Brands are producing more content than ever. Between creator partnerships, paid social, and organic strategy, the volume of creative output has exploded, and the teams behind that work are growing just as fast. But hiring more people and adopting better tools only gets you so far if the managers running those teams don’t have the skills to keep everything moving in the same direction.
To explore this, we spoke with Nick Herinckx, Co-CEO of Oxygen and a longtime executive coach and business leader (leadwithoxygen.com). Nick leads Oxygen, the top-rated management training solution that equips high performers with the skills, tools, and structured support to become highly effective managers. Oxygen works with growing companies to help them build stronger execution through practical, cohort-based manager development programs.
In this interview, Nick shares why companies that scale creative output without investing in management capability often hit a wall, and what it takes to break through it.
Interview
brkfst.io: Brands are producing content at a pace that would have been unimaginable five years ago. Where does management fit into that picture?
Nick Herinckx: It’s honestly the difference between scaling your output and scaling your chaos.
When a creative team is small, work moves fast because everyone’s close to the decisions and close to each other. But the moment you start layering in more people, more campaigns, and more channels, complexity grows faster than headcount does. That’s when you need managers who can actually prioritize, align their teams, and keep execution consistent, and most companies just aren’t building that muscle.
brkfst.io: What tends to go wrong when companies scale without investing in their managers?
Nick: It usually starts with priorities getting muddy. Nobody’s filtering what actually matters from what just feels urgent, so teams end up duplicating work or chasing the wrong deliverables. And once feedback loops break down, quality becomes inconsistent, which means the issues that should be solved at the manager level start bubbling up to senior leadership. Now your executives are stuck in firefighting mode instead of thinking about strategy.
But that’s not really a creative problem. It’s a management problem. It just shows up in the creative work first because that’s where the pace is fastest. That’s why we built Management Essentials the way we did, to give managers practical tools for prioritization, feedback, and team alignment rather than just theory they’ll never actually use.
brkfst.io: What are the most common gaps you see in managers leading creative or high-output teams?
Nick: The biggest one is probably prioritization, which sounds simple but really isn’t. When everything’s moving fast, and the work is highly visible, it takes real skill to protect your team from scope creep and competing demands. A lot of new managers just say yes to everything because they don’t feel they have permission to push back, and then their team pays the price.
That’s closely tied to feedback, too. Creative environments can make direct feedback feel risky, like you’re going to discourage someone or shut down their ideas. So managers avoid saying the hard thing, quality starts drifting, and nobody names it. Meanwhile, everyone on the team actually wants that clarity. They want to know where they stand and what “good” looks like. When managers finally learn to give feedback with both confidence and care, it doesn’t hurt the culture. It strengthens it.
brkfst.io: How does stronger management change the trajectory of a growing team?
Nick: It changes everything about how fast and how sustainably you can grow.
When managers know how to create clarity for their teams, decisions happen at the right level instead of bottlenecking at the top. People can self-correct without waiting for someone to tell them what to do next. And the quality of the output stabilizes because there’s a real feedback culture in place, not just a Slack channel full of “looks great” replies.
We’ve seen this shift play out across many industries through our cohort-based programs. The companies that invest in building real management capability tend to scale more effectively, because they’re not just adding people to the org chart. They’re building the layer that makes growth actually work.
The Takeaway
Producing great content at scale takes more than talented creators and the right platforms. It takes managers who can align teams, maintain quality, and keep execution sharp as the work and the team grow around them.
The companies that treat management as a real skill, one that can be taught and practiced and refined, tend to build more resilient teams than the ones that just hope their best people will figure it out on their own.
As Nick puts it, you can keep adding headcount and tools all day long, but if the management layer isn’t there, you’re just scaling the chaos along with the output.
About Oxygen
Oxygen is a cohort-based management training company that helps growing organizations turn strong individual contributors into confident, capable managers. Through structured programs like Management Essentials, Oxygen equips managers with practical tools for giving feedback, fostering accountability, making decisions, and aligning teams. The company works with organizations across industries to improve execution, strengthen culture, and help managers scale their teams effectively.
Learn more at leadwithoxygen.com