Many of the content strategists on my team were internal hires with strong copywriting skills and limited content strategy experience. One of the primary challenges for me as their manager is to build upon their verbal communication skills and nurture their strategic thinking abilities.

My goal is to:

• Foster a design thinking mindset

• Place high value on strategic thinking and creative rationale, not just execution

• Create a safe space where not knowing the answer is viewed as an exciting opportunity to learn something new, not a weakness

• Allow time for play and practice when learning a new skill or tool

Some of the tactics I’ve implemented are:

• Crazy 8 design challenges. Picking randomly generated topics levels the playing field. Low-fidelity marker sketches remove technical and artistic barriers.

• Reading design books—book club style. This leverages the writers’ love of reading and facilitates conversation about design. (This was actually the writers’ idea)

• How’d they do that Slack channel. Cross-functional team channel were people are encouraged to ask questions. The topics tend to be technical in nature and often start a chain reaction of surprising discoveries.

Career Pathing

My job to make sure that I understand where my team has come from, where they are, and where they want to go in the future. This level of clarity is beneficial for the employee and for the business.

Because the organizational architecture work I do at the department level has a direct impact on the career path for each person on the creative team, having one-on-one knowledge of their career goals is crucial. It gives me a way to identify risk and anticipate how well business decisions will be received.

This knowledge also helps me to match people to specific project assignments in a way that supports their individual career trajectory and gives them opportunities to grow.

It’s important to think about the individuals on the team and also how they fit together in relation to each other. I use a variety of visualizations to study and communicate how our work and the skills of our people align. This is an ongoing process as we continue to evolve our products and services and hire new people to fill in gaps as they appear.

Frequent considerations:

• What tasks are required to do the work?

• What skills are required to complete the tasks?

• What skills do the individuals on the team currently have?

• Where are the gaps?

• What else could this team take on?

Critique and Industry Knowledge

The ability to critique and be critiqued is a vital skill for all creatives. I am responsible for creating a safe environment where critique is valued and appreciated.

One of the ways that I have found especially helpful when training early-career creatives how to provide feedback is to ask them evaluate and discuss work that was not produced by anyone on the team. This strategy keeps the conversation from being personal while still allowing the individual to sharpen their observational awareness and ability to communicate their thoughts on how something was done.

By working together as a team to critique websites that are similar to what we produce, we are able to use the same lens that we would use to view our own work. This lets us develop a common understanding and shared POV on industry trends and best practices and ultimately allows us to deliver a consistent message when talking to our partners.

Departmental Leadership
< See how I provide strategic guidance to the business

Process and Tools
Take a peek at a few of the tools I’ve created >