How to manage conflicts in a creative team?

Creativity is extremely personal, individual, and subjective.?

Creative work is peculiar, solitary, and averse to standardization.?

How do you then make sure that a team full of creative geniuses work in tandem to deliver efficiently and demanding creative work?

It is tricky.?

The obvious answer lies in core team-building practices; trust, communication, and transparency. Ask your HR they surely have a pamphlet on this.?

But I believe it takes more than that.?

Creative conflicts are not the same as other conflicts in a workplace. These are not driven by the incompatibility of work ethics or miscommunication or unequal burden of work.?

Creative conflicts are complex because creativity as a core value cannot be defined.?

Even when people share the same vision regarding a particular project, work in synchronized harmony, and trust each other’s capabilities fully, still find themselves at a chasm. At a gap. At a difference of opinion regarding creative decisions.?

Green for me might be THE colour for the upcoming brand campaign, but my colleague might find it absolutely bizarre. And this is the simplest of examples.?

This becomes even more complex while working on a campaign that's being spearheaded by different teams across different axes. Designers, writers, and videographers working in and across social media, community, business, marketing, and management teams.?

That right there can be the hotbed of arguments and roadblocks waiting to explode.

And the worst way to handle this is by trying to resolve the conflict.?

Resolution is not the solution.?

In trying to find a middle ground we often start micromanaging people, we start dictating their creative process, we try and balance out ideas against one another and end up being stuck with mere pros and cons.?

Creativity through highly personal also has a tendency to be highly inclusive.?

What I mean by this is, that more often than not what we term conflicts are actually superficial differences.?

Once people differing on a particular judgment sit down and extensively discuss their ideas they often reach the “solution” by themselves.

But this is a long-winded process and works better in tight-knit teams. It is a strength that teams develop organically over time.?

You cannot engineer creativity or calculate it. What you can do is let it evolve and allow it to take shape on its own.?

I am open to chatting if you want to know how we manage our brand team.