2019 Leadership Summit – 20 Quotes from Todd Henry on Leading Creative Teams

Every year, my team and I attend the leadership summit and it is always refreshing, challenging and recharging for me. Easily the best leadership material in a conference that is out there. I try to share some of the highlights I took from each session.

Here are some thoughts from the session with Todd Henry on Leading Creative Teams:

  • We should aim to be prolific, brilliant and healthy.
  • Creative people need a challenge.
  • Creative people need stability.
  • A leader needs to speak courage into the people who follow them.
  • If you have low stability and low challenge, your team is lost.
  • A leader needs to know how much stability and challenge each person on their team needs.
  • Never assume that your people are with you.
  • Trust is the currency of creative teams.
  • It is the little things we do that cause us to lose trust in the big moments.
  • Leaders need to declare undeclarables. 
  • We breach trust by pretending to be a superhero.
  • We fail as leaders when we push people away.
  • Insecurity is at the center of so many poor leadership decisions and actions.
  • The place of your insecurity is the place you have the potential to do the most damage to the people around you.
  • Your job as a leader isn’t to do the work or control the work, but to get the work done.
  • We have to transition from leading by control to leading by influence.
  • Leaders, you have to take care of #1.
  • If you are not inspired, you cannot inspire.
  • If you don’t take time to fill your well, you won’t have any overflow for your team.
  • You owe it to your team to know what prolific, brilliant and healthy look like.