Culture & inspiration
As a creative leader I feel driving culture, collaboration and being a spark for inspiration is just as important as great creative. And I'd argue that you can't get great creative without any of those three things. You need happy and engaged teams that feel they're growing and being challenged. These are just a couple of the initiatives I created to foster collaboration and build culture.
Spark
A group of four people in the Target creative department felt like we needed to kickstart the creative department a little and create some collaboration. We saw that we were a little siloed and thought that if promotions, store design, digital and product design could come together, talk and get inspired we could create better work.
Spark was created. It was a group that met monthly and brought someone from the industry in; a designer, writer, maker or other creator, to talk about what inspired them.
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We armed the speakers with our logo of sorts, which was just 'spark' set in Helvetica Bold, and asked them to create their own logo. Here's a handful of their designs.
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Spark was created and run by: Adam Reynolds, Ted Halbur, Travis Robertson and me.
Good Work Quarterly
At Upshot we found there was a similar problem where many creatives and planners didn't know each other the Head of Insights, Liz Aviles, and I found a group who were interested in creating a forum to create change.
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We saw that this could be an opportunity to not only connect but to grow. That's how Good Work Quarterly (GWQ) was born. It's an opportunity for our teams to share great work that they've seen created by anyone. They identify why it resonated with them (is it hard working, bold and brave, human, well crafted or does it transcend the space it's in. After people present this work we talk about.
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One of the great things about it is it gets people comfortable with presenting especially because it's not their work so there are no emotions tied to negative feedback. Plus it creates some great conversation about why work resonates with us. And in the end it inspires the team to create great work too.
Known & Tell
My creative partner, Corbett Trubey and I felt out of the loop when it came to creative coming from the entertainment side of Known. The agency was run in siloes and we felt some crossover would help collaboration while inspire us by seeing all the work we put out.
So building off the success of the previous two groups I created combined with some that he had seen, we created Known & Tell, a bi-monthly meeting aimed to bring the two sides of creative together.
We structured Known & Tell in two themes. One month would be the Entertainment and Consumer Brand teams sharing new work. While the other months we bring in guest speakers to inspire the teams.
Bring Your Kid To Work Day
When I left Upshot the first time we were all young and no one was thinking about kids. When I boomeranged back many of the folks that were still there, and some new hires, had kids.
I saw a great need to do a Bring Your Kid To Work Day because we all talked about each others' kids but never met them.
We didn't just want to bring the kids into the office... we wanted to put the older ones to work. They had stations where they concepted a campaign, came up with the visuals for a photo shoot and then took the pictures and, with the help of a designer, put it all together for a client.
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The best part... the people without kids seemed to like it just as much or even more as the parents. The kids loved it as well.