For those of us in Adland, Mad Men is a persistent reminder that not much has changed in our business over the past sixty years (with the exception of all the illegal and non-PC stuff, of course). Believe it or not, agencies are still run pretty much the way they are depicted on TV. Evidently, the great management and technology revolutions sidestepped Madison Avenue. Read More →
This article originally appeared on HBR.org and The Energy Project. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.
For more than a decade now, I’ve struggled to define what fuels the most sustainably productive work environment — not just on behalf of the large corporate clients we serve, but also for my own employees at The Energy Project. Perhaps nothing I’ve uncovered is as important as trust.
Much as employers understandably hunger for one-size-fits-all policies and practices, what motivates human beings remains stubbornly complex, opaque, and difficult to unravel. Perhaps that’s why I felt so viscerally the shortsightedness and futility of Marissa Mayer’s decision to order Yahoo employees who had been working from home to move back to the office, and Hubert Joly’s to do the same at Best Buy. Read More →
Every year it’s the same thing. We start out the New Year filled with good intentions, high hopes, and a formidable list of life-changing resolutions. And for an indomitable few, those resolutions result in positive changes and personal growth. But for the rest of us, life tends to get in the way.
Before we know it, January is over and February flies by (it’s such a short month!). Then the spring holidays come along. Then it’s summer, and… well, you know the rest. That pledge to “start tomorrow” just leads to the eventual realization that today is yesterday’s tomorrow. So, what can we do about it?
We can start today. For real. Right now.
What we need to do is go from “resolutions” to “real solutions.” And one real-life solution that really works, is easy to do, and can kick-start us into action, is to start reading. And my recommendation is to start your New Year’s reading with any one of the 13 inspirational and motivational books on this list. Read More →
Managing creative people is both the best and the scariest job I’ve ever had. On some days I feel like the luckiest guy on the planet. On other days, I feel like I’ve gone nine rounds with Sybil. To become a decent manager, I read management books, watched what my bosses did (and didn’t do), and tried to figure out how I’d like to be managed.
The common thread here is that people want to know what’s going on and where they stand. Most people want to contribute to a team and feel like they’re doing something useful, if not important. Usually people want to like their bosses and be liked by them in return, even though it doesn’t always work out that way.
This led me to write down my learnings as an operating guide for me. I share it with all my team members because it has more lasting value as a document than as a conversation. Most of those I’ve worked with will tell you that I’m about the straightest shooter they’ve ever met. I mean what I say and I’m consistent over time. I hope this can help you get in touch with your inner manager and make your working life easier and happier. Read More →
When it comes to “rules,” which of the following statements do you most agree with?
(a) Rules are rules…period.
(b) Rules are meant to be broken.
(c) It depends.
(d) All of the above.
(e) None of the above.
While there is no one “right” answer to the above question, the way you respond says a lot about you. The way you think and feel about rules in general will influence the decisions you make and the actions you take in different situations.
Let me tell you about two controversial, thought-provoking, and emotional incidents that occurred in the past week – both of which involved “following the rules” – and see what you think: Read More →
Our newest blogger, Mandy Gresh, is a coach and strategist devoted to helping others hone their plans for their career. Which parts of your current job are the most important for your future? Why is it so important to think like an entrepreneur? And how do you know when it’s time to head out on your own? These are the kinds of questions she’ll be helping us answer….
Becoming a manager is a little like becoming a parent. Although you can do a lot to prep for the job (reading books, observing others, coming up with lots of mental notes, thinking about best practices), it’s not until the day you actually have a staff that you get a clue what it’s really about.
I’m speaking from experience, on the management side at least. At 26 years old I was handed a team in a foreign country, with my manager in New York. The truth is that I was a nightmare to work for: micromanaging, with a very top-down style; only telling people things on a need-to-know basis; keeping track of when people arrived and left…. in other words, the exact person you don’t want to work for. Read More →
In my last post, I listed nine questions to ask the digital team to help you understand what they do, and why and how they do it. And the first question we got back was, “What if the techs aren’t talking?” Well, hmmm, I thought. I guess that does happen — and I rashly promised a follow-up post, completely breaking my rule about not making a promise for delivery before fully clarifying the specs, by the way.
A couple weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a Hired Guns event to preview and critique various Guns’ SXSW presentations. I was overwhelmed by the positive energy in the room and the level of truly supportive and constructive criticism. These Guns were flat-out awesome stars in the digital field, and there was tons of feedback. I thought, “Wait a second — we techies share plenty!” So what gives? Why were these folks sharing so freely, while there’s still lots of non-digital people out there complaining that their digital teams don’t do the same? Read More →
The digital strategist Danny Flamberg writes about marketing, advertising, and culture on his blog, Manhattan Marketing Maven. His series for The Hired Guns is about managing effectively, so that you get the best work possible from yourself as well as your staff.
The toughest thing for a manager to do is to criticize or correct a team member. It’s a charged task, and while it’s necessary, it also pushes all a manager’s buttons. The key to successfully handling this meeting and getting a decent outcome is to leave your baggage and your ego at the door. Read More →
We’re glad to welcome to the blog today the digital strategist Danny Flamberg, who writes about marketing, advertising, and culture on his blog, Manhattan Marketing Maven. In his new series with us, he’ll be covering the tools, tricks, and ways of thinking that managers must have to help their staff do the best job they can.
Most first-time managers have specific tasks they need to get accomplished, and often their first job is to change their mindset from “How can I do this?” to “How can I help my team do this?” They must work to change their actions and attitude from that of an individual player to an effective coach and supervisor.
To succeed at this, focus on the three crucial “W’s”: Read More →
One of the most rewarding aspects of being a manager is the power to waste other people’s time. A great way to do this is by transforming short meetings into endless morale-sucks in which nothing is accomplished and big chunks of the work day are blown.
Here are some helpful hints for pulling this off effectively:
1. Do it on short notice! Impromptu meetings disrupt whatever work people were already doing. Everyone loves a surprise, especially in the middle of a busy day. An unplanned two-hour meeting not only shakes up the same old boring routine, it teaches patience, discipline, and time-management skills. Your employees will thank you a thousand times over. Read More →
One major misconception about Agile product development is that there’s no long-term planning, and that everyone just does that they think should be done in the moment.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Successful Agile shops are ones that put a strong focus on strategy and know exactly where they want to go. Being Agile means that you outline your high-level business goals first, that you think about the six-month and twelve-month plan, that you focus on problems over solutions, and, ultimately, that you abandon timelines and allow yourself to adjust priorities as you go.
Unfortunately, this is where most executives struggle; “How can you not have a timeline? When will things get done? How will we plan?” It’s understandable that executives want to know how time and money is being spent, and timelines and Gantt charts have their place in certain kinds of businesses: see my previous post on Waterfall vs. Agile approaches. But in the world of web development, timelines equal compromise, and compromise equals failure. When you commit to the dates on a timeline, you might as well let everyone know right off the bat that you will either miss the date, or that you will compromise the product to hit the date.
But what’s the right way to do long-term planning in an Agile environment so that executives (and everyone else) feel comfortable with the plan? The answer is a road map based not on deadlines and wants, but on priorities and needs. Read More →
Now that you’re a big, important manager, you’ll probably be called on to interview job candidates. Despite what the experts in Human Resources and Legal say (cough — who cares — cough), the whole issue of what constitutes legal and illegal lines of questioning is blown waayyy out of proportion. Some people are just too uptight.
Nonetheless, here are a few things you might want to say to reassure job candidates that you’re “in sync” with HR and Legal on those touchy topics:
I just want to let you know that we wouldn’t mind hiring a really old person such as yourself. Your generation has done so much for our country, particularly in World War I. The fact that you even showed up today is pretty amazing, when you think about it. I mean, your kids are probably on Social Security by now, right? Ha-ha. No, but seriously — I know you probably didn’t even get that joke, and that’s okay, because I know you’re a little slow mentally. I just want you to know that we’re willing to sacrifice productivity a bit by hiring you. Can I call you Grandpa?
You paid your dues. You put in the long nights. You suffered under bosses who never “got” design and those who thought they’d invented it. And finally, you got there. You got the director role, the VP title, or the creative director position that you worked for during your entire career.
And this was good. As the department leader, you made a name for yourself. You grew the team and tightened up the company’s design discipline. You mentored junior designers and churned out some fairly impressive work. And then it came time to move on.
It’s right at that moment that it hits you—when you were an up-and-coming designer, there were lots of entry- and mid-level jobs. As a designer near the top of the heap, the opportunities for you now are few and far between. Rarely do these positions open up, and even more rarely are new senior-design roles created. By working yourself up the corporate design ladder, you may have placed yourself in a situation where potential new gigs are scarce. Read More →
As a manager, you may occasionally be asked to “think strategically.” That means to consider issues that have a broad impact on the company, such as long-term revenue opportunities, more efficient competition in a changing marketplace, and securing job offers from other companies before everyone at your company realizes you’re clueless.
Unfortunately, “thinking strategically” requires time, effort, and precious brain power that could be better spent on fantasy baseball. Here are five ways to avoid it:
What’s due by the end of the week? When are those reports from Cincinnati coming in? Don’t you have some sort of meeting to attend? Don’t worry about the fact that your company has no office in Cincinnati. The point is, you’re a manager. Look busy.
Pay lots of attention to the work your subordinates do. Has it been double-checked? Would it look better with a slightly larger font? How about an emoticon on the cover page? Don’t worry about your peers in other departments. And by all means don’t bother your boss. Respect his privacy and let him do his own job, and he’ll let you do yours. Read More →
Todd Henry runs The Accidental Creative, a speaking and consulting firm that helps teams do their best work consistently, not haphazardly. His book of the same name, about “how to be brilliant at a moment’s notice,” will be published this July by Portfolio. A slightly different version of this post ran on Todd’s Accidental Creative website.
A few weeks ago I was privileged to hop a plane to St. Louis to spend some time with a great group of creatives wrestling through organizational growth and how to establish new systems to deal with it. After a morning session with the large group, I had the chance to spend about 90 minutes (before hopping a return flight) with a handful of the team’s leaders. We discussed the essentials of creative leadership, and I was asked to distill down what I’ve experienced about great creative leaders as fodder for discussion.
Here are the five principles that I believe all leaders of creative teams must live by if they want thriving teams.
Many leaders are so concerned about safety that they spend much of their time talking about what not to do versus what to do. They operate more like a lighthouse than a laser. A lighthouse can only tell you where not to go, but can’t provide any kind of precise direction or alternative. Creative teams need precise, focused direction. Like a laser. A laser is an offensive tool, not a defensive one. (Unless you’re Han Solo in the cantina. Apparently, Greedo shot first.)
Your team needs you to tell them what to do, not what not to do. Be a laser, not a lighthouse.
Whoever coined the phrase “work/life balance” probably understood that the key to long-term productivity is a positive work environment, a range of outside interests, and job satisfaction. You don’t want people like that working for you.
Instead, here are five ways to keep your workers focused on work 24/7:
1. Don’t have a spouse or family, and forbid your employees from having them. Families have a tendency to be involved in school pageants and athletic events, they don’t like to move or change schools, and they suck out a lot of energy that could be better spent on Six Sigma productivity training. If members of your team have preexisting families, encourage them to jettison them immediately. At minimum, require them to replace their personal photos with framed motivational posters. Explain to them that “this is your family now.” Read More →
You could spend years trying to fail upwards, only to find that all the good promotions have already been claimed by more successful incompetent people. Here’s how to shave a few years off your timeline:
“Management experts” (insert sarcastic chuckle here) are fond of saying that effective business managers lead like coaches, not generals. They point out that in today’s dynamic business world, where top employees have specialized skills as well as the freedom and motivation to change jobs to achieve their career goals, treating employees like regimented foot soldiers is a recipe for disaster. Coaching them like members of a high-performing athletic team is a more productive approach.
What these so-called “experts” fail to understand is that business is a battleground, not a junior-high girls’ badminton league. To succeed, you’ve got to crush your competitors, and what better way to instill that mindset than by crushing your own employees first?
Here are five great ways to do that:
1. Talk, don’t listen! Generals give commands. Coaches have team meetings, make suggestions, and (snicker, snicker) solicit team input. If Patton had adopted the coaching style of leadership during WWII, we’d all be speaking German. Read More →
The digital media strategist Todd Tarpley has launched businesses for A&E, Bravo, and Nielsen. Because there are already hundreds of blogs and books telling managers how to succeed, his “How Not to Succeed” series uses his expertise to help managers learn how to fail instead.
You’ve just been given oversight of a new product launch. Your first task is to hire a team. Here’s how to screw it up:
1. Hire as if it’s a mature business. That means hiring people who have been successfully doing one thing, one way, for a long time. After all, you’re trying to bring some stability to the organization. Why put a premium on versatility and general intelligence? Whatever business plan you have laid out will surely be exactly the same a year from now–no unforeseen changes, no evolution, no growth. People who have worked at the same job and company for ten years or more will fit right into a startup environment–and when things change, they’re prepared to roll with the punches. What could possibly go wrong?
2. If there’s an existing team, don’t make any adjustments or changes. Don’t even bother to interview the members of the current team to get their insights on how things might function more efficiently, or how they would do things differently if they were in charge. They’re NOT in charge, so don’t let them think they are. And whatever they do, I’m sure they do a good job or they wouldn’t be here. Right? Read More →
Jeff Gothelf, a user experience designer working for TheLadders.com, blogs for us about project management and UX careers and trends.
Designers want to be heroes.
Let that soak in for a second. It’s true. Design is a hero-based practice.
To be known as the designer who conceived the iPod or the genius behind the game-changing interaction design of Mint.com is an accolade many seek. Those are product designs, but this mentality is even more prevalent inside interactive agencies. Agencies want to win awards because awards attract new business.
Hero-focused design is promoted even further because of the transient nature of employment at an interactive agency. The more successful you are as an individual designer at an agency, the easier it is for you to get that next gig or step up the design ladder.
The problem is heroes work alone. They don’t collaborate or open their work for review. They reveal work only when they feel it’s “ready,” and they typically seek to control the direction of the project very heavily. The stronger a designer’s hand in the project, the theory goes, the more he or she can lay claim to that project’s success. Read More →
The digital media strategist Todd Tarpley has launched businesses for A&E, Bravo, and Nielsen. Because there are already hundreds of blogs and books telling managers how to succeed, his “How Not to Succeed” series uses his expertise to help managers learn how to fail instead.
Congratulations on the new job! You’re a big, important manager now. But while you’re waiting for your imminent promotion to CEO, you still have to report to someone. On paper anyway! Here’s how to make the most of it:
Be the “But” Guy. Always be ready to point out why an idea won’t work. Shake your head whenever your boss speaks in meetings. Hold firm to your conviction that his plan will fail. The fact is, most ideas do fail, so you’ll usually end up being right. Even more important, busy executives appreciate having a trusted colleague who can play devil’s advocate and challenge their assumptions. By disagreeing with everything he says, you’re providing a valuable counterbalance, ensuring that only the most fully vetted ideas are implemented. That’s exactly what the organization needs. Read More →
Tom Burg, a twelve-year veteran of Silicon Alley, blogs for us about marketing, the digital economy, and how social media is transforming the way we all communicate.
Google’s in the news for developing a process to improve people management within the company. It looks a lot like the way the company perfects its search algorithms or makes design decisions: analyze the data and completely (some would say blindly) trust the results. Because the performance review system is entirely online, it’s also entirely searchable. The team heading up what’s known as “Project Oxygen” found correlations between the “phrases, words, praise, and complaints” used on in-house surveys, reviews, and nominations to arrive at eight traits that separate good managers from bad.
Those traits, by and large, read like they came from a Reader’s Digest management primer–having a clear vision for your team, helping with career development, and being productive and results-oriented. Read More →
There are hundreds of business blogs that tell you how to succeed as a new manager. But there are none that tell you how to fail.
Until now. Read More →
Product Management, User Experience, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Usability Testing
Project Management, Program Management, Production, Content Production
Animation, Art Direction, Creative Direction, Corporate Identity, Flash Design/Dev, Graphic Design, Web Design
Content Strategy, Editorial, Copywriting, Copy Editing, Research, Blog Outreach
Brand Management, Business Development, Sales, Product Marketing, Event/Conference Planning, Promotions, Marcomms, Corporate Comms, Direct Marketing, E-Marketing, Public Relations, Market Research
Account Management, Account/Brand Planning, Media Strategy, Communications Planning, Media Planning/Buying, Social Media, Search (SEM, SEO), Web Metrics & Analytics
Web Development, Front End Development
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