While these habits may not be as well known as Stephen Covey’s for highly effective people, I have found that any creative team, from the most conceptual uber cool one to the most mediocre one can improve if their leader follows the following tips.

1. First, work with the creative army you have. From the most conceptual, innovative art director to the most mediocre one, there is no creative person that cannot become stronger with the right amount of encouragement, constructive feedback, and good natured competition. While hiring creative superstars is great, the first step should be improving the team you have.

2. The best way to prevent attrition is hire the right people. The time to be really hard on employees is before they ever become one. It takes a lot of time and effort to find the right person. It takes even more, however, to get rid of a bad hire. Because I spend so much time interviewing and getting feedback, it’s one reason I have had virtually no attrition on my team in 4 years despite an average annual rate of 30% at AOL.

3. Getting the clients, account manager, and creative team to be all Kumbaya. Let’s say that your client, the account manager, and the creative team are all in different rooms and you ask them, “What is the main purpose of this advertising campaign?” Would you be willing to bet $250,000 that they would all give the same answer? Because that’s what the client is risking. So before any concepting or planning is done, everyone needs to be as clear as the client is on what is the main purpose for spending all this money.

4. Creatives need to know the difference among CPCs, I2Cs, and PDFs. It can be almost a badge of honor for creative folks to claim they don’t care about metrics or how an ad performs as long as it looks great in their portfolio. None of them work for me. A beautifully concepted ad and a high performing one are not mutually exclusive. And the best concepted ones are the ones that delivery results and make the client double their ad spend.

5. If you’re not 5 minutes early, you’re late. One reason my team gets so much agency work is that their creative teams are so bad about getting campaigns done on time for a big launch (tax season, movie premieres, and Christmas wait for no one). So the client has to rely on us for the ads (not just for the placement). Fortunately, we always deliver on time and with better results than what the agency has previously run.

6. There is no separation of technology and creativity. Every creative person (including copywriters) need to understand the latest technical capabilities in order to take advantage of our medium. And the technical folks working on the creative campaigns need to understand the creative challenges and sense of urgency that most campaigns require. And while I am not completely fluent in Klingon, I know how to manage technical teams so they genuinely feel part of the creative group and truly work together with them.

7. There is no separation of ad agencies, clients, and creative departments. In the old days, the creative direction of an ad campaign was totally dictated by the ad agencies. I know because I started out as a copywriter with traditional media ad agencies (McCann Erickson, Earle Palmer Brown and WB Doner) and the thought of working with an interactive ad agency (not that we knew what that was back in the day) or truly collaborating with the client on creative ideas was just laughable. Now the climate is much more collaborative. Because I have full empathy where everyone is coming from, I am an effective creative liaison among all the groups. And in the end, it’s all about relationships and getting along.