I find that in the world of managing creative teams, there's usually two schools of thought.

School thought of number one is I need to control the project.

I need to micromanage my team because I made promises of a certain level of quality.

I feel guilty that I'm not doing it myself.

So I want to make sure everybody's using the exact shade of red or blue or that typeface has to be what I would do. So the popular meme is the hand that moves over someone else's hand is the pixel effort that you might be the art director. And that might be you and you might feel really called out right now. So that's one school of thought. Why wouldn't you want to do that? Because what happens is you rob people of their autonomy, of their intelligence and creativity.

They don't know how to make a decision without you because every decision they've made, you've changed it.

So now they're second and triple guessing themselves.

So you've taken really powerful, sometimes very expensive creative resources, these wonderful people you've employed.

And you stripped them down to the level of an intern or VA.

It doesn't sound super appealing. That's the risk that you run when you manage teams like that. The other school of thought is, you know what? I hired really great people. I'm going to let them run free and we celebrate autonomy and we empower people. And then you go on to do what you want to do. So you're leaving the team, the cat, so to speak, to run amok. And so this is like an absent team management style, right? Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, you're frustrated, you're angry. They're frustrated. They're angry because you let us do this, right? There's no quality control at all. So you're like both options suck, Chris.

One, I'm doing all the work. I'm robbing them of autonomy. Number two, I'm doing very little bit of the work, but it suffers and no one knows what's going on. There's no leadership or management.

So there's a hybrid third model. I'm sure there's many more models, but the hybrid one that I

practice, it works something like this.

I practice the form of intentional incompetence. I'll tell you what that means. It's a weird

phrase, right? I'm intentionally incompetent because a person is really good and lots of things.

Your team will recognize you're really good at it. They'll feel insecure and they'll ask you to

solve all these kinds of problems. And over time, you wind up doing their job while paying them to do it. That's not good. You're not really incompetent. You know how to do lots of things, but you have to fain like you don't know how to do anything so that people can step up and take care of you, take care of the business, take care of the clients. They grow, the company grows, and you are stuck holding the bag.

Here's how I do things. I say, I've trained you. You've done great work. And at this point,

I'm going to leave it up to you to call upon me as to when you want my input on things.

So don't feel obligated to show me anything unless you're not quite sure.

And I welcome the work anytime you want to come in. So I'm not discouraging you from coming in

and showing the work and getting feedback, but I want you to be resolved that you know what you're

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