In the past I’ve said there’s not much formal training around for CDs.
It’s even truer for the type of CD who’s managing and leading more than creating ideas themselves. There’s much more of that to the role than people expect.
Whether it’s arranging workloads, performing reviews, organising training and development, dealing with salary issues, managing client problems, making sure jobs run profitably…
Much of what you have to do day-to-day is find the right balanced answer.
Listening to a lot of very opinionated people who are often disagreeing, assessing what’s happening and then getting to a solution that everyone is, at least, comfortable with if not happy about.
Beyond your past experience the main skill you’re using is negotiation.
And that’s something that you can train in.
Most of the different industry bodies offer great courses in negotiation or managing relationships.
It’s a skill that’s massively useful for creatives of all other levels too.
The hardest part of the job is getting your best ideas bought by the agency team, and then the client.
All great creative pushes people out of their usual comfort zone.
That brings questions and concerns.
Which are things that knowing how to negotiate well will help you to answer.
I often send members of my creative team on negotiation training. They’ve always come back and said it was the most useful training they’d ever done.
More so than the usual copywriting, art direction, tech and program training courses they usually get offered.
