As the Director of Marketing for Airwave, creativity is an especially important skill for Sue Jones.
Throughout her line management career Sue has empowered the team around her to be creative. Her style is to start by talking them through the business requirements, being clear on what needs to be achieved and by when. Then, having answered any questions, she leaves them to get on with it.
“The way that I enable my team to be creative is I’m not prescriptive. I think it’s very important that I allow them to develop ideas, concepts and content in their own style, firstly to get the best out of them and secondly it gets you some different ideas and different thoughts that aren’t your own.”
“I’m not breathing over their shoulders saying this is how you need to do it, this is how it should look because I know that they will come up with something really good. They’ll work with key people, they’ll work with external agencies, and they’ll tap into their own network to come up with some new creative ideas.”
When it comes to developing her own creativity skills, Sue supplements her own research by doing a lot of networking.
She combines formal opportunities, such as everywoman’s events, with bouncing ideas off friends in different industries to gather their feedback as she finds that constantly asking people for new ideas and being inquisitive about similar activities they may have done helps keep her creativity fresh.
“We’re in the process of setting up our own women’s network within Airwave. It’s new for us so every time I’m out I’m asking have you set up a women’s network, how did you do it, what are the pitfalls and what are the great things that you did that could make us really successful.”
