Herding Cats: Managing Creative Types in a Corporate Environment

The conventional image of a corporate employee is highly structured, organized, logical, and left-brained. So what do you do as a manager when your most creative people are right-brained, messy, disorganized, and intuitive?

It does seem sometimes that certain departments in a company are more prone to artistic, intuitive types than others. The art department of a magazine, for instance, or a company's graphic design department seems to attract very talented people who thrive on chaos. But any department can end up with a creative type-the guy with the messy desk in the corner, the woman who can't seem to prioritize well-the misfit.

So what do you do? If your inclination is to fire or transfer the individual, or to try to impose a rigid structure on him or her, you might be making a big mistake. That messy desk and lack of organization might hide enormous creativity and insight.

One technique for getting the best out of creative people is to brainstorm ideas with them; you'll probably end up with more ideas, a surprising number of them good, than you'll be able to use in your lifetime. Gather all the ideas you can mine from these individuals, and then rein them in gently. If someone gives you ten ideas, pick one or two or three that are manageable and tell your worker to focus on them. Then review the result and brainstorm ways of refining the process. You'll get ten ideas; edit them down to two or three. Continue the process until the final product is what you want it to be You may find that, once you've been through this process several times with people, they will begin to foresee what you want from them and be able to impose some structure on the process by themselves.