Foiled Again

With our big planing conference starting in two days, it pains me to report that "stymied again by indecisiveness" is in the lead by a big margin.

Are You Kidding?

If you're reading this at work today, shame on you. You should be eating leftover turkey or heating up some gway tio or whatever.

Thanksgiving would be a nice time to offer your Creatives a 4-day break, so hopefully you've given them, and you, the day off today.

Enjoy the holiday.

(and if you're somewhere other than the US, and this isn't a holiday week for you, then work harder! hahaha)

Enjoy Your Holiday

For those in the US, have a wonderful Thanksgiving tomorrow!!

And for those elsewhere, have a wonderful Thursday.

Pay Attention to Morale

The LeadingCreatives crew headed up to New York this weekend to check in with folks and do some Christmas shopping. Mission accomplished on both counts.

One of my longtime friends and colleagues is working in a small firm there and is chomping at the bit to get out. The upside is, he's a genius, and could do a great job for anyone. The downside is, he might have to leave New York to do so. And this makes him sad.

Frankly, the combination of frustration at the company and concern about his future is making him very unhappy at work. And that's never a good thing.

When you have employees who dread coming to work, who spend their first half hour hitting 20 job search websites, who can't wait to leave...well, they may not being giving you their best work. So it helps to pay attention to their attitudes and fix problems if it's possible for you to do so.

There are some things that aren't really fixable. After 4 years my friend is still in the same position where he started, because the firm is only composed of a few people and there's simply no way to move up. If you have a small company, with no plans to expand, then that's just the way it is. Since your Creatives won't be able to get promoted, you need to find other ways for them to develop professionally. Maybe you can pay for additional training and education, perhaps you could give them time to do professional writing...the bottom line is, if you can't promote them one way, then find another way for them to grow.

You might also have trouble giving raises. Startups, in particular, may not be able to offer more money each year. The recession may be limiting your growth and revenue. My friend is still making essentially the same as he was making 4 years ago, which in New York is not the best plan for personal financial security. If profits are growing, be sure to share them with your employees. If profits aren't growing, you need to figure out what needs to change. And if your business plan is proceeding on schedule and you simply aren't at the big profit part of the plan yet, then find other ways to compensate them. My friend has raised the issue with his boss of offering better health coverage, for example, but the big guy isn't listening.

The "not listening" part is a big factor in my friend's unhappiness at work. His boss is very set in his ways, uninterested in changing anything, keeping policies as is. One suggestion my old colleague made was offering a telework option, and he demonstrated its feasibility over a few days, but it was a no-go. When your employees come to you with ideas for positive changes to the working environment, they may giving you a big hint that something's wrong. If they feel like they have no control over their work life, no say in how they do their jobs, and if they're missing out on other things like raises and promotions, you're likely to have some unhappy Creatives.

That's something you want to watch for. You need to take the pulse of your workforce on a fairly regular basis. This doesn't have to mean sitting down for feedback sessions...it could be as simple as watching body language in the office, or seeing how quickly people bolt out at the end of the day. If people are coming to you with ideas, and you keep turning them down, you should start worrying when they stop coming to you. If you're interested in keeping your experienced employees, you need to find ways to keep them positively engaged in the firm. Creatives who feel like bureaucrats, and stuck in a position with no developmental or financial future, might not be too happy at work.

And they may spend their first half hour of work each day checking 20 different job search websites.

Oh, and another lesson learned from this trip: when you run into someone you've met before, don't say "that's right, you go to Parsons," when in fact they go to the Fashion Institute of Technology. My bad.

What Do You Want to Work On Today?

Google has a well-known policy of requiring it's Creatives to spend 20% of their time at work on projects of their own. This isn't designed for employees to do outside work on company time, but instead is supposed to be something good for Google, something outside the norm, something original.

Of course, Google is not the only major company to do this, nor is the tech sector the first to give it a try. 3M started its "15% time" policy in the early 20th century as it produced consumer goods. Genetech, a biotech firm, encourages its researchers to pursue their own initiatives. There are plenty of benefits to companies that stem from encouraging personal work.

The obvious, and most direct, benefit to your company comes when your employees work on their own projects and someone comes up with a great new product. The classic story in this realm is the invention of Post-Its, and Google likes to tell the story of how Gmail came about in the same way. You just might get something really great if you let your Creatives be creative beyond the boundaries of their normal workload.

You can get better employees out of the deal, too. Personal projects allow them to flex their creative muscles and learn new things that could open new avenues for your firm. You want your Creatives to be creative, and allowing them to take their own initiative will lead them to be better performers for you. Do you really want a bunch of employees who wait around to be told what to do???

The effect on your employees can be pretty dramatic. The opportunity to work on independent projects is a great recruiting tool. It shows you trust your employees, demonstrates a culture of autonomy that will be appealing to the best Creatives, and sets you apart from other employers. It's great for retention, too, as it contributes to a positive environment where people are happy to work. It won't solve all your human resource problems, but it can be a very positive factor.

Sure, you should have some oversight, not just to make sure people aren't goofing off, but also to grab onto a good idea as it's emerging. Figure out what kind of arrangement you want to have with your Creatives, make sure everyone understands it from the time they're hired, and then try it out. yes, small firms might feel like they don't have the capacity for this, but in the long run, it might be the most productive thing you do.

Remember How to Let Go

Earlier this week, Window Media, which published a number of weekly newspapers across the U.S., went out of business. This result was apparently coming for some time, but the leadership failed to prepare their employees for the likely, almost inevitable, end.

On Monday morning, some employees got phone calls telling them their newspaper was shutting down, and they need to quickly come collect their belongings. In other cities, the writers and design editors and the rest of the staffs showed up to find locked offices and a notice telling them when they needed to return to get their stuff later in the week.

No warning. The employees knew things were bad, but few realized just how bad.

Perhaps their leadership would have benefitted from reading this.

Status Reports

How much over-the-shoulder oversight should you do? How closely do you need to keep track of what your Creatives are doing?

Good questions. There aren't any definitive answers, but they're still good questions.

As a leader you're responsible for getting projects finished and products completed. You've got deadlines, whether client-driven or self-imposed, and you need to make sure your Creatives work toward meeting those deadlines. But how closely do you want to monitor their work?

It can be tough to keep your Creatives on a timeline. Creativity can't be scheduled. You can't know exactly when an idea will come to you. Creatives often take a lot of pride in their work, and want it to be done just right, so if you let them take forever, they just might.

So some oversight is necessary. But how much is too much? At what point do you inhibit their creativity, or waste more time with status updates than you gain by trying to keep them on a schedule? The last thing you want to do is have your Creatives more focused on deadlines than on quality.

How can you keep track of them without imposing too much on them? You could do the normal things, like have regular meetings, or have them submit regular status reports. But maybe you can adjust these ideas a bit. Perhaps, rather than having them come to you in a group and sit through everyone else's updates, you could instead go to them individually and see how things are going. You could do this on a regular schedule but the schedule would be for YOU to keep, not them. They might not even realize you're coming to them on the same day every week, but you'll know, and you can use this consistency to gauge their progress. And status reports? Well, rather than having them send you a regular report in a standardized format, consider having them update on Twitter when they make progress or need help, using accounts that are specifically for work and are closed off to outside eyes. Or you might set up an in-house social network for updates, using a system like Ning, which would be particularly useful if your Creatives are geographically dispersed but need to collaborate.

That last point is key: how much do your Creatives depend upon each other? A collection of solo practitioners requires more one-on-one management, while integrated creativity demands a different style of guidance, and perhaps greater oversight to keep all the parts working together.

You might try to avoid the whole reporting issue by creating a culture in which meeting deadlines is seen as an essential part of the creative process. Making your Creatives individually responsible for their work and giving them the authority to essentially oversee themselves can encourage them to meet their deadlines rather than risk losing their autonomy (or their jobs!). During recruiting you would need to explain to your potential employees that they'd be responsible for themselves and they need to be up to the challenge. They might start off with more oversight but gain more independence as they do well. If you had an agreement about your oversight on paper with you and your employee's signatures, almost like a contract with your Creatives, that would reinforce the importance of getting work done on time while emphasizing that they have the authority to work without excessive oversight, and without spending time in meetings or doing weekly updates for you.

How much oversight you need to exercise depends in large part on the quality of the Creatives you hire. If you're hiring the right people, you really shouldn't have to spend much time at all checking up on them.

Book Review: Wikinomics

A colleague of mine got all excited about an idea for our organization last year.

"We should have a wiki!!," he said. "It'll be a great way to gather and share a lot of information. And it'll solve a lot of problems for us." When I asked him exactly what problems it would help us with, he repeated "it'll solve a lot," with nothing more specific than that.

He met with some folks at the National Academy of Public Administration to discuss his idea, and one of the senior people there said, "You sound like a Wikinomics guy." "What's that?," asked my colleague. True to form for this particular fellow, he'd jumped into providing us answers to problems he couldn't identify, and along the way ignored the basic research that might have told him that someone got there before him.

Sadly, the authors of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything are similarly guilty.

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams offer up a good description of modern trends in information sharing and collaboration. They discuss many of the methods by which innovation and creativity are being supported by technology that makes it easier to share. Readers might find the book a little dated because it was written pre-iPhone and before the proliferation of Facebook apps, but it still provides some interesting discussion.

Unfortunately, it also provides a lot of cheerleading.

Tapscott and Williams quickly slide from describing a phenomenon and its implications to openly advocating new practices and dismissing the potential consequences as irrelevant. It's all right to take a position based on evidence and rational argument, but the book quickly devolves into hyperbole. Comparing song mixing mashups to the Renaissance is taking things a bit too far.

For example, the authors promote businesses opening up their intellectual property to their customers so they can tinker with it, but they ignore the the profit incentive that drove the original innovation. They castigate Apple for limiting the customization early iPhone users could perform on their phones and the company's unwillingness to provide support for hacked products. As the years since then have shown, of course, Apple has created a new model for customer innovation that was slowly in progress when this book was first written, something the authors seemed not to consider at the time. The Apple model further allows apps to be shared throughout their entire customer base, rather than simply among the "geek elite," which would be the likely result of the authors' recommendations.

Throughout the book there runs a belief that today's innovative kids, who need to be freed from the ties of intellectual property laws, will continue to adapt and adjust their consumer electronics now and forever. The authors never approach the question of what will happen when these kids grow up and have to deal with jobs, mortgages, and other responsibilities that will encroach on their innovation time. This perception that in the future everyone will innovate isn't backed up by any research, merely by opinion.

This is a problem throughout the book. Various claims remain unsupported by data. For instance, the authors claim that music companies should encourage mashups because they lead to higher music sales by their artists. Nowhere, though, do the authors offer any evidence to support that claim, evidence that a good doctoral student should be able to collect for a dissertation.

Once you ignore data and evidence it's easy to ignore the negative implications of what you're advocating. They largely ignore, for instance, the problem of bad information being injected into decision making by content providers who really don't know what they're talking about or worse, who are deliberately loading bad info into the system. Yes, they make the point that the Encyclopedia Britannica has as many errors as Wikipedia, but at the Encyclopedia, someone can get fired for that, a fate that doesn't befall the person at home voluntarily editing Wikipedia pages. What happens to science in this environment? Is "peer review" still worth anything when the reviewers aren't peers? The authors stick to the positives but ignore the negatives.

And that, ultimately, is what dooms this book. Their conclusions may very well be sound, they just might have the right answers, but by not taking a hard look at the positives and negatives there's no way to really know.

By only presenting one side of an issue while implying they've considered both sides, they present the reader with poorly developed arguments that sound good enough to be ok, arguments that many readers will accept and act upon without question.

Which sounds remarkably like the effect of their wikinomics model as a whole.

How About a Day Off?

Today is Veterans Day in the U.S., and a day of remembrance in many other countries as well. If you have veterans working for you, it sure would be nice to give them this day as a holiday.

Don't Gossip

We all know there's plenty of drama in a workplace filled with Creatives. It's like a union rule or something. One of the first steps you can take to minimize that drama is to cut back on the gossip. And the best way to do THAT is to not be a gossip yourself.

Social gossip can be harmless. Who's dating who (unless one of the who's is married, or is the other who's boss) or whose tie doesn't match their belt, or whatever, can be meaningless. But gossiping about business matters...now THAT'S a bad thing.

The worst culprit here would be you, as a leader. If you do it, it sets the tone for everyone else. But it also signals some problems with your leadership.

If you're gossiping with your employees about things going on in the company, that implies you don't have good communication within the company. If information is being traded as gossip, rather than being passed openly and honestly from leadership to workers, that's bad. When employees hear you gossiping about business matters, then they start wondering what they AREN'T being told. If your employees know you don't trade in gossip then they'll pay more attention to the things you DO talk about.

Don't talk trash about the people above you, and don't sit around with your employees badmouthing policies from above. Remember, once you have to carry out policies, they become yours, rather than belonging to some vague "they." If you're criticizing the policies you're supposed to carry out, it becomes much harder to enforce them when your employees think you don't agree with them.

Do NOT talk about your employees with other employees, especially if you're being critical. I used to have a boss who would tell me how disappointed he was in others...all I could think was, "what's he saying to them about me?" Remember, anyone who gossips to you will gossip about you, so the quickest way to lose your employees' trust is to start talking to them about each other.

Along similar lines, if someone comes to you with a complaint or a concern or a new way of thinking, don't go blabbing it to others. People will stop coming to you if they think you can't be trusted to keep your mouth closed, and you'll shut off important communication from your employees if you do that. So don't do that.

Gossip is unprofessional, and gossiping about the business creates a lot of problems, especially if YOU do it. It can be tough to get your employees to stop, but it should be fairly easy to make yourself stop. Just. Don't. Do. It.

Should You Take on Interns?

As we make our way through the fall semester, students at colleges (and some high schools) across the country are looking toward next summer and the potential for internships. The application process for many internships has already started (and finished, in some cases). You may be wondering if it's worth it to get into the realm of internships, so before you jump in and take on an intern or two, think about why you're doing it and what's involved.

Consider what you'll need to provide. You may have to pay them (and you need to decide if this is a paid or unpaid internship before you advertise it). You need to offer training in your field; after all, this why people take internships for low or no pay rather than getting more traditional jobs. If they're good, you should provide them with positive references when they're applying for jobs later, whether with your company or somewhere else.

All of that seems like a pretty small outlay of resources. So what do YOU get for it?

First, let's be honest: cheap labor. Whether paid or unpaid, interns can be employed doing those tasks that need to be done but don't require a regular employee with a certain education or background. Some administrative work, like copying or simple PowerPoint preparation or anything along those lines, can typically be done by your interns. Since they don't have the skills needed by employees with more responsibility, and since they're really here for the training, you can generally get them for less money. But don't beat them. Not hard, anyway.

Second: you're developing people to work in your field. This is a good thing. If you're ever thinking "wow, they don't teach THIS in school," then having an intern is your chance to teach them whatever you think they're missing in their education. For creative fields, schools often develop skills, but practical experience is required to turn those skills into a profit-making business.

Third: this could be an audition for a potential employee. It sucks to take someone on as an employee only to discover they really weren't what you're looking for. Sure, you can cut them loose, but no one likes to do that, especially if the person isn't bad but is simply wrong for the job. If you can, try giving them some real responsibility (not enough to wreck your firm, of course). An internship gives you a chance to see what they're like in the workplace, and at the same time let's them see if your firm is right for them, in a way that an interview can't.

If you're going to hire interns, there are some things you should consider. The biggest is, you may not have much for them to do. You might consider having them work a shorter schedule than regular employees. Be flexible, too; if there's really nothing for them to do, and no one has time to work with them, let them take off, especially if they have studying to do or a paying gig they need to get to. Also, bear in mind that interns expect to get some training in how the business works. You need to be prepared to make time for that, having then assist different people on a variety of work and not just brushing them aside because they're "too much trouble." Just as they have certain obligations to you, so too do you have obligations to them. Someone in your firm needs to be responsible for them, and you should have a plan in place for what you're going to do with them and how you're going to help develop them.

Interns can be fun, and you can start a long relationship with them at this stage (a professional relationship, not a Monica Lewinsky-style relationship). If you think it's too much trouble, if your company is too small or the work is too fast-paced, then don't take them on. But if you think it can do you and them some good, give it a shot. Done properly, everybody wins.

It's All About Attitude

Even as leaders we all work for someone. Whether it's for a boss higher up the food chain, the shareholders, or our clients, we always answer to somebody. And when the person you're working for lays down a goal in front of you, you have two possible attitudes you can take:

"Let's figure out how we can do it"

or

"Let's figure out why we can't."

Ask yourself which attitude would work best for your firm?

And now ask yourself which attitude you really have. Really.

Still a Problem With Focus

So Friday my boss calls me. "Can you come down?," he asks. "We need to have a skull session."

We're in the midst of planning a major restructuring of our organization, an effort involving a thousand people, millions of dollars, and new employees and facilities in a couple countries. It's big, it's been keeping me hopping, and it sounds like my boss has just gotten some new guidance we need to discuss.

Next month we're holding a planning conference with some of our folks from around the area and around the globe to develop a strategy that, for budgeting reasons, needs to be ready to by February. There's a lot to think about. There's a lot to plan. There are a lot of ideas that need to be "socialized" with other groups. As the strategic planners it's up to us to create the way forward.

I get to his office and sit down. The boss looks pensive.

"OK," he says, "we need to figure out a way to take notes during this conference."

...

Are you KIDDING me???

Obviously, he never read this post. It would be helpful if he did, as long as he didn't know I'm the one who wrote it.

Anyway, I told him what to do, and left to go back to work.

Leaders, I implore you: focus your attention on the important stuff, or you're letting your Creatives down.