The Hardest Part of Leading a Creative Team Is Knowing When Not to Fix It
I found the best description of creative leadership in a book about wandering.
Rebecca Solnit writes in A Field Guide to Getting Lost: "The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. Early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration."
She was writing about nature. I read it in 2020 and wrote it down without knowing why. I found those notes recently and finally understood what they were trying to tell me.
We romanticize creativity. We imagine it as expansive and energizing, a room full of good ideas and momentum and people building something together. And sometimes it is. But more often, especially when the work is real and the stakes are high, it looks like deterioration before it looks like anything else.
I know this from my own creative practice.
I paint. And without exception, somewhere around week one of every painting, I hate everything about it. Not because the work is bad. Because my vision moves faster than my hands can execute. What exists on the canvas is always behind what exists in my head, and that gap is genuinely uncomfortable.
What I have learned is that paintings are made of layers. Each layer has to be and breathe before the next one can land. Rushing it does not close the gap. It just creates a mess that takes longer to fix.
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and author of Creativity Inc, describes this as the fundamental condition of creative work. Early versions of anything are incomplete by definition. The discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something is being built.
I have confused transformation with failure. More than once.
When we introduced a new daily SOP to the team I’m part of, the first phase was exactly what you would expect. Some people loved it. Some hated it. Some didn't care. Everyone stayed in their corner of opinion for longer than felt comfortable. It looked, from the inside, like the process wasn't working.
But something happens when you hold steady long enough. The objective feedback starts layering in. People stop defending their initial reaction and start building on each other's ideas. One day it clicks. The new SOP plus the team's honest input becomes something better than what either would have produced alone.
That click does not happen if you intervene too early.
The leader's job in that moment is not to fix what looks broken. It is to know the difference between actual deterioration and the deterioration that is part of becoming something.
Solnit also writes: "Children are good at getting lost because the key of survival is knowing you're lost."
The same is true for creative teams. The ones who navigate transformation well are not the ones who avoid the chaos. They are the ones who can name it, hold steady inside it, and trust that decay is not the same as failure.
Here is what I have learned about when to actually step in: it is not when the project looks messy. It is not when people are pushing back. It is not even when you feel the discomfort of not being in control.
The signal to intervene is when respect starts to erode.
There is a difference between someone voicing a counter-proposal about an idea and making it personal. Creative teams will always have counter-proposals. Most of them have real value. The problem is when those proposals stop coming from a place of building and start coming from a place of ego. When it stops being about the idea and starts being about winning.
That is when you step in. Not to fix the project. To protect the relationships.
Everything else, the messiness, the disagreement, the uncomfortable phases where nothing seems to be working yet, that is just transformation doing its job.
Let it.
That distinction is one of the most important things a leader can carry into a creative process.
And I found it in a book about wandering.