Coaching Creative Executives: Lessons from the Front Line

Over the past year, alongside my work with writers and artists, I’ve spent a lot of time coaching creative executives.

Film, television, theatre, dance, advertising, animation. Different sectors, different business models — it’s a fascinating and eclectic mix, yet the coaching and mentoring conversations share similar themes.

Creative founders often start a company from their own creative spark, carrying sole responsibility for creative output. This leads to a set of primary challenges.

Identity

Where does the person stop and the company begin? I like to ask the question what is the difference between you and your company? Often the answer is - there is no difference.

Combining the self with the company throws up some significant issues. It helps to separate the two and focus on the commercial company separately from the founding creative person.

In a commercial creative environment, the needs of the artist and the company are different.

It can be revealing to do the exercise of the Monday morning meeting with yourself. A kind of meta exercise where the founder plays both the role of themselves and the company chair or chief exec. Often, as a board member, they can see what the company needs to do very easily, but as the creative founder it’s much harder.

It can be difficult to combine the needs of the commercial company and the work the creative founder wants to make.

Clarity

Creative execs can have many demands and ideas pulling them in many different directions. There’s nothing wrong with this, and often the minds of creative people, my own included, are full of genius plans that never come to fruition. I’ve got almost as many short stories I’ve started and not finished as I have stories I’ve completed.

To get finished, clarity and focus is needed, and that requires energy.

It's useful to focus on what will work, and sometimes this can mean moving on from ideas that are passed their sell-by date, or just too difficult or demanding to complete. It can help to establish a process for selecting the ideas that will progress smoothly and those that will take a lot more resource and effort.

It’s important to focus on a clear goal and even more important to have a process or plan to achieve it, and a way of telling when it’s been achieved.

Goals are like ideas, we can all have them, but achieving them requires the hard work of planning and executing.

Isolation and Uncertainty

Knowing what idea to bet on is hard enough, but in the creative world there is the uncertainty multiplier. Even when we are making something, we don’t necessarily know what it’s going to be when it’s finished. But gatekeepers, boards and investors require certainty. So we have to talk with complete confidence as though the work is already complete, yet maintain a creative mindset, staying open to new ideas and directions.

Anyone who has ever shown a first-cut to a studio will be familiar with the impossibility of this dual mindset. Film director Stanley Kubrick was rumoured to run the fragile celluloid of a first cut through wire-wool before showing it to the studio, as a way of reminding them they are watching work in progress.

As a leader we have to be sure, and as an artist we have to be unsure.

Running a company we are left with very few people and places where we can say ‘I don’t know yet.’ This can be a very isolating experience. Uncertainty is both risky and essential.

Conclusion

Generic leadership advice and commercial planning can feel constructive, but if it ignores the complexity of the creative businesses and the people who run them, nothing happens.

What does help is space. Space to slow down, to separate the artist from the company, to understand what the artist needs and what the company needs. To do some solid thinking about where the artist is in the context of the work they are doing, and what the business really is. All this helps discover what matters the most and what to do next.

My role is rarely to provide answers. I listen carefully, ask the right questions, and — where useful — bring perspective from having built and led creative organisations myself. When clarity begins to emerge, practical next steps usually follow quite naturally.

Creative leadership isn’t just strategic work — it’s deeply human work.

When people are given permission to think clearly and honestly, decisions become lighter, and the path forward less tangled. Having a coach or a mentor can provide vital support in the journey through complexity to clarity, and it can stop creative founders feeling so alienated.

If you’re leading a creative company at the moment and finding it more complex than you expected, you’re certainly not alone. The work is demanding — but it doesn’t have to be done in isolation. There is support available, and space to do your best thinking to find your best ideas and an obvious way forward.