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Inspiration Event List & A Question for You

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Lately, I’ve been writing quite a bit – some weeks busting out three articles a week for Advertising Week and the Examiner – and yet, I’ve ignored this blog.  I’m sorry, friends.

To start making up for it, I’ll give you a couple quality posts this coming month; I promise.  If you’d like me to address something specific about moving up in your career, creating work-life balance, or something else creative career related, please leave a comment below (or e-mail me privately at angela@definingsuccesscoaching.com).

In the meantime, check out the fun list I created for an article on inspiration.  These are life experience-type ideas that don’t take as much time or commitment as the usual examples of traveling, skydiving, learning a language or taking an art class.  Give some of these a try (or let them inspire you to create your own list) that you can pull from when you hit a creative block:

  • Watch a foreign film (with or without the subtitles)
  • Hang out in a store you’d be embarrassed to be caught in
  • Crash a party or happy hour (You get extra points if it’s an industry-specific event for an industry you know little about. Hint: These are constantly taking place in hotel ballrooms.)
  • Search for the perfect gift for the weirdest person you know (and who isn’t a close friend)
  • Learn to fix something mechanical (e.g., old clock, typewriter, motor)
  • Eat at a foreign restaurant where you know nothing about the type of food
  • Attend an open mic or beat poetry night
  • Go to the most bizarre niche MeetUp group event you can find
  • Get to know festival/carnival/fair workers and their stories (Yes, befriending carnies will inspire you. Trust my experience.)
  • Volunteer at a food bank
  • Spend time in a musical instrument store (if you don’t usually)
  • Play with Mad Libs

Read the full article on ways to get unstuck creatively, if you’d like.  If you do, you’ll learn about my “carny days.”

Remember to leave a comment (or e-mail me directly) if you have something you’d like this blog to answer for you.  What would you like help with?

Filed Under: Advertising Creatives/Graphic Designers, Articles, Blocks, Creativity, Resources Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How NOT to Manage Creative People

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[A bit of a rant with tips on creative management – managing creatives and managing creative teams]

The Harvard Business Review published the blog post “Seven Rules for Managing Creative People” by professor Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.  And wow, was it wrong about managing creatives! 

The professor starts by over-generalizing and negatively portraying creative people. Here’s how the blog post begins:

“Moody, erratic, eccentric, and arrogant? Perhaps — but you can’t just get rid of them.”

What a way to preframe the readers’ thoughts about creative people.  It continues…

“In fact, unless you learn to get the best out of your creative employees, you will sooner or later end up filing for bankruptcy. Conversely, if you just hire and promote people who are friendly and easy to manage, your firm will be mediocre at best.”

For someone who is an “international authority in personality profiling and psychometric testing,” it’s surprising that he hasn’t met the friendly, easy to manage, innovative, and award-winning creative types that I have worked with.  There are no two types of creatives – decent people verse innovative people.

I’ve worked with hundreds of creatives and if categories of creatives were to exist, the number of categories would be in the double digits.  A very small percentage may be “moody and arrogant,” but the majority are brilliant, kind people.  Many of which I call my friends.

The Harvard Business Review blog post feels like an attack on my friends, on my previous co-workers, on my creative coaching clients, on the advertising and design industry as a whole, and on me personally.

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic might be able to get away with writing something like this if it pertained to teenage private art school students (maybe), but this article is slamming professionals in creative careers.

And does the professor not know that competition and deadlines push creative people to actually create?  Not only does he state, “The worst thing you can do to a creative employee is to force them to work with someone like them — they would compete for ideas, brainstorm eternally, or simply ignore each other,” but also he goes on to say that creatives shouldn’t have to follow processes or structures.  No competition and no accountability.

Then he advises to pay creative people poorly because the more you pay people to do what they love, the less they will love it.  WHAT?!  But while you’re paying them poorly, make them feeeel important.  And remember, that you should not let them manage others because creative people are rarely gifted with leadership skills.  WHO IS THIS GUY?!

More than 350 people have commented on the blog post asking the same thing.  My favorite comment is: Looking forward to your follow up “How To Survive Extraordinarily High Turnover.”  You see, because if this professor had experience managing creatives hands on using his own tips, he would be fired based on the extremely high rate of creatives running from the building.

The scariest part is that Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is the co-founder of metaprofiling.com, a company that is designed to identify employees’ creative and entrepreneurial potential.  I’d hate to think of how he’d treat those who score the highest on metaprofiling’s creative scale.  As a “leading authority in talent management” according to the metaprofiling website, think of the advice he’s giving to the companies he’s consulting.

As for how to manage creative people (from someone who has many years of experience managing creatives), here are my rebuttal tips –
 
Eight Rules to Managing Creative People:

1.  Ask them what motivates them and then motivate them that way

2.  Create the best synergy possible by surrounding the best creatives with the best creatives and encourage competition as well as collaboration

3.  Don’t waste their time and talent on meaningless briefs

4.  Have real deadlines and accountability otherwise little will get created and/or you’ll lose their respect

5.  Pay creative people what they’re worth and then some knowing that creatives are in high demand and no two people are the same

6.  Make them feel important because they are

7.  Give them the opportunity to lead and encourage the growth of their leadership skills

8.  Treat Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s blog post as if it were written for The Onion 

Filed Under: Advertising Creatives/Graphic Designers, Articles, Business, Ranting Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Happiness in Advertising?

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Advertising People are Leaving Agencies

Research shows that 30% of advertising employees will leave their agencies this year. (This is one of the main reasons I’m working with advertising agencies through presentations and high-level career coaching.)

Driven to Help Advertising People

When I saw the question, “How Much Do You Utterly Despise Working in Advertising?”, I immediately wanted to reach out to miserable advertising people, GRAB THEM BY THE SHOULDERS and tell them it doesn’t have to be this way – THEY CAN BE HAPPY! I know the vicious cycle too well; I lived it and I have the solution. I can help whether it’s through an agency presentation, agency-sponsored coaching program or working directly with an advertising art director, copywriter, designer, ACD or CD without the involvement of his or her agency.  It’s my passion.  It’s my purpose.  And it’s also my biggest frustration to know that there are people in the advertising industry that don’t want to go to work in the morning and don’t know that they can change that.  When I get all fired up (e.g, this very moment), I have to remind myself that I can only help those that want the help (like my past and current clients)…oh and those that know an advertising career coach like me exists. And with that, I’ll end this public rant of sorts (which can’t quite compare to the intensity of the rant in the video below created by Deutsch LA) and get back to telling the industry I exist and I want to help.

Cannes Session

It’ll be interesting to see what Deutsch LA proposes and what they share about their “ownership culture” during next Monday’s (June 18, 2012) Cannes session “Ending The Agency Talent Rotisserie.”  Deutsch LA created a series of videos as a teaser including the video above, which were included in the AdFreak article with the subtitle Deutsch wants to make you happier.

What I Do – Money and More

Yes, turnover is costly to agencies and money is important to a business, but it’s not all about money.  Keeping talented creatives is a must.  Attracting talented creatives is a must.  And a certain level of happiness is a must if you want to create great ads consistently.  Deutsch LA recognizes that, “this agency talent rotisserie has real costs, on recruiting, creative excellence and business development.”

I push my clients to make substantial shifts toward employee satisfaction (custom to each agency and  advertising creative individual’s needs), so that each can be fulfilled when they were previously stuck.  So they can dramatically slow down or stop the agency talent rotisserie.  I guide them to the balance of efficiency with palatable culture.  They go from talk to action.  They go from their employees leaving to their employees being happy to work there again.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Advertising Creatives/Graphic Designers, Articles, Business, Clients, Creativity, Fulfillment, Happiness, Money Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Creative Week 2012 Highlights

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One Show Interactive Awards

Enjoying the company of my long-time friends, Creative Recruiters from GSP (Linda Harless and Zach Canfield) and DraftFCB (Rafi Kugler) was a personal highlight during Creative Week 2012. Here we are the final night of Creative Week at The One Show Interactive Awards.

Creative Week 2012 was a whirlwind, an incredible whirlwind.  Each day started with a breakfast presentation at 8:30a.m. and ended with parties that lasted until 3:30a.m.  (Note: That’s 19 hours of inspiration, networking and good times, and it’s impossible to do it all for 5 days straight.)  Here are some whirlwind highlights:

  • The people that think the Big Idea is dead are outnumbered.  No one is arguing about the Big Insight (as a replacement) yet.
  • Curate the funny.  That’s advice from Ron Faris, the Director of Brand Marketing for Virgin Mobile USA.
  • When an audience full of want-to-be authors are asked if they’ve ever wanted to write a book, 2 people will raise their hands – the guy who’s written a book and me.
  • Adobe’s VP of Experience Design, Michael Gough, never mentions the word “creativity” to his people.  For Adobe, it’s about the alignment of 10,000 people and getting them all moving in the same direction.  Imagine the “creative” alternative…
  • Every 7 to 10 years puppets become viable again.  The people of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop believe we’re on the onset of that.
  • The best networking happens after the events.  While business cards can be exchanged during pre-scheduled networking times, the most natural, genuine (and fun) networking takes place when people are hanging out because they want to.
  • The concept of “collaboration,” with its best of intentions, continues to be the black sheep in discussions on creativity.
  • People want to work with cool people and do cool stuff.
  • If phone chargers are gold, finding an outlet to use in Manhattan is platinum.
  • 72andSunny sat on a panel for provocative advertising and then swept The One Shows (yes, plural, both the advertising and interactive awards) with their provocative ads.

Coming soon: Advertising Week the first week in October 2012.

Filed Under: Advertising Creatives/Graphic Designers, Articles, Business, Clients, Creativity, Events, Time Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Creativity shows up when you invite it

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CreativityRecently I wrote an article around claiming your creativity.  As I wrote I could feel passion bubbling up inside of me.  I am creative (one notch more creative than business-like in the left-brain/right-brain test), and I am my happiest when I am surrounded by creative people.  “Who are creative people?” you may ask. Years ago I would explain the answer with specific examples of graphic designers, art directors, writers, painters, musicians and so on.  Now I tend to simply say, “Creative people are those who say they are creative.”  Notice, it’s not enough to know you are creative, you must admit it.  You must say it outloud.  You must claim your creativity.

Several weeks ago I connected with a creative group on Meetup.com.  Please understand that I am the type of person who only joins a group when I am confident that not only I want to commit to it but also that I have the time, energy, resources, etc. to jump right in.  So after being an assistant organizer of a music-related Meetup group for close to a year, I joined the creative group.  As I read the group’s description, a book that is on my to-read list was showcased.  The book The Artist’s Way has come up three times in a matter of weeks, so I took that as a sign to join the group (and bump the book up to the top of my list). After filling out my bio in which I first said,

“While I love art, design, music, and specifically singing and playing the ukulele, my real passion is coaching & consulting creative people so they finally feel satisfied even when they have previously felt stuck,”

I found out that the organizer of the group is also a coach!  Yesterday, we met for tea (for her) and coffee (for me) where we must have sounded like giggling teenagers with a crush (only we were discussing coaching, business, marketing, and creativity).  Stories were spilling out of me almost faster than I could say the words, and I was absorbing her experiences as if I were watching a movie trailer.  As with many times throughout this last year, the fact that career coaching is what I am meant to do was blindingly evident.  Her passion for helping others find or reignite their creativity was refreshing, and I couldn’t help but think about the final line in my article, “When you claim your creativity, you are powerful.”

The more I focus on my career coaching business’s niche market of graphic designers and advertising creatives, the more creative my thinking around my business has become.  It’s no coincidence that as I invited creativity to take center stage in one of my articles that it has begun to show up more and more in my work and life.

With that, I encourage you not only to claim your creativity but also invite it to be a part of every aspect of your life.  If you’re like me, you’ll feel more fulfilled than you even thought possible.

Filed Under: Advertising Creatives/Graphic Designers, Articles, Books, Business, Clients, Creativity, Fulfillment, Happiness, Law of Attraction Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,