Nobody teaches you how to lead a team. You learn it by getting it wrong in front of people who are relying on you, then trying to get it slightly less wrong the next time. I co-founded OpenMinds in 2009 and I have led teams of up to 30 across creatives, digital and tech ever since. What follows is the part that held.
A team is not the org chart on the wall
On paper it is a neat set of boxes and reporting lines. In practice it is many different people with many different ideas of what good work looks like. The job was never to force everyone to work the same way. It was to make sure every person’s version of good work pointed at the same outcome for the client. Get that right and the boxes mostly take care of themselves.
The clearest proof I have is the SEEK Asia virtual career fair. Launching a customised job-search platform across five countries at once, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong, meant the tech team and the marketing team had to move as one unit, on one timeline, with no room for “that is not my department”. Good work, to me, is exactly that: different teams banding together to turn a hard situation into a good outcome. No org chart delivers that. Alignment does.
Mentoring at OpenMinds grew out of the work, not a programme
I never sat down and designed a mentoring scheme. It grew naturally out of building the digital team, one conversation at a time. I am no-nonsense about the work itself. The standard is quick and accurate, and I do not move off it. But most of mentoring turned out to be listening long enough to understand what someone actually needed, which is often not the thing they asked for. Someone who wants help with a client presentation sometimes really needs permission to disagree with the client in the first place.
These days the clearest example is OpenCreative, a small off-shoot of OpenMinds that I lead, producing affordable, quality creative content from emerging talents. Those talents come through an agency programme we built on OpenMinds’ MOU with APU’s School of Media Arts and Design. Over three years we have taken in seven students. Two still work with us freelance, and two we are hiring full time. Degree graduates walking in, full-time professionals walking out. That is the programme working, and it is the most satisfying scoreboard I have.
How my leadership style changed without lowering the bar
When I started I was old school and strict. Over the years I moved to something built more on encouragement. The one thing I never touched was the standard. I do not hand out praise for every small thing either. Not every win deserves a pat on the back. But when we win big, it is always worth the mention. The proof I point to is not a number on a slide. It is that most of the people who came through OpenMinds have gone on to scale their careers, in Malaysia and abroad.
What running risk for clients taught me about trust
Part of my role is managing risk for clients while giving them the honest advice they need, not the easy yes. That only works when two kinds of trust are in place at once. The team has to trust that I will back their judgement when it counts. The client has to trust that I will tell them the truth even when the truth costs us something in the short term. Neither kind arrives quickly. You build both the same way, slowly, through being consistent long enough that people stop bracing for a surprise.
Leading a creative team through fast tool change
The tools have shifted more in the last two years than in the ten before them. Most of what I read about 2026 says the same thing: the teams pulling ahead are the ones rebuilding how they work around new tools rather than bolting them onto old habits, and keeping a human firmly in the loop on judgement and brand. That matches what I see. Leading a team through this is not about having every answer first. It is about being honest when you do not, and building people who are not afraid to say the same to you.
What I would tell someone leading a team for the first time
Your job stops being about your own output the day someone else’s growth becomes your responsibility. That is a harder trade than it sounds, and most of the discomfort in the first few years comes from not yet believing it is true. I have come to think brand building and people building are the same discipline. You invest early, before there is proof it will pay off, and you hold the standard while it does.
