There’s a phrase I use a lot when talking about leading creative people:
Let them cook.
It sounds casual, but I mean something pretty specific by it. If I hire someone because they have exceptional taste, judgment, craft, or expertise, I don’t want them spending the next six months learning how to imitate me.
I hired them because they can do something I can’t.
Or because they see something I don’t. Or because I believe they can make the team better in a way I haven’t figured out yet.
So let them cook.
This sounds obvious. In practice, leaders are remarkably bad at it. We hire someone because their portfolio feels different. Their perspective is sharp. They have a point of view we don’t already have.
Then they arrive and we immediately spend the next few months sanding all of that off.
Here is how we present work.
Here is how we critique.
Here is what our design should look like.
Here is how I would solve that.
Here is how we’ve always done it.
Six months later, we’re frustrated that the person we hired to change the organization hasn’t changed very much.
Of course they haven’t. We taught them not to.
Hire for the thing you don’t have
One of the most important things I’ve learned about building great creative teams is that I’m not trying to assemble a collection of people who think exactly like I do.
That would make me incredibly comfortable. It would also make the team incredibly boring. I want people with strong opinions. I want people who have developed taste independently from mine.
I want the brand designer who thinks differently from the motion designer, who thinks differently from the design engineer, who thinks differently from me.
I want someone to walk into the room and show me something I never would have made. The temptation as a leader is to see that difference as something requiring correction. Sometimes it does. But sometimes that discomfort is precisely what you hired.A great hire should leave fingerprints on the organization. The organization should look a little different because they were there. If everyone you hire gets absorbed perfectly into the existing machine, you may have built a very efficient machine.
You probably haven’t built a particularly creative one.
Don’t confuse mis-calibration with lack of talent
One of the most creative designers I’ve ever hired came in swinging.
Immediately.
They had whimsical ideas. Weird ideas. Ideas that pushed the brand far outside of where it had ever gone before. And they weren’t shy about them. They would put them directly into public channels for everyone to see. Some people found that uncomfortable. And to be fair, a lot of the work was nowhere near the brand yet.
It would have been very easy to solve that by telling them to stop.
Run things by me first.
Stay closer to what we already do.
Learn the system before you try to change it.
But what I saw was something I didn’t want to lose:
Confidence. Curiosity. And a willingness to explore much farther than the rest of us were exploring.
The brand alignment could be taught. I wasn’t convinced the instinct to push that far could be. So instead of shutting them down, I protected the part I thought was valuable. I encouraged them to keep bringing ideas.
Then we spent several 1:1s every week going through them together. Not redesigning them. Not making them mine. Small corrections. Pull this part back. Push this idea further. This part feels like us. This part doesn’t yet.
Over time, something changed. They didn’t become less creative. They became more calibrated. And before long, they were bringing ideas that were still unlike anything the rest of us would have thought of, except now they were expanding the brand and raising the bar instead of simply sitting outside it.
The thing that initially made them harder to integrate became one of the things that made them unusually valuable.
Protect the thing you hired
I think this is one of the most important responsibilities of a creative leader. When someone joins a team, figure out what makes them unusually good. Then be careful not to accidentally manage it out of them.
Sometimes the trait that will eventually make someone extraordinary is also the trait that makes them difficult to integrate at first. The designer who goes too far. The person who asks too many questions. The person who challenges assumptions. The person who jumps between disciplines. The person whose ideas initially feel a little strange.
Your job isn’t to accept every behavior or every piece of work because “that’s just their creativity.” There is still a bar. There are still expectations. There is still feedback.
But there’s a difference between calibrating someone and conforming them. One makes their judgment stronger.
The other makes them easier to manage.
Those are not the same thing.
Learn where they light up
That same designer taught me something else. They wanted range. They liked context switching, moving between different types of design. They didn’t want to sit inside one narrow lane forever.
So I made them a promise. I told him I would pay attention. I would learn where they excelled. I would notice what kinds of problems gave him energy. And when I saw him having fun with something, getting unusually good at something, or finding a kind of work where his instincts became especially sharp, I would try to give him more of it.
And we did.
I think people tell you a lot about how they want to do their best work before they ever say it directly. You can see it.
Which projects do they volunteer for?
What do they obsess over?
Where do they suddenly have ten ideas instead of two?
What do they talk about when nobody asked them to?
What kind of problem makes them impatient to start?
Leadership is not just assigning the work the organization needs done. It is understanding the people you have well enough to create the conditions where their best work has a chance to appear. No role can be designed entirely around preference. There will always be work that simply needs doing. But when people know you are paying attention to where they are strongest, there is a different level of trust. They know you aren’t just trying to extract output from them. You’re trying to help them become more of what they are unusually good at.
But “let them cook” is not laissez-faire leadership
This is where the idea gets harder. Giving talented people freedom does not mean abandoning the quality bar. I believe enormously in autonomy. I also believe very strongly in saying:
No. This isn’t good enough yet.
Those ideas aren’t in conflict. They’re dependent on each other.
Autonomy without standards isn’t empowerment. It’s abdication. Standards without autonomy aren’t leadership. They’re control.
The job is holding both. I should be able to tell someone that the work isn’t there yet without needing the answer to be “make it the way I would make it.” That’s a very different kind of critique.
Instead of: “Move this here.”
It becomes: “This hierarchy isn’t working yet.”
Instead of: “Use this treatment.”
It becomes: “This doesn’t feel distinctive enough.”
Instead of handing someone the answer, you keep holding the problem. That can be uncomfortable.
It’s much faster to art direct the solution yourself. And sometimes you should. Leadership isn’t a religion. There are deadlines, emergencies, junior team members, and moments when the clearest thing you can do is simply show someone what you mean.
But if that becomes your default operating model, eventually something happens:
your team gets very good at asking what you think. And very bad at knowing what they think.
Talent doesn’t always come from the expected places
I love working with incredibly talented people. I want people with range, taste, ambition, craft, and conviction. But I’ve become increasingly skeptical of over-indexing on known designers, recognizable names, or traditional pedigree. Not because those things are bad. Because they can become shortcuts. A big-name company on a resume can feel like proof. A portfolio everyone already knows can make a hire feel safer. A large following can create instant social validation. But none of those things are the same as talent. And talent doesn’t always come from the expected places. I know that personally.
Years ago, I came into tech from the skateboarding, music, and fashion world. I didn’t know the developer-tool space. I didn’t have the obvious background. Someone took a chance on me anyway. And I soared. That experience changed the way I hire. I will take chances on people because someone once took a chance on me. Some of the strongest people I’ve hired were obvious on paper. Some weren’t.
Some came from the exact companies you’d expect. Others came from places that made you look twice. What mattered was whether there was something there.
Taste.
Judgment.
Curiosity.
Range.
A point of view.
And just as importantly: what did their talent do to the room?
The strongest creative teams I’ve built have had powerful individual voices. But those people could still be changed by one another. They could take critique. They could abandon an idea they loved. They could build on someone else’s thinking. They could recognize when another person in the room had better judgment on a particular problem.
They could be exceptional without needing the room to orbit them.
That distinction matters. I want extraordinary people. I just don’t need the world, or a famous company, to have already validated them before I do.
And I don’t need their extraordinariness to become the organizing principle of the team. Sometimes leadership is recognizing the signal before the pedigree catches up.
And sometimes it’s recognizing that the best talent creates lift, not gravity.
The bar can’t live in one person
I don’t want to build a team that knows what I would do. I want to build a team that knows what good looks like. Because if the quality bar only exists in my head, I haven’t built a strong team. I’ve built a dependency.
At first, leadership often means being the person holding the bar.
Not yet.
This feels expected.
Push it further.
Take something away.
Try again.
But if you do that well, something starts to change. Over time, the team should internalize it, challenge it, and eventually improve it. The goal was never to reproduce my taste across a group of people.
It was to help people build enough judgment that they could challenge the work without waiting for me. And eventually challenge me, too. A strong team should not become more dependent on the leader as it gets better. It should become less dependent. The standard should become shared. The judgment should become distributed. And the collective bar should become better than anything one person could hold alone.
Hire people for the thing you don’t have. Protect the part of them that made you want to hire them. Teach context without teaching conformity. Hold the bar without prescribing every answer. Notice where they come alive and give them opportunities to go deeper.
Let them change you.
Let them change the team.
Let them leave fingerprints.
Give them enough room to bring the thing that made you hire them in the first place.
Let them cook.
Freedom doesn’t mean lowering the bar. You still have to know when the dinner isn’t ready.
But if you’ve done the job well, eventually you won’t be the person everyone is waiting on to decide whether it is.
They’ll already know.