Herding Tigers: The Creative Leader Podcast

One of the more concerning dynamics of the “everything is on the record all the time” world is that changing your mind – especially in a highly public way – has become SIN NUMBER ONE. If a politician or business leader evolves in their understanding of a topic, we call them a flip flopper. If someone alters their once-fierce perspective in light of newfound information, we call them a hypocrite or a traitor. However, one of the most crucial roles of the leader is to be a learner, and it is impossible to learn without being shaped and changed in some way. To be shaped, you have to open yourself to the idea that you don’t know everything, and that your present ideas could be incorrect, or at least incomplete.

On this episode, we discuss why it's important to change your mind (sometimes) and how to do it effectively.

The Herding Tigers podcast is back! We'll be featuring leadership conversations, interviews, and tips for helping your team do its best work each day.

Leadership is only lonely if you're doing it wrong. On this episode, discover the two types of relationships that every creative leader needs.

Join my weekly in-person meetups at CreativeLeaderRoundtable.com.

If you have talented, driven, creative people on your team, conflict is inevitable. Conflict isn't bad, it's just a by-product of the creative process. However, how you handle conflict will determine the health or dysfunction of the team. On this episode, we share three core principles from Herding Tigers about dealing with conflict in a healthy way.

It’s human nature to want to assign blame. Since the dawn of time we’ve assigned unseen causes to effects that we can’t explain. We even find ways of off-loading blame for our vices (the devil made me do it!) and our shortcomings (it’s just my nature.)

Much of this blame-shifting is in the effort to protect ourselves. We don’t like being seen by others as a failure, or as lacking self-control. There are sometimes consequences for failure that affect our job, our family and even our health. We also don’t like to see ourselves as a failure, and we do everything we can to protect our desired self-image.

When a culture of blame infiltrates your team, it can be devastating.

On today's episode, we share a few ways to identify a culture of blame, and several principles for dealing with it.

For a deeper dive, check out Herding Tigers.

After a failed project, many teams simply move forward to the next one, without a postmortem. This is a huge mistake. It’s important as a leader that you seize those failures and mistakes and turn them into growth moments for your team. Otherwise, people are likely to commit the same mistakes again. Some of the biggest coaching opportunities you’ll have are in the moments when an individual or your team has failed, and you have to seize them.

On this episode, we share a handful of questions to ask at the end of any failed effort to help you learn from them and move forward with confidence.

Leading creative work is like trying to organize something that doesn't want to be organized. You will face a number of unique pressures that can easily sidetrack you (and your career) if you don't handle them well. On this episode, we share three of those pressures, and offer a few questions to ask yourself to gauge how well you're managing them.

As a leader of a creative organization, your job may be to tell your client’s story through the work of your team. Your team is in the business of positively shaping the perception a market has towards what your client is selling. You are attempting to gain the market’s trust through creative storytelling and branding. If effective storytelling is as much a part of selling your client’s image to the market then why shouldn’t it be an important tool in selling your leadership to your team?

Lisa Johnson has spent years studying the elements of effective storytelling and has become a sought-after consultant by some of the world’s largest brands. She believes that one of the best ways for leaders to show themselves to their team is through telling stories. Specifically, she says that leaders should tell stories that reveal something about themselves that the team may not have previously heard.

On this episode, we share are a few kinds of stories that Johnson recommends leaders tell. This episode is excerpted from the book Herding Tigers.

Today's episode is sponsored by the Herding Tigers Workshop, and live event for you and leaders just like you. Check it out at HerdingTigersWorkshop.com

Leadership is hard. It’s a lonely role, you face crushing uncertainty with elevated stakes, and you’re expected to deliver not only on your own work, but also to corral the creative minds of others and parade them into the promised land. (Oh, and did I mention that it’s often thankless?)

However, leadership is also a tremendous opportunity. You get the privilege of helping others unleash their best work, and you get to have a level of influence on decisions that will often determine the success or failure of the organization.

When the pressure is on, and uncertainty is rearing its ugly head, there are traps that even the most experienced leaders fall into. When you fall into one (or more) of these traps, you put an impediment in your team’s path, and introduce dissonance into the organization.

On this episode, we share four common traps that leaders fall into when the pressure is on: deferring, blaming, bending, and hovering.

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This episode is brought to you by the Herding Tigers Workshop, a live event for you and leaders just like you that's designed to help you be the leader that creative people need.

Here is a core truth of leadership: if you are not inspired, you cannot inspire. Take time each week to inspire yourself and to connect with the deeper stream of your motivation. On this episode, we share three simple ways to stay inspired so that you can earn your team's trust and respect. Remember that great leaders have great rituals.

Learn more about Herding Tigers.

If you control the work of your team, their capacity never scales beyond the scope of your personal involvement. Great leaders set effective rails to help their team members make good decisions in the face of uncertainty. On this episode, we share the elements of a good leadership philosophy and how to establish your own.

Learn more about Herding Tigers at HerdingTigers.net.