Why Is Communication Important for Creatives and Artists?
- Jul 16, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 3
Art has always been a way for creatives and artists to communicate and express their inner thoughts to the world. But communication is different in contexts outside of visual art. When they need to put themselves out there, especially in a working environment, approaches would differ. But let's circle back to how communication is a skill that can benefit artists in the long run in the setting of project management.
Various factors and essential skills contribute to what makes project management effective, but today, we’ll be covering one important topic: Communication. This is the third installation of our mini-series—for the skills of Time Management and Planning, refer to previous parts!
Table of Contents
TL;DR
Effective communication can significantly impact your creative projects, and it can become a habit if you intentionally incorporate these factors into your team interactions.
Challenges of managing a creative team can be a struggle, but implementing these best practices for communication will help smooth out the bumps and ridges of potential issues.
The Importance of Communication in Project Management
Communication in project management refers to the sharing of ideas, opinions, progress updates, and feedback between members of a team. When members of your team are aligned on the same page, it ensures that individuals working on the project are aware of expectations. Moreover, it prevents mistakes from snowballing into something bigger.
However, communicating with creatives requires different approaches and methods, like a more casual way of delivering a message or in a group setting.
3 Essential Skills for Effective Team Communication
Skill #1: Collaborative Communication
Collaborative communication refers to the seamless exchange of information within a creative team to achieve a common goal. It’s important to communicate—but how you do it is just as crucial.
This can be especially important to artists and creatives. Create an environment that promotes collaborative and creative communication to learn from one another. Putting multiple heads together allows for art to be enriched with multiple perspectives, styles, and cultures. Your creative projects can only benefit from this!
How can we practise collaborative communication?
Centralise information and communication: In communicating effectively, you can leverage the advancement of technology. Choose an application or platform that can help you and your team create an all-in-one collaborative space or dashboard. This will support the retrieval of related information, documents, and discussions that might have been overlooked or missed. Together, your team can address any issues, thus promoting transparency.
Engage in tasks concurrently: Work collaboratively by tending to tasks, documents, or files at the same time. This boosts transparency, cultivating trust and clear communication, which are essential to cohesive teamwork. If you create an environment that encourages a culture of projecting positivity in teamwork through freely exchanging ideas and opinions, bonds and team harmony will strengthen.
Skill #2: Candid Feedback
Feedback is really important to ongoing projects, especially within a team setting. It improves the quality of your art while strengthening teamwork and communication. Giving and receiving feedback is also a form of acknowledgement. It shows that you are paying attention and gives parties the opportunity to alleviate misunderstandings, which is crucial to effective and successful communication.
This form of two-way communication doesn’t just help with your project management needs but can also promote creative growth. Learning is a large part of art, and this process could be aided when you’re in an environment that appreciates and understands good feedback. Having external criticism allows for a fresh pair of eyes to view your work from perspectives other than your own, which can enrich the whole work.
How to give feedback effectively:
Understand your environmental influences: Online communication is often limiting; the lack of body language, tone of voice, eye contact, and facial expression might lead to misunderstanding and miscommunication. As artists who express their thoughts through art, they take advantage of communication tools provided by platforms to deliver their feedback with more than just words.
For instance, with TESSR Review from TESSR collaboration tools, you can leave feedback through comments, voice messages, and annotations. Handwriting your comments, adding uplifting emojis, or recording your appreciation are all covered!
Be sure to give constructive criticism: For feedback to be absorbed, the recipients should be informed of what the error is, why it should have been done differently, what the proposed solutions and suggestions are, and how much room for improvement there is moving forward. Besides that, try to stay positive during the feedback process, as being overly negative while giving vague criticism tends to confuse and demotivate your team members. So, avoid this to establish reliability and prevent wasted time.
Skill #3: Emotional Intelligence (For Creative Leadership)
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) refers to the capability to understand emotions of your own and others, and how you manage them—but to be more specific, there are five main components of high emotional intelligence:
Self-management
Self-awareness
Empathy
Self-motivation
Social skills
But how are these relevant to effective communication within project management?
Your emotions can fuel the way you respond and react to things—people with high EQ may avoid team conflict, de-escalate conflict, and relay feedback without offending. It’s hard to keep emotions out of work, and if mismanaged, they can pose a setback to you and your team members.
When you communicate with high EQ, you are also improving your communication skills. Especially for creative leads, they need to read their team dynamics and set a communication approach that fits them, as every team is unique. And with the practice of empathy and self-awareness, it promotes psychological safety while managing your creatives.
How to improve emotional intelligence:
Ask yourself more questions: Examine why you or someone else feels a certain way towards something. Consider how someone may react to one thing and how someone else could respond to that same thing. To put it simply, put conscious practice into empathy, and it may become second nature to you soon enough.
Active listening: Observe and pay attention to verbal and non-verbal cues while showing the other party that you’re listening. When you put a conscious effort into being active in a conversation, you’re practising your social skills—a key factor of emotional intelligence.
Common Communication Challenges (and How to Solve Them)
Maintain Creative Culture in Structured Environments
The Challenge: Findingthe balance between structure and flexibility to ensure that creatives thrive and stay on schedule can be a challenge. There is a binary perspective that sees the creative nature of artistic environments as being unable to flourish in an organised system.
Solutions: Thus, when setting up a system for your creative team, try methods like Agile and allow a set trial run period for them to get used to it. Check in with them as the weeks progress and note down any improvements or downfalls that could affect their work efficiency. Set clear project milestones but leave the day-to-day process to the team.
Manage Creative Personalities
The Challenge: Every creative individual has their own uniqueness, and a creative team is often filled with these individuals with diverse visions and work preferences. However, even a slight difference in perspectives and opinions can lead to the risk of arguments and mismatched ideas. Creative leaders are expected to lead a team to harmony by ensuring smooth collaboration with an understanding of differing thoughts.
Beyond just contrasting viewpoints, creatives are commonly sensitive to criticism. With their passion tied to their work, they can be attached to what they produce and mistakenly receive feedback as a criticism of themselves.
Solutions: So, normalise a culture of constructive and respectful disagreement to prevent unproductive arguments. Then, when feedback and review sessions are conducted, facilitate and encourage open dialogues by sharing vulnerabilities. This allows teams to be vulnerable on their own accord.
7 Communication Best Practices for Creative Managers
Managing a team is no easy task, from juggling a lot of tasks that involve problem-solving to delegating tasks and overseeing the entire process. But one thing that is often overlooked is how to communicate effectively with the creative team as a manager. Here are some tips to ensure smooth and collaborative communication:
Clear Guidelines to Work Within
Set clear boundaries to give your creative team a framework to work within. Unlimited freedom can actually be overwhelming and frustrating, while well-defined limits help boost creativity and keep the project on track.
Specify Inspiration or Direction
Never let your team members work on something vague or very generic inspiration from clients. Not only this lack of clarity but also it will lead to confusion and inefficiency. Instead, prepare a detailed brief with specific inspirations, references, or demonstrations to communicate what you and the clients envision.
Regular check-ins with the team
Never wait until the end of the project to give a long list of feedback. If you’re acting as the bridge between the client and the creative team, relay feedback to the team regularly. However, at the same time, you also need to monitor the changes in the client’s direction to avoid confusion in your team. Also, establish a firm stance on the aesthetic agreement to ensure alignment between all parties.
Encourage Input with Active Listening
Communication is more than just giving feedback. Listening is as much of a skill as communicating effectively. It helps to understand another person's perspective and thoughts. This doesn’t just apply to creative teams; it includes stakeholders when they share their feedback. Being able to listen to what they mean and relay it back to your creative team is a valuable skill that prevents potential miscommunication.
Set Clear Expectations
Establishing what is required of your team during a communication session helps set the tone for the entire session. Whether it’s for one-to-one conversations, emails, or review sessions, setting clear expectations helps steer the conversation in the right direction.
Practice Positive Body Language
Nonverbal cues can be powerful indicators of positive communication that can build trust and authenticity. Facial expressions, gestures, postures and tone carry weight, sometimes more than spoken words. While this can help creative teams build trust towards their leaders, it can also help leaders interpret their teams’ cues to understand them better.
Apply What You Preach
Advising and reminding your team is good, and especially applying them in your day-to-day actions and behaviours. It encourages your team to trust you more as you practise what you preach. In time, they will follow in your footsteps.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
How to communicate better with creatives?
When it comes to communicating with creatives, it’s important to be precise and clear about what you’re trying to convey, especially during feedback sessions. Giving vague suggestions will only risk the work being stuck in a feedback loop.
What are the important communication skills for leaders?
It’s important for leaders to be authentic and communicate with clarity and confidence. This should also come with empathy and respect so that your team trust your leadership and opens up their pain points when that day comes.
What is dynamic communication for art leaders?
Art leaders with dynamic communication are highly adaptable and blend storytelling with strategic approaches in managing an art team. Their ability to translate something that is inherently artistic can transform into actionable items.
Author(s) Bio
From Malaysia, Leia Emeera is a writer at TESSR, and a published author. She has been putting pen to paper ever since she learned how to, and has an anthology to her name, titled 'Ten'. Leia loves music, games, and her beloved Labrador retriever, George. She aims to further her studies in English Literature and Creative Writing the moment her gap year ends. 'Till then, you will find her sitting behind a desk, writing with TESSR.
Connect with her on LinkedIn: Leia Emeera
With a background in Arts English, Adilla has been a casual writer for various hobbies like parodies of animated shows and plots for board games. She loves to read anything and everything from fantasy stories to articles on tips and tricks. Now an advocate for mental health and effective project management for the creative industry. Currently, Adilla resides in Malaysia and is a creative writer at TESSR. To know more about her, check out her LinkedIn.
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