Working with Creatives is a new and innovative consultancy that aims to help organisations everywhere work with, manage and bring out the best in their creative colleagues.
Alastair Pearce
I’m Prof Alastair Pearce PhD and I founded the organisation in 2020 having devised and delivered seminars on the subject of “creatives” for several years before that. Working with Creatives encapsulates my thirty years’ experience working within and leading creative organisations around the world whilst steadily learning how to manage and work with creative people.
I have led organisations in both Europe and South East Asia including colleges training creatives: designers, artists, musicians, photographers, actors, dancers, marketeers… The thread linking them all is creativity.
The two key lessons I have learnt over the last thirty years are that creatives can be managed – yes, it’s true – and that the skills the manager needs are the same regardless of the specific area of creativity. So, if your organisation employs creative people, Working with Creatives can help you.
And I have always been a bit creative myself: used to write music, now it’s novels, poetry and management. ‘Management’, creative!? Oh yes, good managers must be creative especially when managing colleagues who are creative themselves.
How I Learned To Work With Creatives
I managed a big arts college in the UK - lots of musicians, all very creative. After a bit I got the hang of it: their enthusiasms; grumbles; brilliance; fears and determination. Then I was asked to work with a group of actors. “Oh no Alastair, don’t go there” my musician colleagues advised. “They’re so different’. They weren’t. Next to a bigger organisation with a much wider range of specialist creative colleagues. And they weren’t ‘different’ either. Then South East Asia, new specialisms, new cultures, climate, languages, food and politics. But the same kinds of creative colleague with the same talent, drive and worries about creativity that I’d known back in the UK...
Since returning to Europe I have worked with creatives from many industries -commercial as well as overtly “creative” – and, although they have different disciplines, I am convinced they all share the same genes! And they lived happily ever after? Well, it took some doing, but most of the time, yes, the creatives were happy and their managers happy too. However, it was tricky, and it took me some time to learn how to get there. Although working effectively with creatives is both possible and fun, it needs a lot of skill. My organisation, Working with Creatives, gives you the knowledge you need.
Your Company
Do you have a picture of your organisation perfected? If so, I bet it stars people working well together. And is creativity central to that picture, yes?
So how are your creatives getting on with their alternatively talented colleagues? The picture in your mind or sketched in your Strategic Plan is the image on a jigsaw puzzle box. Inside are your employees – jigsaw pieces. Your task is fitting them together so that they can work happily and transform your sparkly picture into reality.
It's tricky: happy creatives doing things that also make your organisation happy, whilst working happily with other colleagues happy with those creatives! Creative /Organisation / Non-creatives: there are some challenging interfaces to be sorted out. How can you achieve this? How can your organisation that relies on creativity work effectively and happily with the people who generate the creativity?
Your Company
Do you have a picture of your organisation perfected? If so, I bet it stars people working well together. And is creativity central to that picture, yes?
So how are your creatives getting on with their alternatively talented colleagues? The picture in your mind or sketched in your Strategic Plan is the image on a jigsaw puzzle box. Inside are your employees – jigsaw pieces. Your task is fitting them together so that they can work happily and transform your sparkly picture into reality.
It's tricky: happy creatives doing things that also make your organisation happy, whilst working happily with other colleagues happy with those creatives! Creative /Organisation / Non-creatives: there are some challenging interfaces to be sorted out. How can you achieve this? How can your organisation that relies on creativity work effectively and happily with the people who generate the creativity?
Cost of Our Services
The cost of employing Working with Creatives varies with the type of engagement required. It is defined though discussion with Working With Creatives and depends on the degree of customisation of materials required, the duration of engagement and the type of delivery – workshop, reports or mentoring.
Get in touch with us to find out more.
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