Stop Wasting the Talent of Your Chief Creative Officer

By Courtney Feider

These days hiring a Chief Creative Officer is all the rage. Many companies see the value of bringing brand management and direction in house, and having someone who is entrenched in company culture oversee creative direction.

There’s just one problem. The success of this strategy hinges completely on whom they hire and what sort of leverage the CCO is offered in the organization.

Simply put: A CCO who merely handles ad campaigns and branding consistency is a missed opportunity. This person needs budget control, a seat at the table when executive business plans are being created, and the leverage to present big interruptions in the company—and have the company see them through.

The reimagined CCO role is something fundamentally different than it has been in the past. This person should not only direct the brand, but can also be an agent for integrated change—part leadership advisor, part strategist, and part creative thought igniter. A CCO should be a tactician who leads change management, innovation, and creativity throughout the organization—setting up strategic and thoughtful creative disruption, and implementing it with a process.

Why is this important? No matter your industry, innovation is the only concrete way to stay ahead of the competition. What better way to drive innovation than having every member of your organization working on it?

And cultivating creativity quite literally pays off. Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, reported that after training employees of a small California city in core creative competencies, managers received 55 percent more new ideas. City officials also attributed $3.5 million in savings and $600,000 in new revenue to the creativity training their team received.

Depending on the department, creativity and innovation can be complex skills to develop. The reinvented CCO doesn’t simply wield a palette and paintbrush, skipping through the office, cheerleading, and spewing colorful quotes. Instead they use concrete ideas and methods to help transform company culture and output.

This might just be your most important professional engagement this year, and here’s why:

Can inspire a new business strategy. If well selected, your CCO is your “free thinker” in the business meeting. They will see the holes in old thinking and be able to create bridges between where you are and where you need to go. When given autonomy and presentation opportunities in the business meeting, a great CCO can inspire new thinking in each member of the executive team and help light up every department and business initiative with a leading-edge approach.

Can drive the creation of a new product line. Your best CCOs are futuristic thinkers, constantly looking ahead, mitigating risks and rewards. In the case of developing a new product line, the CCO can help the organization understand what the marketplace craves and the artistry needed to make the product irresistible. They can use futuristic thinking to pinpoint trends and telltale signs of what’s to come. They can also help light the fire of creativity within the group that will develop the product, by leading the team through strategic brainstorm sessions and levels of development.

Can help you reach a new market. Promising CCOs are stellar conceptual thinkers who, with support from executive management, can help you engage and persuade a new community of customers to connect with your organization or product. Using branding know-how and the history of what resonates with customers, a CCO can uncover detailed audience segmentation by individual marketplace connection, and help match up the differentiators, artistry, and assets of the product to the audience’s need. They can help illuminate a strategy to connect the dots, making the audience feel like their attraction to the product was always their idea.

Can ignite creativity in lagging departments. A great CCO is empathetic and excels at leading himself/herself and others. In departments lacking creativity, he or she can establish new practices that will work the creativity muscle, honing the department members’ opportunity to connect to themselves to their work. A CCO can create and administer projects that help teams think outside of the box, and direct the setup of a physical atmosphere and even a psychological space that promote creativity. They can lead brainstorming activities and hold people accountable to developing the skill of creativity over the long term.

Your CCO should thoughtfully merge strategic business objectives, marketplace attraction, staff engagement, and company innovation to create results. If the CCO isn’t touching all of these areas, you’re missing the point.