Managing creative people is a challenge at the best of times. In this highly practical session, Thea Hamren, Creative Director at Mr President, shows you how to build, motivate and manage your creative team

Course Outline This session is designed to coach anyone who is the leader of a creative department how to improve the quality of the work their teams produce. Thea does this by explaining how to put together teams whose talents are complementary and how to inspire better work out of these teams. From understanding how to connect with difficult individuals, to setting a creative vision and giving constructive feedback, you’ll start to see how to make your team happier and more creative.

In the process Thea elicits a better understanding of the qualities needed by a successful creative leader. She hones your ability to spot what’s working and what isn’t – and importantly, what to do when it isn’t. As always with D&AD Creative Training sessions, these ends are achieved by a busy, interactive and wholly involving day at the end of which you should emerge as a more pro client and more rounded creative leader. And there couldn’t be a more energetic or charismatic person to lead you towards that achievement than Thea Hamren. 

Learning outcomes, by the end of this workshop are:

• A better understanding on how to recruit creative people
• Better ability to define key team roles
• Setting out a clear vision for your team
• Motivating and inspiring your team even in challenging situations
• Utilising appropriate tools to manage poor performance
• Making time to develop the individuals within your team
• Improving the way your team interacts with the wider agency and with clients

  This course is suitable for: 

• Creative directors 
• Account managers and planners
• Creative group heads
• Art directors, designers or writers who aspire to become a creative director
• Those in positions of responsibility who are called upon to inspire those who work for them – for instance, managers of projects that call for creativity to be employed 

About the trainer 

Thea Hamrén is an award winning creative director currently at Mr President in London. Originally from Sweden, a Hyper Island alumni, she’s worked in Stockholm, New York and London over the last 10 years, from small agencies to big, creating campaigns for the likes of Sony, Coca-Cola, Bacardi, The Guardian and Greenpeace. She started off at design agency Syrup in New York & Stockholm, moving on to LBi London, through the merger of DigitasLBi, to finally being in the formative team of Mr President in London. 

Thea’s approach and learnings on managing and working with creative teams comes from experience of working in three very different creative cities, managing a range of different teams, whilst finding and developing her leadership style. She said: ‘As a creative leader you’re never finished learning, how you learn and listen are key parts of leading a team.'

Thea is a keen lecturer and facilitator of creative techniques for the industry and creative schools in the UK and Sweden. Her lectures range from the brilliant basics of creativity to creating purposeful work, and how to inject goodness in your agency.

In the fall of 2015 she started ‘Refugee Phones’ in London with a mission to bring connectivity to the refugees at our borders in the jungle camps in Calais, providing them with donated smartphones and SIM cards collected from the digital industry as well as private persons. 

She’s won some prestigious prizes such as Women of the Future and SheSays industry award 2015. And she has been featured on BIMA’s 100 top influential people driving UK digital 2016. 

Her work is on the global stage, with her last projects of 2016 taking her to Nepal, Kenya and South Africa.

Fun facts: She re-designed the brand for the DigitasLBi merger managing to make a unicorn the logo of the massive cooperation, to injecting positivity and imagination into the brand. Because as she said "Every time someone is negative in a brainstorm, a unicorn dies."

Quotes: "Creativity is the one natural resource that we all have running through us that never runs dry."

Please note all bookings are non-refundable.