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Category Archives: Team Leadership

A Better Way to Meeting: Smooth Flight

Our resident Improv Performer and Trainer, Shana Merlin, leads us through an exercise, based on the work of Dr. Rick Brinkman, that will improve any meeting, whether video, conference call, or in-person.

Leadership Currency: What Is It and How To Earn It

Leadership Currency: A new leadership mindset for 2020

Carla Harris, speaker, author, and Managing Director at Morgan Stanley talks about two kinds of reputation and influence you build in your career, performance currency, and relationship currency. Combined, we like to refer to these as your leadership currency. In this video, Lead Trainer and Creative Executive Coach, Lauren Russo explains leadership currency and why effective leaders both earn it and spend it across their careers.

Why We Love Improv For Teams

Improv For The Win!

What is fun and can help you practice risk-taking and communication at all levels? Improv! In this leadership video, we’re talking about why we love this for teams.

Navigating Conflict in the Workplace

Three Tools to Help You Address Conflict

Deftly navigating conflict in the workplace is never fun, but it’s imperative to being an effective leader. In this leadership video, learn about our three favorite tools for addressing conflict at work. Get beyond the conflict by understanding priorities, scope, and social threat triggers for yourself and the other party.

Motivating People Up, Down, and Across Your Organization

How to Motivate Others

You inspire and galvanize your direct reports, but how do you motivate people across your organization? In this leadership video, get insights into our two favorite strategies for motivating others above, below, and across your organization.

Level-up Without Leaving Others Behind

Your People Deserve Better Team-Building

Team building should be more than just swag t-shirts. Design a team-building experience that’s worthy of your smart, talented, and engaged people. In this leadership video, we are talking about the three filters you should use to evaluate your next team-building experience.

Create a Leadership Development Program That Sticks

Leadership Development Programs: Four Resources to Consider

Considering creating a leadership development program for your organization? In this video, we discuss the four things you need to think about before you start.

Culture: How to Assess and Improve It

Why You Need a Culture Assessment

As a creative leader, you need candid feedback on how people experience their workplace. How do you get this intel when people aren’t exactly transparent with the boss? In this leadership video, we’re breaking down the what, who, and why of culture assessments.

Why Are We Here? Purpose Matters

Why Purpose Matters

Leading human teams is about much more than simply managing resources. There’s the transactional aspect of overseeing resources + workflow. There’s also a crucial relational component to managing people. In this leadership video, we’re getting relational. Let’s talk about how sharing purpose, or “the why,” with your people can lead to better work experiences and more sustainable results over the long term.

Lauren Russo Rethinks Structure

Meet our Creative Executive Coaches

At the Creative Executive, we work with some pretty amazing people. We work with teams who are striving to communicate and collaborate better. We work with corporate clients to improve the way that work gets done throughout the organization, with an eye towards a more sustainable culture and profitable outcomes. We couldn’t do any of this work without our incredible team of coaches who work alongside these clients. In this ongoing series, we’ll be profiling all of our coaches. Our talented coaching team helps fuel the magic we facilitate for companies, teams, and leaders every day. This month, meet Lead Trainer and Coach, Lauren Russo.

Culture-Centric Hiring: Win the New Talent Game

When it comes to the job hunt, it’s a buyer’s market these days. And job searchers are looking for more than just a set of benefits. They are looking for fit. What does this mean for organizations looking to hire?

It means you will need to work harder to find the right talent that will help you move your organization forward. Here are five insights to help your organization navigate this hiring frenzy and come out the other end with the right people.

How to Scale Management and Leadership in Your Company

We just finished a fun project with a client creating a Management and Leadership Style Guide. The partners of this company wanted to guide the development of their new managers in a way that’s meaningful both to them and to the staff they oversee.

Questions To Help You Troubleshoot Team Issues

With the fast pace and client-centric focus in creative environments, it can be hard to pause for a second to check in on how your team is working. Before you realize it, dynamics take root that can damage your productivity and your entire work culture.

When you know that something needs to change on your team, but you can’t quite pinpoint the problem, ask yourself these questions to help identify your issues and set a course of action.

Career Pathing: A Blueprint for Developing Leaders

Whether you call it career design, career mapping, role planning, or professional development, it is essential to map out how your people can gain the skills, experience, and expertise to grow toward a particular role, responsibility, or outcome. We call it Career Pathing.

Growing a Deliberately Developmental Organization

When was the last time you wanted to stay in a job where you weren’t being challenged or using your talents? Where you knew exactly what to expect every day? Where there were no surprises and you knew you would have the same role in five or 10 years that you have today?

That might work for some people, but we’ll bet this doesn’t work for you.

10 Things to Think About Before You Get Work-Married

I was recently asked for insights on what people should think about before becoming business partners.

Partnership is marriage. Period. When it’s great, it’s great, and when it’s challenging…you have to dig in. Partnership is being legally entwined with someone else (or multiple people), for better or worse. Read more…

What’s Your Superpower?

What do you love? What makes you smile? What interests you? What are you good at? Your superpower lies at the intersection of the answer to these questions.

What I Learned From Our C/E Immersion Weekend

As I was wrapping up our Creative Executive Immersion experience, I found myself at a loss for words. I was having a really hard time articulating my thoughts to the group because I was so blown away by their courage.

In the coaching world, the word courage gets thrown around like Snickers on Halloween, so it can often sound trite or superficial. But talking about courage and actually experiencing it are two very different things. During the Immersion weekend, I was witness to the depth and meaning of the word.

Grit in the Face of Adversity

Franklin Roosevelt, Maya Angelou, Albert Einstein, Walt Disney…history is full of stories of wildly successful people who have overcome incredible odds. This is not to say that FDR succeeded because he contracted polio at 39; FDR succeeded despite his disease. Surviving and thriving after a truly time-stopping, universe-questioning trauma often comes down to grit. We all have trauma and tragedy. Grit is what takes us from merely white-knuckling and surviving the pain to actually thriving.

What is grit? Read more…

What Really Makes You Valuable

Last week I had the honor of opening the Worldwide Partners’ North America Annual Meeting with a talk about The Humanity of Creativity.

Much of the talk centers around the four pillars of human relationships within your business that either motivates or hampers the way to creating great work and getting great results – Self, Clients, Talent, and Partnerships.

We also heard from Read more…

Creative work by its very nature is usually unorganized, passionate, and messy; navigating the field and managing creative people with professionalism takes thoughtful nurturing not required in other areas of business. The Creative Executive Method ® understands that and helps you provide structure and leadership without disrupting the flow and dynamism that’s key in a creative environment.

I’ve learned much about myself as a leader, how I lead my team effectively and ineffectively. The team response has been positive to the new conversations we are having.

My brain actually thinks differently since I’ve taken The Creative Executive Method ® . The way I operate on a day-to-day basis, the way I speak, and the way I listen have changed for the better. I feel I developed a stronger ability to think more critically when in a direct leadership or management situation. As a result, I’m a more effective producer, a more open-minded manager, and a much more intuitive leader.

Often I am moving too fast and don’t take the time to think about my style, my impact, and my team’s impact. I realized that taking the time to be mindful about the challenges we discussed, in particular around teams, is really important for me and for the success of my business.

If you want a course that takes the blurry edges of your career and pulls them into focus, I recommend The Creative Executive Method ® .

We love working with Lauren. We have used her at our annual retreat for two years now, and each time we have walked away with a clearer, cleaner vision of our firm, ourselves, and where we want to go next. She does a great job setting the tone for the day and keeping everyone on track. Having her facilitate allows the leadership team participate in meaningful discussions alongside everyone else. We couldn’t recommend her more.

I felt really frustrated, having been in advertising for a crazy long time, thinking it was too late to change. But we figured something out. Something great. And now I’m creatively inspired again.

We tasked Jen with helping to coach our Atlanta Sales and Strategy teams on leadership, growth, and representing yourself. She had such amazing energy and kept the team engaged through the new insights and strategies she shared, as well as her interactive approach. The team walked away energized and inspired to take the next steps in driving their careers forward.

The more business we won and the bigger projects we were given, the less control I had of my time. Through working with Jen, I made the time to not only prioritize what I really wanted to accomplish both professionally and personally, but to establish what I expected from my staff. It allowed them to grow and take ownership of tasks and let me get back to working within my skill set. It also let me keep up with some personal goals that had fallen into the background. Jen’s coaching helped Wexley grow by helping me improve my overall productivity.

I found myself thrown into the deep end, having to take charge of a team of 10 overnight. Jen helped me find my footing as a manager and gave me the confidence and skills to grow a successful, motivated team.

Working with Jen has been the best investment of the latter half of my 20-year career. I was stuck in my own narrative, and she helped me see the possibilities in a different, authentic, and valuable way.

I’m infusing more fun, energy, and creativity into team meetings as well as spending more time 1:1 with my team members. We are implementing this change across the company, and I am in the process of working with other executives at the company to do the same with their teams.

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