Building a creative team sounds like a staffing question. You need more people, so you hire more people. In truth it is a question of quality. Every new person changes what a team considers good, and anyone who grows quickly risks losing exactly what the team was needed for in the first place.
At an agency, over four years, I grew the creative team for one of Europe’s largest retail brands from 7 to 22 art directors, with responsibility for hiring, development and the quality of the work. What I took from it has less to do with methods than with decisions you have to make early.
- Building a creative team starts with agreeing on a shared standard for good work.
- Hiring for attitude and judgement goes further than hiring for the most beautiful portfolio.
- Quality only holds when looking at the work together becomes a routine.
- A good team eventually decides without the person who built it.
Table of contents
Building a creative team means sharing a standard
A small team holds quality almost by itself. Seven people see each other’s work, they sit close together, and whoever sets the tone is visible every day. With every additional person, this quiet calibration gets weaker. Beyond a certain size nobody sees everything any more, and then it is no longer the team that decides what is good, but each individual at their own desk.
That is why, for me, every phase of growth begins with uncomfortable work: writing down what good work means for this brand. Not as a rulebook with fifty points, but as a few sentences you actually use when discussing a specific image. Anyone building a creative team needs this shared language before the third hire arrives. How strongly it shapes the final image is something I described in the post on art direction.
Hiring for attitude, not for the portfolio
A portfolio shows what someone has made. It rarely shows how someone has decided. The most beautiful work in an application is often the result of many hands, good budgets and a strong brief. What I want to know is something else: can this person explain why an image works, and can they cope when their favourite idea is not chosen?
I learned to talk less about finished projects in interviews and more about rejected ones. Someone who speaks openly about an idea that did not work shows judgement. And judgement is the quality that matters most as the team grows, because you can no longer bring it to every decision yourself. Talent can be developed; a missing feel for the brand is much harder to build.
Protecting quality as the team grows
Growth does not shift quality all at once, but in small steps. An image goes through that would have been reworked a year earlier. A shortcut becomes a habit. Nobody decided this, it simply happens because the pressure rises and the time for conversation shrinks.
What helps is not an additional approval loop but a steady rhythm. Regular, short sessions in which the team looks at the work together keep the standard alive. McKinsey describes how particularly creative companies treat creativity as a leadership task and work with clear goals and clear accountability (see here: McKinsey, Creativity’s bottom line). For a growing team this means: quality does not belong in the final approval, it belongs in everyday work.
Building a creative team that decides without me
The hardest step is the one where you step back yourself. Anyone building a creative team eventually has to hand over decisions they would rather make themselves. That only works if there are people in the team you trust with those decisions, and if everyone knows the standard by which they are made.
A second leadership layer helps: experienced colleagues who lead smaller groups and stand behind the quality of their work. Here, too, structure follows the question of who is allowed to decide what, as I describe in more detail in the post on marketing organisation. The goal is a team that does good work even when you are not in the room.
What I would do differently
I would write down the standard earlier. During a growth phase you take it for granted for a long time, because it is clear in your own head. For the tenth or fifteenth person in the team it is not. The earlier it is put into words, the less depends on who happens to look over whose shoulder.
What remains open for me is how AI will change the picture. If machines take over part of the execution, judgement becomes even more important than it is today. Building a creative team would then mean, even more than now, choosing and developing people who can tell good work from arbitrary work. What that means for the skills in a team is something I described in the post on AI literacy in the team.