Social Capital in Singapore

The development of social capital is important to your firm. As trust and relationships emerge between your Creatives you'll find they interact more, creating a synergy that enhances the overall creativity and innovation of your firm. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and so forth. I've talked about this concept before with people in different situations and I've found that many people think this happens naturally, that it takes no effort, and that it's the normal situation that firms can expect.

But that's not quite true. Societies, whether small firms or national populations, don't necessarily create social capital. The time I recently spent living and working in Singapore showed me a society where social capital did not develop for the most part, and I saw some effects of that. Think about how this could play out on a smaller scale in your company.

Singapore has a high population density, limited natural resources, and multi-generational families living in the same home. In this situation, social capital can pretty much go one of two ways: either people learn to cooperate and help each other and do things that benefit society as a whole, or people can look out for themselves with a "get out of my way" approach. What I saw in Singapore seemed to be the latter.

You could see this expressed in daily life, in the little interactions between strangers. Getting onto public transit involved trying to cut around to the front of the line, and blocking those getting out just for a chance to rush on ahead of others. It was rare to see someone give up a seat on the train to an older person or pregnant woman. In restaurants, customers are rude, or at best indifferent, to the wait staff, who provided mediocre service in return. If I saw someone hold a door for someone else, I assumed they were an expat. There just didn't seem to be a lot of cooperation in daily interactions.

Now, this isn't a criticism, merely an observation. Different societies develop in different ways, and no doubt there are cultures that go too far in terms of social capital. But there are effects of this, and when it comes to your firm, you need to decide if you can live with those effects, or if it would be better to encourage the development of social capital.

What are the effects? I'd say that for Singapore one of the biggest effects has been a reduction in natural-born innovation. Yes, a recent survey ranked Singapore #1 in the world in terms of innovation, but even many locals will tell you that's being done mostly by the foreign workers. As a foreigner I was often told how different I was, particularly in the way I interacted with people. For example, among the professors on my hallway, only two of us kept our doors open, me and a British professor. This encouraged students to talk with us and facilitated the exchange of ideas, which are pretty important when it comes to creativity and innovation.

This isn't to say creativity and innovation don't exist among the Singaporean population. They do. I have one friend who's a very talented graphic designer, another who's a wonderful fashion designer, and there are some very interesting films coming out of Singapore. But these talented individuals are just that, individuals, and it's difficult to bring people together collectively. Do some collaborations exist? Of course. But not on the scale that they could if cooperation was the social norm.

The lesson for your firm is that social capital doesn't just "happen," because there are other ways your firm's culture can develop. True, if all your Creatives come from a high social capital environment then you'll be more likely to see it develop, but if you get that diverse workforce we all say we want then you'll get some negative qualities along with the benefits, and low social capital might be one of them. Being proactive about the development of social capital among your Creatives can be the difference between having creative individuals or a creative firm.

Living Overseas

A recent study by the American Psychological Association found a relationship between creativity and living overseas.

It's not totally clear from the study which leads to which. That is, does living abroad help develop creativity, or are creative people simply more likely to try living overseas?

But it seems likely that those who've lived overseas have had a chance to sharpen their creative skills. First, by living in another culture they've been exposed to new ideas and different ways of thinking. Creatives with a stronger foundation like that are in a better position to develop new ideas for you that set you apart from your competitors. Second, they've learned how to adapt, and that ability to fit into a new culture will help them as they take on diverse projects for you. Lastly, they've realized there's not just one way of thinking out there...even if they were raised in a pretty homogeneous environment, their experiences overseas have helped them see new ways of addressing familiar issues, and helped them realize they don't always have the right, or the only, answer. There are probably plenty of other advantages to this sort of background.

This can help you when you're recruiting new Creatives. The study's authors wrote:

Knowing that experiences abroad are critical for creative output makes study abroad programs and job assignments in other countries that much more important, especially for people and companies that put a premium on creativity and innovation.

So, regardless of which way the causality arrow is pointing, looking for employees with overseas experience can help you identify those with a stronger creative bent.

Of course, if you're going to look for people with this background, then once you get them you need to take full advantage of it. But that's a discussion for another time.

Keys to a Creative Culture

You can hire Creatives, you can have them teleworking or sitting in an open-air office, your can pay them better than your competitors can match, but that doesn't guarantee you creativity. Your employees can't just be creative on demand, or on certain days of the week if they're going to be most effective. Instead, they need a culture of creativity, an environment that encourages and rewards creativity on a regular basis. Just as you can't ski in a desert, you can't expect to be creative if you've got an organizational culture that doesn't support it.

A survey of 300 executives by the Economist Intelligence Unit identified six factors that are necessary conditions for a creative environment.

Clarity of purpose: the sense people have that innovation is a business priority. Your employees need to know they are there to be creative, that the firm exists to be creative. A good understanding of your firm's mission is critical at all levels, not just among the senior leadership.

Outside-in perspective: the sense that the organization is open to ideas from external sources, especially from customers. Real Creatives understand they always can learn more and they don't have a monopoly on good ideas. If leaders listen to outside views, the employees are more likely to as well.

Innovation discipline: the sense that innovation is managed through a disciplined process. It's easy to sit around and fill up a dry-write board with ideas. It takes discipline to turn those ideas into reality. Creatives are more energized to be innovative if they know their efforts will have a result.

Idea generation: the sense that employees are expected and encouraged to take initiative and try new ways of doing things. If leaders don't want to move forward and try new things, employees won't wither. That's death for a creative firm.

Idea support: the sense that the environment in the organization is supportive of the development and implementation of innovative ideas. This includes not punishing people for trying something that doesn't work. As we've written before, if you never fail, you aren't taking enough risks. Creatives need to know their leaders will support them when it comes to new, unconventional thinking.

Recognition: the sense of being rewarded for identifying and implementing innovative ideas. If the whole idea of your firm is to be creative, then you need to reward those who meet your mission. Give your Creatives the tools they need and then watch to see how they perform. If you want success to be repeated, you have to let people know when they've been successful.

These ideas don't guarantee success -- it's not a checklist for every firm -- but they tell you what the minimum is.

How do you achieve all these factors? Well, that's another discussion for another time...

Own Up to Mistakes

You've got a good education and years of experience. You've learned from the best, tried all kinds of different styles and techniques, and got promoted to a leadership because you know what you're doing. You're an expert.

And someday, you're going to screw up.

It's OK to try something and not have it work. Frankly, if you never have a failure, it means you aren't taking enough chances. But having done something that doesn't work, you need to do two things. First, admit it (at least to yourself) and take corrective action, and second, learn from the mistake so you don't do it again. The first part is the hardest...if you can do that, the second part often follows. But admitting the mistake, THAT'S the tricky part, and honestly, it's a mark of a good leader, someone who's confident enough in his own abilities that he doesn't fear a setback and willing to put his ego on the shelf for the good of the firm.

A recent article in Business Week discusses recent moves by the leadership at Pepsi to overhaul multiple brands simultaneously in the middle of a corporate reorganization. Putting tasks such as marketing and strategic planning in a single pair of hands makes for an interesting challenge, but the scale of this operation takes it far beyond "interesting."

Not one to fiddle in the margins, d'Amore has taken drastic action. His audacious solution: tear down and then rebuild PepsiCo's biggest beverage brands, which, besides Pepsi, include Gatorade, Tropicana, and Mountain Dew. And he is doing this all at once. D'Amore's ambitious agenda brings to mind the Obama Administration's theory that it would be a shame to waste a crisis. His calculation is that a more powerful and enduring Pepsi will emerge from this creative destruction. D'Amore is willing to try new things even if it upsets traditionalists. And rather than cherry-pick a few priorities, he has taken on seven brands.

D'Amore informally called his undertaking The Big Bang. It was an apt metaphor. He was proposing not just devising new ads and slogans for seven separate brands but redesigning 1,121 different bottles, cans, and other packages. And he wanted to have the reconceived products on store shelves in seven months to coincide with the 2009 Super Bowl, when PepsiCo was planning to unveil several new commercials.

Never had the company attempted to overhaul so many products so quickly. The danger was clear: In January consumers would walk into supermarkets and find that nearly all of their favorite PepsiCo beverages looked dramatically different—and they might hate the changes. What's more, d'Amore's team wouldn't have time for the exhaustive market research that usually helps mitigate such risks.

Risky, but perhaps the bold move the company needed. Not everything worked out, though.

It's a risky strategy, and d'Amore, 53, has already stumbled, most glaringly when a consumer backlash forced him to scrap new Tropicana packaging...

Consumers hated Arnell's redesigned Tropicana carton, which included a cap that looked like an orange. After receiving mounds of irate letters, Nooyi decided to cancel the repackaging.

If you've seen the redesigned Tropicana carton, you know what the author's talking about. The new design came out while I was living overseas so I didn't see it at first, and only noticed it for the first time the other day. A friend suggested why perhaps I hadn't noticed it after I returned: the redesigned carton used a font that made it look like a generic, supermarket-brand of juice. My eyes had passed right over it because I didn't recognize it as Tropicana.

But even with that mistake, you have to respect Mr d'Amore at Pepsi for acknowledging it and reversing his earlier decision. Having done that, it's more likely that next time he'll find a way to do the marketing research before turning his Creatives loose on a new design. Maybe he still won't do it the old-fashioned way, but odds are he won't do it this way again, either. One sign of a good leader is the willingness to accept responsibility for something that doesn't turn out right and find a way to move beyond that failure toward success.

Free Agent Retention

Due to some technical problems we weren't able to post entries last Wednesday and Friday. Oops. But we seem to be back on track now.

We've added a new category for posts, "Recession." Very often this blog will offer some advice on not only how to survive an economic downturn, but also on how to take advantage of the opportunities it presents. This new tag should help you find those articles and keep your head above water while you wait for conditions to improve or adjust your business model.

One obvious concern for employees and employers is unemployment. As a leader you want to do your best to hold onto people so you can grab new opportunities as they present themselves and keep those employees out of the hands of your competitors when your market turns up again. This is particularly true of Creatives, who often have unique talents you can't find in just anyone.

When we talk about the unemployment rate we tend to think about our full time, permanent workers. Unemployment figures account for those individuals who are looking for full time work but haven't found it yet. However, there's an important segment of the workforce missing from those numbers, and that's free agents.

Free agents are your freelance or other self-employed workers that you typically hire on an "as needed" basis, and while they might be few in number for some firms, in others they make up the bulk of the workforce. For the leader, a big advantage of hiring free agents is that you avoid full time having workers sitting around, and collecting a salary, when there's no work for them. Now, with things not going so well, you can reduce costs by cutting the number of free agents you use so that it only matches your immediate needs. This can help you get through any current problems you might be having.

But wait...

Some recent news articles have suggested that the free agent "industry" is facing a bit of a crisis. As free agents lose work they don't qualify for unemployment benefits, and over time the idea of staying in the free agent word may not seem like an option. They may have to shift to a full time job (if they can find it), possibly doing something other than what they did as a free agent. You might think that's just the risk they run by taking on the challenge of being a free agent, but as a leader you need to think about how this affects you and your business.

As we mentioned before, in a creative field you often employ Creatives with unique talents. You want to keep those employees now, because as competitors fall by the wayside you want to take on the work they left behind. Thinking more toward the long-term, as conditions improve you want talented and experienced Creatives, not a new batch that's untested. When it comes to Creatives, all of this is just as true for free agents as it is for full time workers. If you use a lot of free agents, you need to think about who will be available when you need them. As you cut people loose now you can't be sure they'll be there when you need them, as they may have to go do something else in order to survive.

So yes, you have a vested interest in helping out your free agents. What can you do? Well, you might consider keeping more free agents on contract with fewer hours each, rather than cutting a bunch of folks and keeping a few fully employed. This means everyone will likely have to find other income to stay afloat, but finding additional income is a bit easier than starting from scratch. You might also consider allowing them to do work for your competitors; many free agents are required to have a "no compete" clause in their contracts, but you might consider not doing that so they have a better chance of being fully employed. Don't worry that you'll lose them to your competitors; if you show you're willing to work with them, you're liable to generate some strong loyalty.

The objective here is to help your free agents find a short-term solution in order to avoid long-term problems for yourself. This isn't to say you should be running a charity, nor should you put yourself out of business in an attempt to provide work to your free agents. But you need to think beyond your full time employees, and realize that your free agents are facing some special pressures of their own that you might be able to address, in a way that helps you both.

Happy Songkran!!

April 13-15 is the celebration of Songkran in Thailand. A new year festival, it is also celebrated in Laos and Cambodia at this time, unlike Chinese New Year (known as Tet in Vietnam), which is a lunar new year celebration in late January or early February.

So hey, since it's a holiday in Southeast Asia, why not give your employees a holiday??? Is it possible you might have some Thai/Lao/Khmer Creatives in your firm who might like to spend the day getting soaked with water with their family?

A recent article in Diversity-Executive magazine points out that many firms are bad at cross-cultural communication within their own firms. In fact,

Organizations tend to lose out on the opportunity to capitalize on a variety of business impacts — such as improved recruitment and retention and having access to new ideas and business practices — when they don’t carefully navigate intercultural workplace issues.

So, even though it seems like taking an extra holiday might cost you money, think about how much money you might be losing by not taking that holiday, and generally ignoring the diversity within your workplace.

Info Overload

The other day I heard someone on the other side of the cubicle wall ask "what does this acronym mean?," referring to the name of another organization with which we sometimes work. She has a tendency to talk a lot anyway, so I just rolled my eyes and didn't answer, thinking "there's a box on your desk with a keyboard and a screen that connects you to THE WORLD, and in about 5 seconds you could get the answer."

To be fair, she's a bit older (yes, even older than me!) and wasn't raised with an "always on" connection to the internet, with all its right and wrong answers, its good and bad information. She may not yet have transitioned to the frame of mind that uses "Google" as a verb or that expects -- nay, demands! -- immediate access to information. She doesn't read her newspapers online, she doesn't find old friends or keep up with current ones through Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn, and she doesn't map out her trip to the grocery store and get traffic conditions for different routes. She doesn't really understand what a blog is.

But we do. In particular, many of your younger Creatives do.

We have so much information available to us, and it's so easy to go get it. Some of it comes through a "pull" system, like going to different websites or leaving an office TV tuned to CNBC. Some of it is a "push" system, whether we're on mailing lists or getting individual e-mails. We can access that from so many places with wi-fi, Blackberries, iPhones, and more.

The availability of information can be very useful for Creatives. Many new ideas are developed from a synthesis of existing ideas. A news story can spark a new way of thinking about something. We can reach out and get answers in a hurry so we don't waste time digging for answers and instead can get back to our creative work. We can see what others in our field (including our competitors) are doing. And we can take a quick break, when we need to rest our brains, and just look at YouTube. The immediacy of our information access is a good thing.

But...

...and there's always a "but," isn't there?...

...too much information can overwhelm us.

If you take in too much information you'll have trouble processing it, and that whole idea of synthesizing various ideas to come up with something new won't work. Never mind that time spent online, on the Blackberry, or on the phone is time spent not working, there's also the problem that when you ARE working, it might not provide the high quality work you want.

Kathleen Parker recently wrote in the Washington Post that

...with so much data coming from all directions, we risk paralysis. Brain freeze, some call it. More important, we also risk losing our ability to process the Big Ideas that might actually serve us better...

In fact, brain research shows that we do our best thinking when we're not engaged and focused, yet fewer of us have time for downtime. (If you have to schedule relaxation, is it still relaxing?)

Daydreaming, we used to call it. Ask any creative person where they got their best ideas and they'll say, "Dunno. Just came to me out of the blue." If you're looking for Eureka -- as in the Aha! moment -- you probably won't find it while following David Gregory's Tweets. Or checking Facebook to see who might be "friending" whom. Or whose status has been updated. George Orwell is . . . More likely, the ideas that save the world will present themselves in the shower or while we're sweeping the front stoop. What the world needs now isn't more, but less. The alternative to mindless activities for the mindful is turning out to be not a less-informed nation but a dumber one.

Unchecked "infomania" -- yes, there's even a term for this instapathology -- can lead to a lower IQ, according to a 2005 Hewlett-Packard study. The research, conducted by a University of London psychologist, found that people distracted by e-mail and phone calls lost 10 IQ points, more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana -- or comparable to losing a night's sleep.

Just as too much candy rots your teeth, apparently so too does too much information rot your brain.

The solution is not to unplug the cable modem or confiscate the phones. As is the case anytime there are benefits and costs to something, you need to strike the right balance. Making polices about shutting down information, like limiting internet usage, can be seen as punishment and can also end up hurting your Creatives' ability to do their jobs...remember, information is good. Instead of trying to force something upon your employees, try teaching them instead. Help them discover the proper balance for themselves, give them the tools to figure this out on their own. You'll end the day with more talented Creatives who are better at getting and using information, and in the process, they won't hate you. Put those to results together -- more skill, no hate -- and that's not a bad outcome.

Creatives With an Accent

There's a growing debate in the US about hiring foreign Creatives. In many industries, particularly in the technology fields, a lot of innovation is being led by foreign talent. With the economy in the toilet, and with unemployment rising, there's an argument being made that there's no need to hire foreigners when there are so many Americans looking for work. On the other hand, a smart company hires the best talent it can, and if that talent is from outside the US, then so be it.

Currently bouncing around Congress is the "Stopping Trained in America PhDs From Leaving the Economy Act of 2009." Known as "the STAPLE Act," the idea behind it is something like stapling green cards to the diplomas of PhDs in science, technology, and engineering in order to give permanent residency to foreign students who earn those degrees. In the last couple decades so many American students shifted their focus away from science and technology and into finance and such (and we can see where THAT'S gotten us), and the slack has been taken up by foreign students coming here. For many years those students stayed here but more recently they've seen opportunities back home that weren't there before. Rather than continuing to make it difficult for them to stay, there are those in Congress who'd rather encourage them to stick around. Other discussions currently taking place involve the possibility of increasing the number of H1B visas for professionals, and figuring out what role work visas should play in free trade agreements.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who think we should take care of our own citizens first, making sure every qualified American has a job before hiring foreigners. Rather than increasing the quota of H1B visas, these visas should be suspended for now. The argument is that there are plenty of qualified people here, so the original argument for having H1B visas -- that Americans are studying finance instead of computer science and therefore we need people from overseas -- has gone away. We're already seeing this in the financial sector, where firms that receive federal bailout money have limits on hiring foreign workers, and there are plenty of people who say this concept should be expanded nationwide.

There's a certain logic to this, IF you view employment as something that should be provided rather than earned. For me, though, I tend to come down on the side of those who want to improve our immigration system and, in the process, make it easier for foreign Creatives to come and for foreign students to stay. US firms will do best if they hire the best talent, regardless of where that talent comes from. If Americans have trouble competing against foreign Creatives, then the Americans should make themselves more competitive. That's how capitalism is supposed to work.

Innovation and creativity are not limited by man-made national boundaries. Reducing our potential labor pool will hurt firms' performance and slow down the economic recovery. We can't just create Creatives overnight, so we should be looking for those who have the skills we need. Imposing new barriers to foreign Creatives and focusing on individual employment at the expense of the broader economy hurts everyone. It's better to bring people in and keep the jobs here than to outsource work to foreigners working for overseas companies. In the long term, welcoming those 85,000+ temporary workers every year can help, not hurt.

If you don't want to hire foreign workers, then don't. But taking that option away from others is a bad idea.

Strategic Planning Is More Important than Ever

One of your jobs as a leader is to minimize uncertainty. That's particularly important in creative fields, which are very different from bureaucracies or assembly lines or customer service positions where the same work gets done day after day after day. Your Creatives are involved in projects that require original thinking, and that often have "end points" after which new projects will start. Without some guidance your Creatives may be all over the map, and if you haven't planned for new projects after the current ones are done, that map may lead you to the unemployment office.

This month some folks at The McKinsey Quarterly have some hints to help you out. An article called Strategic Planning: Three Tips for 2009 offers, not surprisingly, three useful tips for strategic planning in this uncertain period. The authors focus on:

Having a realistic focus
More monitoring of the implementation
Looking beyond the crisis

One of the hardest things to do with Creatives is keep them realistic. You don't want to stifle creativity and innovation, but you still have to keep them within uncontrollable constraints. While they always have to think "inside the box," the trick is to shape "the box"in such a way that you take full advantage of your resources and give yourself as many options as possible. Once you understand those options you can develop your strategic plans to reach the most desirable one(s). In the longer term you can try to change those constraints and resize your "box" even more.

You also need monitor the implementation of your plan to see if it's working or if you need to make changes. To do this you need a set of benchmarks you're trying to reach, and indicators that tell you whether or not you're making progress. One unfortunate tactic some leaders use is to start implementing their plan, look for the positive signs of success and then create indicators that use those signs, rather than creating reliable indicators first and then looking to see if they come true. If you do that, you're only cheating yourself, because you could be failing and not even know it, and then you have no chance to correct it.

Finally, the authors of the McKinsey article point out the importance of looking beyond the current crisis, and they're absolutely correct. It's easy to get wrapped up in what's going wrong now or in the opportunities presented by the crisis without looking past it. You need be thinking about how you'll proceed if you're successful at weathering the current crisis, because otherwise you'll come out the other side of it and then be wondering what to do and how to keep your momentum going. Looking at a particular problem is tactical; looking at that problem in the larger context of your business environment is getting you toward a strategic sense.

A lot of people avoid strategic planning because they think it's too hard, or it will tie their hands too much. Your Creatives, though, need guidance from you in order to do their jobs. They need to understand the possibilities and the limitations, and most importantly, they need to understand the direction in which you want them to go. So don't leave them hanging.

Get 'em Ready -- Again

Apparently, the need to start employees off right isn't confined to our creative fields and private firms. Even the US government is beginning to realize the importance of setting a good tone for new employees.

Agencies Need Better Welcome Wagon for New Employees, Report Says
By Alyssa Rosenberg

Federal agencies should improve their approach to bringing new employees onboard and integrating them into the workplace culture if they want to boost retention rates and productivity, the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton said in a report released on Monday at the Excellence in Government Conference in Washington, sponsored by Government Executive.

Leslie Ann Pearson, senior associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, said "onboarding" was not used as a retention tool by agencies and orientation for new employees tends to be a paperwork exercise. "They may not be getting any mission information," she said. "One employee said he was sworn in in a hallway without an American flag. It's not inspiring. We had one employee who showed up for work and their manager didn't know they were coming.

"The report, which included feedback from 11 agencies, said the federal government had no consistent approach to onboarding and orientation, even though high-quality programs can boost employee performance and eliminate turnover.

The report authors recommended a five-step approach to acclimating new employees. Agencies should reach out to and prepare for new employees as soon as they accept job offers. On a recent hire's first day, the report suggested agency managers spend time teaching mission values and introducing the employee to senior leadership and possible mentors who can help them negotiate the new environment. Also, managers should be directly involved during the employee's first week, according to the the report, to set performance expectations and ensure that the hire starts doing meaningful work as soon as possible. During the first 90 days, managers should both give and solicit feedback and provide initial training. During the first year, employees should receive recognition, formal feedback and a development plan.

"The first 90 days are when the employee is thinking, 'Did I make the right decision, should I stay with this organization?'" Pearson said. "It's no surprise that the agencies we went to that had stronger onboarding programs were higher up on the [list of PPS'] Best Places to Work.

"Cynthia Heckmann, chief human capital officer at the Government Accountability Office, said her agency had succeeded by analyzing GAO's workforce challenges and rebuilding its onboarding strategy from the ground up.

"We put together a two-year program for our entry-level staff. It's very structured in terms of the training we provide," Heckmann said. "Every two months there's a review and a pay component.

"GAO also built a mass notification system, Heckmann said, and as soon as a new employee accepted an offer, everyone from information technology to GAO's shared service center was alerted so the employee had what they needed to do their job when they arrived on their first day.

Candace Irwin, director of workforce systems and the accountability division at NASA, said systems integration was particularly important for agencies like NASA that carefully monitor access to facilities and deal with classified information. A single system allows human resources officers to fill in information about new hires, request technology and alert security to the arrival of new employees. NASA also has built a portal that provides information to new hires and their families so they can prepare for their first days at work.

Joyce Cofield, director of recruitment, retention and diversity in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department, said OCC woos candidates seriously, sending them gift baskets when they accept jobs, and then intensely inculcates them in OCC's values.

"Orientation is where we seal the deal," she said. "We spend a full week with our college recruits, and we do all those pieces of reinforcing the OCC culture.

"Irwin emphasized that onboarding has to be continuous. "Onboarding is a process; it's not an event, she said, "and it has to begin before the employee shows up at the gate."

First impressions matter. We know that if we can get employees familiar with their jobs and trained up, they'll do better...that's obvious. But if we welcome them aboard and treat them well from the start -- with simple respect and some recognition of their enthusiasm -- they're likely to stick around longer, too.

Be Upfront, In Front

As a leader, your main job is to make decisions. There are plenty of other things you do that provide guidance to your Creatives, but the bottom line is, you need to make the decisions that take your firm in a particular direction and turn opportunities into realities. I like to say that sometimes the best way to lead is to get out of the way, and I think that's true, but you still need to find the right path upon which your Creatives should tread and push them from behind even if you aren't holding their hands and guiding from the front.

The best thing you can do to help your Creatives out is give them clear, accurate guidance early on. One of the most important things you can do is give them all the facts and deal with reality at the start of something rather than letting them wander down a path under one set of assumptions and then change the rules on them.

This is particularly important when you're leading Creatives. Your employees are trying to think outside the box (or at least, think inside a bigger box) and even though you want to encourage creativity and innovation, sometimes you need to rein them in a bit. There are often limits on what you can do -- there are deadlines, resource constraints, skill deficiencies, and other things that take a good idea out of the realm of the possible.

We may think we're dampening creativity if we remind employees of these limits, but the truth is, those limits exist whether we want them to or not. They're going to have an effect, and we need to decide how far we want our employees to go before they crash into the wall of reality. By deciding early what's not possible and communicating that, you can move your employees toward what IS possible, and increase their chances of success. If, on the other hand, you keep some facts from them and let them do what they want without guidance (or with inaccurate guidance) they're going to waste time before they realize that what they're working on isn't going to work, and there's a good chance they'll resent you for it.

Remember, too, that if you're willing to identify your limits and make decisions within those limits, you can then decide if the resulting actions are good enough or if you need to try to change those limits in the future. If you aren't honest with yourself early on, if you aren't willing to make the decisions that restrict what plans your Creatives pursue, you'll never address those limitations and you'll always be stuck with them.

I've got a bit of personal experience with this. We had an international partner ask us for help with a problem and I came up with three options for helping them out. Plans A and B involved other organizations, while Plan C involved an expenditure of resources from my office. My leadership approved of all three plans at first. During the next week, as my attempts to help with the problem faced resistance, it looked like Plan C was going to have to be the one. On Wednesday, my leaders approved the plan as an option if we needed it; on Thursday, when I told them that was the answer we needed to go with, I was told "we don't have the money to support that." Now, had they told me that upfront, I would have created another Plan C, and I might have successfully fixed the problem. As it turned out, the problem went unsolved, and we looked pretty bad as a result. Sadly, because my bosses weren't willing to make a decision when we first discussed the various options, I wasted time on a solution that never would have worked and gave up the chance to to possibly develop another one that would.

Here's the hard truth: if you aren't prepared to make decisions, you have no business being a leader. And if you feel like you can't be open and honest with your employees when they start going down an unrealistic path, you're going to see a lot of failure in your firm. And nobody wants that. Well, except for your competition.