continue to shape how I come to the work and what I believe to be true — and replicable in the business of creativity.
As I flicked through my pictures of my teams, allowing the warmth of their spirits to gather in the space around me, I came to see that my teams have always been the best teams. Not subjectively. Empirically, irrefutably, reportedly. Because part of what I do instinctively is to create the conditions in which the best rises to the top.
Alright, so how?
- Give people the context (the why, the explanation of the bureaucracy, the why of the why) and give them the benefit of the doubt that they are a). grown-ups and b). can handle knowing that there is at least context, even if it’s infuriating
- Jump in front of the bullets, give the team air cover, be first through the door (part of this is my own unbridled enthusiasm but also might be DNA, some cultural behavioral thing handed down from a couple of spies, literally, on both sides of my family)
- Honesty, candor, and being direct are non-negotiables but so is kindness, calmness, and fairness
- Push people to keep pushing in a direction when there’s something interesting there, it can feel intense but also exhilarating; do not give anybody the answers (jeez! I don’t have them!) but push others to get there
- Let it go. If an idea doesn’t have traction, quickly give everyone permission to drop it
- Genuinely, infectiously, almost romantically, believe your team will leave things better than you found them
- Make it always feel like your company, even if the team works for someone else. The problem that your team is going to solve through creativity; it’s your problem now
My friend who used to work on one of my teams still ribs me about this to this day, but he recalls a time when we had a meeting where he and someone more junior on his team were presenting where they were on an idea. The thing was an offering, a product, a solution that we were going to take to market. About five minutes into their presentation, apparently I said, “I’m going to stop you and suggest we cancel this meeting today.” Silence. Breath held. I went on, “It’s clear this isn’t where you want it to be, so go off, get it to a better place, and let’s reschedule this review.”
I even wince a little now imagining being on the receiving end of that.
I’m reminded of a CEO who once simply said to me, after I’d flipped him a slide deck, “Is this our best work?” Ugghhhh I want to curl into my own body and die in shame. It was not our best work. But none of this is shouted. It’s fair, calm, controlled. It has become my way of signaling trust and respect are mutual. When you’re on my team, I trust you to do what you can do. I honor your respect for my time with my respect for your effort. These create the handrails for a team to push.
There is so much more to learn from taking time to deconstruct what goes right. We often like to post-mortem the bad and simply high-five and move on from the great. There is so much else I want to explore about thinking styles, operating systems, communication, psychology, and the role human connection plays in the business of creativity.
And if you’re reading this and were ever on my team, we were the best. You were the best team. That was the best team. Everyone knows it.
