Editorial Team Leadership: Balancing Creativity and Management

Managing a team of creative, academic, and marketing professionals is not an easy task. As higher education undergoes a digital transformation and more learners are embracing e-learning, it gets even more complex.

In 2020, the global e-learning market, valued at $ 197.00 billion, was estimated to grow to $ 840.11 billion by 2030, at an accelerated rate, to keep up with the demands. 

As such, editorial leaders are grappling with multiple questions and challenges. For instance, should content products take a mobile-first, personalized approach? How can content management operations become more cost-effective?

This blog outlines the key challenges, as well as potential solutions. For instance, data-driven editorial team leadership teams can adopt the use of platforms like KITABOO to build relevant, inclusive, products and run efficient content management operations. 

Table of Contents:

I. Key Challenges In Editorial Team Leadership 

II. Why Balancing Creativity And Management Is Key 

III. Tips For Effective Editorial Team Leadership

• Align Business & Content Development Goals 
• Automate The End-To-End Production Cycle 
• Enhance Collaboration
• Boost Content Relevance 
• Protect Copyrights & Revenues
• Build A Data-Centric Culture

IV. Conclusion

The growth of mobile penetration and affordable data is nudging newer generations of consumers to take a mobile-first learning approach towards a wide range of activities – from shopping to learning. 

College students and professional learners, for instance, want to absorb information within the smallest amount of time. They aspire for more control over all aspects of how and when they learn. Editorial leaders are struggling with several challenges due to these rapid shifts:

Lack Of Data-Centricity  

With learner’s needs changing so quickly, content development teams need access to learner data, to help them keep up with their needs, and build relevant content. However, legacy content management systems have limited ability to analyze data and predict future trends. 

Lack Of Content Relevance 

The needs of college and university students are diverse. However, existing content lacks language diversity, relevance for students with unique needs, and a mobile-first approach. The editorial team leadership needs to invest resources in making content engaging, accessible, and relevant to every individual student. 

Lack Of Efficiency 

Traditional educational publishing production processes are time-consuming and labor-intensive. The manual nature of processes slows down the production cycle and makes it challenging for companies to take new products to market faster. 

Lack Of Collaborative Tools 

The content creation cycle has multiple stakeholders, from subject matter experts, and instructional designers to editors. There is a lot of back and forth between team members, which results in errors and duplication of efforts. Collaborating from multiple locations can especially be very challenging.

One of the top tenets for the editorial team leadership, today, is to ensure a balance of creativity and management in meeting their business goals. 

Harnessing creativity helps drive innovation in areas like instruction design, engagement models, and the quality of content products. This approach enables content teams to also use data smartly to understand their audiences better. 

On the other hand, attention to the management side of things helps publishing teams run their operations efficiently, and drive higher ROI as they scale. Adoption of digital textbook platforms such as KITABOO, for instance, helps publishing teams bring efficiency to their production cycle, and yet, be able to innovate and produce engaging content such as interactive eBooks.

Editorial team leaders can balance creativity with a strong management framework by implementing the following tenets.

Those leading editorial teams will need to pay attention to content development, as well as the business side of things. They will need to be invested in aspects such as operational budgets and the saleability of content products on the one hand, and the creative and innovative aspects of the content developed on the other hand. Both aspects need a long-term perspective to help build a sustainable and profitable educational publishing business that is also credible and puts student needs first.

One of the top shifts that all publishers in the higher education segment must consider is the automation of the entire content creation, publishing, and distribution cycle. By doing so, they can run with lean teams, reduce the production timeline, bring more innovation to their products, and go to market quickly. AI-powered automation brings more intuition to the entire process, offering recommendations to content teams at every stage. Team members can get more invested in the strategic aspects of their work.

More companies are considering shifting to the remote or hybrid model of working to save on costs and make the entire operation cost-effective. The adoption of cloud-based, digital publishing tools like KITABOO makes collaboration across geographies a seamless process. This software makes it easy to onboard new members, control access to team members, and collaborate as a team. Content can be accessed from a centralized database by authorized members, and teams can work collaboratively, completing projects on time.

Today, editorial team leadership must factor in the trends that are working with young learners. For instance, a growing number of learners are learning from mobile phones, as opposed to laptops. Learners seek personalized learning plans as opposed to cookie-cutter learning programs.

Another important trend is the evolution of education policy to make education more inclusive. Growing accessibility expectations are nudging publishers to create content that caters to learners with diverse needs. Higher education publishers need an actionable accessibility strategy in place, to  capture greater market share and derive higher ROI for their outputs.

Editorial leaders must invest resources in protecting their revenues. For instance, the use of digital publishing platforms that come with in-built digital rights management tools can ensure that their content is accessible by authorized users. Such tools make it difficult for fraudulent players to plagiarize the content, which results in lost revenues for businesses.

Important business and content development decisions must be backed by relevant data and not based merely on hunches, intuition, and market buzz. Technology can play an important role in this transition. For instance, digital textbook publishing tools such as KITABOO come with superior AI-power predictive analytics engines, which help companies crunch every piece of relevant data, turning it into insights.

Adopting the right balance of creativity and management acumen can help the editorial team leadership navigate market shifts more strategically, and emerge as leaders. Technology will play a major role in bridging gaps and bringing efficiency, innovation, and data-centricity to higher education publishing operations. 

If your company aspires to create, publish and distribute effective e-learning content, the digital textbook publishing platform KITABOO is geared with the right technology solutions to support you in your mission. Leverage our cloud-based digital publishing platform, which is available as a licensed version (one-time buy) as well as a subscription model.

Get in touch with us to start a conversation.