We’ve all managed someone who felt they were so special they deserved special treatment. Someone who seemed to grab at power every step of the way. But what differentiates a designer with an attitude from a diva or divo?: the enabling by senior management.
Name a highly successful athlete—he has a coach. What about that internationally recognized opera singer? She has a coach. Atul Gwande, a highly respected surgeon, just published an article in the New Yorker explaining his decision to hire a coach. Why do all these already successful professionals have coaches? Because you just can’t do it alone.
Making work fun…sometimes this seems like an oxymoron, it’s called work for a reason, right? But we are all familiar with the proverb “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Regardless of industry, job title and role, we all need breaks within our day to allow our brains to recharge. For some this may mean water cooler breaks or coffee runs, but for others this means a few minutes on Facebook or making sure to take their lunch break away from their desk.
The unfortunate fact is that in-house creative teams are often viewed as back-end production within organizations. Creative teams often find out about jobs at the last minute, without the proper time to do their best work. Many times, clients present a project that they have already ”thought out” strategically and mocked-up, and just want the creative team to “make it pretty.” This thinking is outdated and doesn’t give the creative team the credit or respect that they deserve as professional designers. It also doesn’t create the most compelling experience for your team. Company leaders often do not realize how graphically based their brand experience is. What the creative team contributes not only represents an organization to the public, but also attracts and resonates with current and potential clients. Further, it attracts and recruits future employees that will (hopefully) help both propel the organization in the direction and vision that the executives want and set the standard for the reputation of the organization.
[This content is protected for registered InSource members only. Please log in, or register as a member. Registration is free.] For information about how Cella can add value to your business through consulting, coaching, and training, please email cella@cellaconsulting.com. This article was written by Team Member Brendon Derr.
Creative services is one of the last parts of corporate America that has been relatively untouched by Six Sigma. Many manufacturing companies apply it rigorously to their production lines, with the mathematical target of Six Sigma being to get errors as low as 3.4 per million items produced. This is an outstanding goal if one of making pharmaceuticals (and, in fact, the pharmaceutical industry has even surpassed this very low error rate), but the general reaction of creative people is, “Developing creative output isn’t like making pills.” This is very true. Ogilvy attempted to apply Six Sigma to its business a few years ago – with mixed results.
If you provide a great career opportunity and pathway for your team members, you promote a more stable workforce, a higher performing department, lower personnel costs, and a happier culture. These all improve your ability to attract better talent and better work opportunities over time. Enough said…we’ll need another post to quantify all of that! With all these benefits in mind though, here are a few points you’ll want to review while (re)defining roles and the organizational structure for your interactive team.
rule of thumb: “Offshoring projects will cost 4 times less but take twice as long to complete.” The notion of saving up to 70% of labor costs can be very enticing, especially in tight economic times. However, offshoring can be a daunting endeavor and one that can almost as easily waste money as save it.
I’m often surprised by the many well-established Creative Services organizations that do not utilize a DAM system for managing digital assets. And often, they explain that they don’t need a DAM system because they have a well-organized shared server where they keep all their assets, work-in-progress and archived files. But, this approach actually works better for outside agencies that it does for internal groups.
As in-house creative leaders, we’re charged with inspiring our teams to be and stay creative.
This can be daunting when there are many revisions, only one client, only two fonts to choose
from (y’know: Book and Italic, or if you are lucky one serif and one sans serif) and the color
palette is limited to three choices. So with all of this potential monotony, how do we inspire
our teams to find and maintain creativity?
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What industries do you think offer the best opportunities for an in-house creative professional?
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