The Hard Truth About Becoming a Creative Director
The Hard Truth About Becoming a Creative Director
Brand Design Masters podcast EP 174
===
Announcer: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Brand Design Masters podcast, the show dedicated to helping you build the skills you need to design bulletproof brands for yourself, your business, and for the clients and customers you serve. And now, here's Philip.
Philip VanDusen: The following podcast comes from one of my recent YouTube videos or live streams. If you've ever checked out my YouTube channel, you know I share a ton of value there, so I'm now re-releasing the audio from some of them here on the podcast in case you'd prefer to listen as opposed to watching a video.
Sometimes I may make reference to an on-screen visual or two, but that just comes with the territory and won't detract from the content, I promise. Okay, so now let's jump into the episode.
Okay, so here's the hard truth. One of the biggest misconceptions [00:01:00] people have about becoming a creative director is that they think it's the ultimate creative job. They imagine that the higher you climb in the creative industry, the more time you get to spend doing the great creative work. But the truth is, the higher you climb, the higher you move up in your career, the less of your job actually becomes about design itself, and that realization catches a lot of creatives completely by surprise.
I've coached a lot of designers, art directors, and creative professionals over the years who eventually reach the point where they start feeling frustrated. They're incredibly capable creatively. They know their software. They understand branding. They can develop concepts. They can present work. They can execute.
W- Then they hit a ceiling because what got them to that level is not necessarily what will get them to the next level, and at a certain point in your career, being a great designer stops being enough. Just gonna say it And that can be a really difficult transition emotionally, because most of [00:02:00] us got into this industry thinking that we love making things.
We love aesthetics. We love the craft. We love the process of creating something from nothing. So once you move into leadership, once you move into being a CD, your value starts shifting away from execution and towards something completely different. Your value becomes tied to your ability to lead people, to navigate organizations, to communicate strategically, to manage complexity, and solve business problems.
That's the part that no one really explains to younger creatives. A lot of people think creative directors spend all day designing or having control over the creative studio, telling an- other designers what they should be designing. In reality, most creative directors spend their days in meetings, reviewing work, aligning cross-functional stakeholders, managing timelines and navigating politics, dealing with budgets and solving organizational problems, and translating business goals into creative [00:03:00] direction.
And honestly, that's where a lot of creatives get stuck. You want the title, you want the higher salary, and the authority that comes with leadership, and you still want to live almost entirely in the creative itself. You may wanna keep one foot in being a designer while simultaneously being an executive, and eventually those two things start really competing with each other.
And one of the things I've noticed over the course of my own career is that people who continue to rise are usually the people who become interested in the business side of creativity. They become curious about how organizations function. They start paying attention to budgets and operations and stakeholder management and project management and marketing and brand strategy, things like team dynamics, and also just leadership itself.
Because once you get to a senior leadership role, and that i- really essentially is what a CD is, those are the conversations happening in the rooms that you're gonna find yourself in. [00:04:00] People are no longer sitting around talking about whether something should be blue or green. They're talking about marketing positioning and competitive threats and organizational priorities, things like revenue goals and scalability and efficiency or consumer behavior.
And one of the hardest things for creatives, one of those hard truths to accept, is that leadership, a lot of the time, is much less glamorous than you might have imagined it to be. You spend far less time creating and far more time facilitating. You spend less time making the thing and more time helping other people make the thing better.
You spend less time expressing yourself creatively and more time building relationships and building systems and managing personalities and dealing with interpersonal conflicts than creating creative And to be honest, most creatives never really want that. They never really want that kind of m- managerial [00:05:00] responsibility, and that's okay.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to stay close to the creative itself. But what you have to understand is that there usually is a ceiling attached to that choice. At some point, organizations stop promoting people based solely on creative execution and start promoting people based on leadership capability and organizational value.
And this becomes even more important as you get older in the creative industry. In fact, some of the companies even have a name for it, particularly in the tech industry. It's called up or out, meaning if you aren't advancing, and that is getting promoted, eventually you're gonna be seen as having stagnated, and then before you realize it you're out I talk about ageism a lot in the creative industries because it's a very real thing, and by the time many creatives reach their mid-40s, even early 40s to early 50s, they start realizing that experience alone is [00:06:00] not going to be protection for them.
And in many companies, experienced creatives become seen as expensive overhead unless they've evolved into leaders, into strategic leaders who can influence organizations at a higher level. Remember, up or out. And that's why I always encourage creative professionals to move upstream in their careers.
Essentially, you wanna become harder to replace, and the way you become harder to replace is not by becoming faster at Photoshop than a 20-something designer. It's by developing the kind of skills that only come from experience, things like people management, communication, strategic thinking, relationship management, finances and budgets, organizational influence, business understanding.
Those are the things that create long-term career resilience in the creative industry. Now, here's a power tip. One of the things I've learned over the years is [00:07:00] that most promotions happen way before the promotion actually happens. And what I mean by that is you usually have to start doing that next level job before anyone officially gives you the title or pays you for it, and that can be frustrating, and that's just the reality of how organizations work.
Senior leadership needs to feel confident that you can already operate at that level before they hand you more authority, more visibility, and more responsibility, those pesky things that go along with a higher title and the higher salary. So if you're waiting for permission before stepping into leadership behavior, you're probably waiting too long.
The people who rise inside of organizations are usually the people who proactively take ownership. They volunteer for difficult projects. You wanna help solve problems outside of your immediate job description. You wanna make sure that you're making your manager's life easier. You wanna [00:08:00] step into anything that seems ambiguous or n- seems to have open questions that you can help solidify or answer.
You wanna make sure you're raising your hand when there's organizational chaos and say, "Hey, I'll take that on." And yes, sometimes that means doing work that technically isn't your job. But here's one of those hard truths. That's part of leadership. One thing I think a lot of creatives underestimate is how much visibility matters inside of organizations for your promotability.
You can be incredibly talented and remain completely invisible for years, and this is particularly problematic when people are working remotely. If senior leadership never actually sees you solving meaningful problems- Then that's a problem. Meanwhile, someone else who may not even be as talented creatively as you are, who is constantly presenting or leading initiatives or managing cross-functional projects and becoming [00:09:00] associated with momentum inside of a company, guess who's the person who gets promoted?
Now, organizations promote confidence and visibility. They promote perceived leadership. They promote trust. They promote people who make the organization function more effectively. And honestly, that can feel really frustrating when you're coming from a purely creative mindset. And that's because, of course- We all want the world to be a meritocracy, right?
We want to believe that the best work automatically wins. But organizations don't really work that way. Human beings don't really work that way. The higher you rise, the more your career becomes about relationships, and trust, and communication, and influence. And that's why when I coach creative pros, I often say that some of the most valuable periods of your career may actually be the ones that feel the most frustrating.
The difficult corporate environment, the overly political organization, the [00:10:00] complex stakeholder structure, the operational chaos, like I said before, those experiences can actually become incredibly valuable leadership training if you approach them in the right way and take some ownership, proactive ownership, that's visible.
Now, sometimes I refer to this phrase as getting paid for your education, and that's because what you're really learning here is how organizations operate. You're learning how to navigate complexity and how to manage people, learning how to influence outcomes. You're learning how to survive inside of an imperfect system, and those are the lessons that become transferable far beyond whatever company or agency you're actually currently in, and are transferable when you leave.
Here's another thing you might be missing. Transferable skills are everything. Creative execution skills tend to be industry specific, right? But leadership skills, those are portable. [00:11:00] Those you can take from any company, agency, client side, doesn't matter. It could be B2B, it could be big corporate, it could be outside of a design functionality entirely.
But leadership skills are one of those things that are true career insurance. The ability to lead teams, communicate strategically, align stakeholders, solve organizational problems, those are the sort of skills that translate across industries. Those are the skills that allow people to pivot to different industries, to move to consulting, or start agencies, or build businesses, or move into executive leadership later in their careers.
And honestly, I think this is becoming even more important now because of AI. AI is gonna continue commoditizing execution level creative work. It's just a fact. And that doesn't mean that creative professionals are going to disappear, as much as everyone seems to be saying that on social media. But it does mean that the human value will increasingly shift towards creative [00:12:00] direction, and judgment, and leadership, strategy, interpersonal relationships.
The people who thrive over the next decade are probably not going to be the people obsessing over tools. They're going to be the people who understand how businesses work and how creativity drives business results So if you're someone who wants to become a creative director someday, you need to understand the hard truth that the path is much bigger than becoming a better designer.
You need to become someone who can lead people, navigate organizations, solve problems, think strategically. That's the real job. And once you understand that, your career journey starts to look really different. So if this kind of thinking resonates with you, I'd love to have you as part of this community.
Subscribing is the best way to stay connected to conversations like this one. Stay creative, and I'll see you in the next one If you enjoyed this episode of the Brand Design Masters podcast, it would be great if you'd take a moment to give us a star rating and review on your favorite podcast [00:13:00] listening platform.
Also, if you'd like to stay up to date on all the latest creative industry news, trends, resources, books, and articles, as well as my latest YouTube videos and live streams, head over to philipvandusen.com/muse and sign up for the Brand Muse newsletter. It's an industry-leading publication that'll help you build and improve your creative practice, personal brand, and business.
That's philipvandusen.com/muse, M-U-S-E. Thanks again for listening, and bye for now
