Interview with Lacey Jae Christman, Executive Creative Director

“I’ve learned to separate ‘this makes me uncomfortable’ from ‘this is a bad idea.’”

‘Word to the Wise’ is a Client Interview Series. I have had the privilege of working with many extraordinary creatives and leaders over the years and this is my way of sharing snippets of their experiences. Not just because they are inspiring but because they are relatable.

Lacey Jae has always been a maker. Long before she was leading creative organizations, she was drawing, designing, obsessing over clothes, objects, color, and the tiny details that tell you something about a person before they ever say a word. Today, that instinct shows up everywhere in her life: in the brands she builds, the people she leads, the glass she blows, the neon she bends, and the questions she keeps asking about how creativity can work harder, feel more human, and become something better than what already exists.

Over more than two decades, Lacey has built teams, grown businesses, launched brands, and helped shape creative cultures across fashion, advertising, healthcare, and increasingly AI and emerging technology. But the part of leadership she cares about most is not being the person with the best idea in the room. It is seeing something in other people, sometimes before they see it themselves, and creating the conditions for them to surprise even themselves.

She is known for having a very high bar, saying the thing that needs to be said, and caring just as deeply about the person hearing it as the work itself. She believes creativity should be brave, beautifully made, and useful to someone beyond the people who made it.

Lacey lives in San Diego with her husband, daughter Colette, and dog Gizmo. She is currently building an art studio onto her home, because apparently leading creative teams all day still leaves her wanting to make things with fire at night.

You’ve led creative teams throughout your career. What have you learnt about creating environments where people can do their best work? I’ve learned that people do their best work when they feel both challenged and seen.

Creative people inherently have to develop tough skin. We ask them to pour themselves into an idea, advocate for it, believe in it, and then somehow detach enough to hear that it isn’t working. “Care deeply, but don’t take the feedback personally” sounds reasonable until you’re the person who spent three days thinking about the idea at 2 a.m.

I’m candid. If something looks like garbage, sounds robotic or inhuman, feels too clinical, or simply isn’t landing emotionally, I’ll say that. But candid doesn’t mean giving everyone the same feedback in the same way.

With a seasoned Creative Director, I can usually be very direct. Sometimes we’ve generated 50 ideas and we’re only showing the client five. Part of leadership is knowing which ideas are worth pushing and which simply need to die. If I see potential, I’ll be specific about where it is. And sometimes the right feedback is simply: stop spending time on this one.

With someone earlier in their career, I’m more likely to explain why. Part of my job is helping them develop their own filter, not just telling them what I like.

The standard stays the same. The way I help someone reach it changes.

Psychological safety doesn’t mean making the work comfortable. Great creative rarely is. It means creating enough trust that people will keep putting something of themselves on the table, even knowing the idea itself might not survive the room.

Your career sits at the intersection of creativity, healthcare and leadership. What continues to inspire you about the work you do, and what keeps you curious?

I’ve always been drawn to the things people carry that no one else can see.

Before healthcare, I found that in fashion. A jacket that becomes armor. A bold color that enters the room before you do. Worn-in boots that tell you something about where a person has been. It was never really about clothes. It was about identity, protection, self-expression, and the quieter ways people try to be understood.

Healthcare taught me the same lesson with much higher stakes.

Behind every diagnosis is a person carrying fear, hope, embarrassment, family dynamics, financial pressure, grief, or a future they suddenly can’t picture clearly. The science can tell you what’s happening to someone. It can’t tell you what it feels like to live through it. People don’t experience a diagnosis as data. They experience it in their body, their family, their fear, and the plans they suddenly don’t know whether they can make.

I felt that very personally recently when I found a lump in my breast and went through a breast cancer scare. For that period of time, health took over everything. I wasn’t thinking about my calendar or whatever needed to get done that day. I was scared for my family. I understood in a very visceral way how completely a health issue can occupy every thought.

People live inside that uncertainty every day. If something I make can help someone feel seen, authentically represented, a little less frightened, alone, or confused, then the work is worth it to me.

The categories change, but the assignment really doesn’t: find the humanity inside the problem.

What’s a project, challenge, or experience that fundamentally changed the way you approach your work or lead others?

I don’t know that it was one project. I think it was realizing, over time, that I was learning how to lead from everyone around me, including some people I absolutely did not want to emulate.

I’ve had the privilege of working for an extraordinary Managing Director who taught me a tremendous amount about running a business, not just a creative department. I watched him have difficult conversations with candor without making people feel small. He knew when to challenge me, when to back me, and how to make it clear that both were coming from a genuine desire to help me grow.

And I’ve also had some pretty awful managers. People who lacked empathy. Leaders who created fear instead of trust. Narcissism. Gaslighting. I learned a lot from those experiences too because I kept thinking, I never want someone who works for me to feel the way I feel right now.

Then there was another shift: becoming the person other people came to for answers. Someone on my team will bring me a situation, I’ll start giving them advice, and halfway through I’ll realize either that I wish someone had told me the same thing when I was navigating that stage of my career, or that I probably need to take some of my own advice.

Creative people are often promoted because they’re great at the work, then expected to suddenly know how to lead people, run a business, and navigate clients. We spend surprisingly little time teaching them how. A lot of what I know, I had to figure out by being in the situation and working through it.

So leadership for me is less about having a finished philosophy and more about paying attention. What made me better? What made me smaller? What helped someone grow? What shut them down?

That’s changed the way I lead. I try to repeat the things that helped people grow and do a hell of a lot less of the things that made them smaller.

Creativity often requires courage – whether it’s sharing a bold idea, embracing uncertainty, or taking a different path. How have you learnt to navigate those moments?

I’ve learned to separate “this makes me uncomfortable” from “this is a bad idea.” They are not the same thing.

Some of the best ideas I’ve been part of made the room a little nervous because they didn’t look like the thing everyone already knew how to approve.

In healthcare especially, courage can’t just be provocation for provocation’s sake. The boldest ideas need an incredibly strong strategic spine. If I can clearly explain why something is right for the patient, the brand, the business, and the moment, I’m much more comfortable fighting for something unfamiliar.

Sometimes courage is defending the idea everyone wants to water down. Sometimes it’s telling a client the work isn’t there yet. Sometimes it’s admitting your own idea isn’t the best one in the room.

I’ve also learned that courage can look like standing your ground without becoming defensive. You don’t have to become louder to become stronger.

And sometimes it’s giving someone else the microphone when you know you could take it.

In your experience, what qualities distinguish a good creative leader from a truly great one?

A good creative leader can make the work better. A truly great creative leader makes the people better.

They develop taste and confidence in other people. They know when to push, when to protect, when to teach, when to challenge, and when to get the hell out of the way.

I also think great creative leaders understand that creative leadership is business leadership. You have to understand the client, the strategy, the economics, the people, and the culture. Great creative cannot live in its own little terrarium.

I read Creative Strategy and the Business of Design fairly early in my career, and I still recommend it to art directors moving into more senior roles. In school, we learn how to defend the work to a professor or Creative Director. Nobody really teaches you that the client may be thinking about revenue, market share, a board meeting, an angry sales team, or twelve other problems you can’t see. Understanding the business gives you a better chance of getting great creative made.

And generosity matters. If you need to be the smartest or most creative person in every room, eventually you build a room full of people who are afraid to surpass you.

My favorite moments are when someone on my team does something better than I could have.

That’s the point.

The creative world is constantly evolving. What shifts are you most excited or perhaps most hopeful to see in the future?

I’m fascinated by AI because it is dramatically shortening the distance between imagination and making.

A creative person can prototype a film, explore visual languages, build a world, test an idea, or show someone what was previously trapped inside their head much earlier in the process. That’s the part I find exciting. Not that everyone suddenly becomes a creative, but that people with strong ideas, taste, and judgment have more ways to express what they’re seeing.

The tools still don’t know what’s original, what’s emotionally right, or when something is finished. Taste still matters. Craft still matters. Direction still matters.

Ironically, the more digital everything becomes, the more I find myself drawn to physical craft. I blow glass. I bend neon. I laser cut anything that will sit still long enough. I’m building an art studio onto my house because making things with my hands still teaches me something technology can’t.

Glass is heat, pressure, patience, risk, failure, and repair. You learn very quickly that beauty is not an accident.

So my hope isn’t simply that we make more things faster. I hope these tools give great creative people more room to experiment, explore, and push an idea further.

Faster is useful. Better is still the point.

Is there a belief, principle, or piece of wisdom that has consistently guided you throughout your career, especially during difficult seasons?

The work is not really about us.

A client said something to me recently that I haven’t been able to shake. We were talking about scientists working on a treatment for children with a rare disease, and he said something along the lines of, “A scientist will work around the clock because the family waiting for this medicine is caring for that child around the clock.”

I’ve always been the person who will stay late, work the weekend, or build the thing nobody asked me to build. Most of the time it hasn’t been because I wanted someone to notice how hard I was working. It was because I could see something that might make the work, the team, the agency, or someone’s experience better, and I had a hard time walking away from it.

I don’t believe burnout is a badge of honor. I’ve actually had to learn that caring deeply doesn’t mean carrying everything yourself.

But I do believe deeply in service.

There are real people at the end of what we do. Patients. Families. Caregivers. Clients. Teams. Remembering that keeps me grounded when things are hard and keeps my ego in check when things are going well.

Is there a podcast, substack or book you’ve recently enjoyed that you’d recommend?

I bounce around quite a bit depending on what I’m curious about.

The Brief Bros. is probably the one I’d recommend first. I’m very aligned with Howard Ibach’s philosophy that the creative brief is ultimately a tool for creatives, not a document designed to impress a client. I’ve actually brought Howard in to work with strategists on writing better briefs because I think the quality of the work is often determined long before anyone starts concepting.

I also listen to The Creative Floor Awards Podcast, Brett Essman’s How in the Hell, Todd Henry’s Daily Creative, and recently Women at Work. I’m particularly interested in conversations about women at senior levels because the questions change. It becomes less about whether you can do the job and more about influence, ambition, boundaries, and how you want to use the authority you’ve earned.

Book-wise, I’ve actually been deep into fantasy lately because, honestly, sometimes you just need a break from reality. I spend enough of my day thinking about strategy, people, healthcare, business problems, and whatever happens to be on fire. I don’t think everything I consume needs to make me more productive.

Sometimes feeding your imagination is productive enough.

And finally, when you reflect on our coaching work together, what has stayed with you the most?

One idea I keep coming back to is gracious firmness.

I’ve always led with a lot of empathy, but I think for a long time I let that turn into over-accommodating people. Coaching helped me realize that understanding why someone feels the way they do doesn’t mean I have to take responsibility for fixing it. I can care about someone, be candid with them, and still hold my ground.

I can set a boundary without writing a dissertation explaining why I’m allowed to have one. (Admittedly, that one is still a work in progress.)

Another big lesson has been recognizing that leadership doesn’t mean carrying everything. Sometimes helping someone means solving the problem. Sometimes it means creating enough space for them to solve it themselves. I actually wrote in my notes, “give people the space to step up,” which sounds obvious until you realize how often strong leaders accidentally take that space away.

I still care deeply. I still have strong opinions. I still want to fix things.

I’ve just learned that sometimes the strongest version of me isn’t the one doing more.

It’s the one who knows what is actually hers to carry.

Amelia Kruse is the founder of Sageform, a conscious leadership studio, and creator of the Sageform Method°, a framework for creatives, leaders, and founders ready to lead from the inside out. You can learn more about working together here.