Happy New Year!

Here’s hoping 2010 was a great year for you and 2011 is even better. Happy New Year!!

Back to Singapore

Never content to sit in one place for too long, the Leading Creatives crew will be landing in Singapore in a few hours. We’re going to spend the next couple weeks meeting with some Creatives there, as well as with human resources managers, academics, and leadership consultants, in hopes of gaining more insight into the practices Singapore is employing to build its creative industries. More to follow...

Looking Ahead

The end of the year is often a great time for reflection. At "Doors of Perception," they offer an intriguing look at where design researchers should be looking during the next ten years. Some interesting intersection points emerge, so take a look and see what you think.

Merry Christmas!

The Leading Creatives crew wishes you, your families, and your employees a very Merry Christmas!!

Look Globally to Work Locally

The US needs to seriously overhaul its immigration policies. The debate over, and this weekend’s defeat of, The DREAM Act, certainly demonstrated that. Until it does, though, you need to find the best ways to make use of global Creatives.

Your job as a business leader is to make a profit. That means minimizing costs while maximizing revenues. One way to max your revenue is to have the best possible talent working for you, and to find that talent you need to have the broadest feasible pool of potential recruits. That means not limiting yourself to American employees, and there are a couple ways you can do that.

The easier method is to hire free agents overseas. This is a pretty popular business model; the software development industry in Malaysia has really taken off, for example, with many folks there working remotely for American firms. Some US business owners have contracted with free agents overseas and then made occasional trips there to meet with their Creatives, others simply do it all online. In this case you save on local expenses but may incur some recruiting costs overseas and might have some additional travel expenses if you chose to be more “hands on” about it.

If your preference is to have employees on-site, then you should look into what it takes to sponsor someone for a work visa. You can keep your recruiting efforts focused here at home because there are plenty of foreign students here who would love to stay after graduation if only someone is willing to work with them on the immigration process. The key here is to be willing to go through that process and sponsor employees, which takes some effort and expense on your part. You also need to hire these folks on as full-time employees rather than contracting with them as free agents. Something to keep in mind is that someone who has shown the ambition to study abroad, especially if they’re from a non-English speaking country, is someone who’s obviously pretty motivated and, we can expect, pretty capable…otherwise, they wouldn’t have made it here. Think about what it takes to complete a degree in a language that isn’t your first, and you’ll come to realize something about the kind of employee you’ll be getting if you hire them.

Oh, and by the way, all of the above applies equally well to non-US firms. If you’re in London, Sydney, Singapore, wherever, you still should be trying to find the best possible talent, and that’s not always going to be homegrown. Look at your country’s immigration policies and see how you can best make use of foreign talent when you find it.

Looking Ahead

New Year’s resolutions are pretty common, though if you think about it, there’s really no reason to wait until January 1st…if something is a good idea, then a particular date on the calendar probably isn’t going to make it better. Still, people like to wait for a certain “Hallmark date,” as a friend calls them, and for business purposes it often is a good idea to start something at the beginning of the year just to make the budget and tax paperwork easier.

So as the new year approaches, if you haven’t started thinking about changes you’ll make or new ideas you’ll try, now would be the time.

Your strategic plan is something you should review around this time, if you haven’t already. Your plan should be a living document, with you updating it as changing conditions warrant, and overhauling it when your operating environment shifts to something completely new. Look at your objectives and goals, see which ones you’ve accomplished, which ones are no longer relevant, and what new ones you might include.

When you have an idea where you’re going for the next year, look at your human capital requirements. This doesn’t just mean figuring out how many people you need, it also means thinking about what kinds of people you need. What skills should they have, what education and training should they have completed…this affects not only your recruiting for new Creatives but also the development you want to do with your existing ones.

Consider what new markets you want to explore in the next year, so you can include them in your planning for the following year. Are there new products or services you might want to provide? Do you want to expand into new geographic markets? As you start looking ahead to 2012 you’ll develop an idea of what you need to do in 2011 to get ready for it.

We always need to have one eye on the future as well as one eye on the present, but sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of that requirement. Use the changing of the calendar as a chance to focus your attention on what’s coming, at least for a moment, so you can make sure you’re on track for continuing success.

Get Some Good Info

Sure, it would be nice if everything you're curious about could be answered here in Leading Creatives, or by the folks at Designing Leaders, LLC. But there are plenty of sources of useful information out there, many of which are free but worth far more than you're paying, and they're worth exploring.

Some of the major consulting firms have their own in-house "knowledge centers," which play the role of a research institute within the company. While their primary goal may be knowledge generation that ultimately supports their consulting efforts, some of these companies make many of their products publicly available. I've used two companies' work in previous jobs as well as in my classes, and find them to be a great (and free) source of information.

One is Boston Consulting group. You can set up an RSS based on your specific interests so you know when something new comes is published, or you can subscribe to get e-mail notifications. They publish white papers and research reports, many of which are focused on particular industries. McKinsey and Company also offers some great products, and they tend to focus more on leadership and on international issues. Of course, it's possible I had my subscription settings set a certain way, and both may offer much more than I realize. The best thing to do is check them out and see if something they offer might be useful for you.

The best leaders are always learning, and it helps to realize that none of us knows everything, and no matter how good we are at our jobs, there's always more to learn. While these free opportunities don't take the place of more in-depth reading, or more formal training and education, they offer a great supplement and allow you to tailor your reading to your greatest needs in order to make the best use of your valuable time.


PS: Daniel Pink is preparing the first paperback edition of his book Drive. I thought it was pretty good the first time around, but Dan, in a very cool crowdsourcing kind of way, is soliciting input from readers for the new edition. If you've read the book and would like to offer some ideas for the upcoming edition, check out his blog to learn more: http://www.danpink.com/archives/2010/12/who-else-wants-to-contribute-to-the-paperback-edition-of-drive

At the Intersection

One of the incredibly cool things about teaching at a university is the interaction between people of very different fields. Sure, stovepipes exist between individual departments (and even between individuals), but at least you have the opportunity here to bring together some very different ways of thinking. At a faculty Christmas party yesterday I enjoyed an interesting conversation about some recent events in DC with an engineer, a historian, an anthropologist, and a neurobiologist. Our specialties didn’t necessarily give us insight into any unique facts about the events, but the different ways we all think in our work suggested different ways of thinking about what happened. I was introduced to some perspectives I really hadn’t considered before.

So, can that happen in the business world? Of course it can. Does it? Well…

In The Medici Effect, Frans Johansson talks about “the intersection point.” He describes this as the point where different ways of thinking come together. The intersection point could be a point in time, when different ideas seem to converge, or it could be a physical place; a university could be one example, and Johansson discusses the Santa Fe Institute as another. The idea here is that no specialized way of thinking has a monopoly on good ideas, and it can often help to evaluate problems through a different lens. An astronomer can suggest a different scale of vision to a biologist, a mathematician might see patterns in literature that escape the attention of an English professor, that sort of thing. I’ve enjoyed working at the intersection point on interdisciplinary research teams at universities, and it’s a very useful thing.

In business, though, it gets harder. We tend to hire in accordance with our firm’s objectives and the specific tasks that need to be accomplished, and we don’t always think about what other skill sets might broaden our view and help us achieve those objectives. For instance, the creative elements in advertising firms pretty much consist of copywriters and artists…so, is there a role for an international affairs specialist? A nurse? A chemical engineer? There might be, if we’re trying to be creative and develop new ideas that stand out from our competitors’. It’s not that these particular backgrounds necessarily bring any specific information into the work; sure, someone who speaks Chinese would be helpful if we’re writing ads for China. But that’s not the point. Instead, we try to make sure that advertising copy isn’t just written from the point of view of a copywriter, because frankly, there are a lot of other points of view out there among the potential customers. Some of the big consulting firms have seen the logic of this; in addition to hiring plenty of people with business backgrounds, they also hire doctors, designers, engineers, scientists, and others, and not simply to work with clients in those particular fields. They do it because it gives them a worldview much broader than their competitors’.

If you’re small, you may need to do this in baby steps. Perhaps, for specific projects, you could hire free agents from a variety of fields to work together. You could also consider crowdsourcing your work if that’s appropriate for your particular field. Whether you create a physical intersection point, or one in Second Life, or simply a moment in time when you bring different perspectives together, you will likely find that your possibilities will increase dramatically.

It's Coming

I’m hearing more and more reports from Creatives who are preparing to jump ship as the economy improves. Are yours among them?

For the last few years, with unemployment rising, and many smaller (and, for that matter, larger) firms going under, many Creatives have felt like they’re stuck where they are. Many employers, seeing this, have been more comfortable with salary freezes, benefit cutbacks, and other measures they thought were necessary to weather the storm. Even if they understood the need for those measures, a lot of Creatives may be looking for greener pastures.

Other firms seized the opportunity to help their Creatives develop by taking advantage of downtime to pursue training and education, or did pro bono work, or did other things to keep their Creatives engaged and ready for the time when the economy turns up again. But even in these firms, where Creatives may have been happy in their jobs, they still may be itching for something new as new possibilities begin to open up.

This presents you with both a challenge and a couple of opportunities.

The challenge is to hold onto the Creatives you want to keep. This is always tough, as the best Creatives will always be in demand, but as things start looking up it’s going to get even harder. If you implemented austerity measures, you need to think about backing off of those: lift the pay freezes, restart the employer contributions to retirement accounts, and so on. Realize, too, that perks that disappeared during the recession may need to come back; yes, it may be time to contract with a coffee service again. If you’re one of those firms that focused on the positives during the recession, start putting those development efforts to work. Make use of the training and education you paid for, start using the skills that were developed during the pro bono work, challenge your Creatives to do even better. The best Creatives want that challenge, and you should make a space where they can improve. In any event, start identifying those performers you want to hold onto and begin getting an idea what it will take to keep them. It might not take much, and so you can reduce your costs if you find out what’s really important to your most critical people.

The opportunities? Well, one is, as Creatives are looking to jump, you should position yourself to catch some. This is the time for your business to grow, as demand increases and you can fill the gap left by companies that didn’t make it. Start thinking about opportunities for growth and recruiting strategies now, rather than waiting until the transfer of people is in full swing. Remember, as people star to move around, you’re not just at risk for losing some; you also could gain some.

And the other opportunity? Well, if you have any people whom you’d like to see go, just be sure you don’t stand in their way when they head for the door in their search for a new job.

Stay Engaged While Staying Out of the Way

In theory, it seems easy for Creatives to stay engaged in their jobs. They’re doing work they want to do, it’s challenging and requires active creative thought rather than just repetition, and they often move from one project or client to the next, leading to new experiences. We hope, in the creative workplace, that our employees are actually interested in what they do and putting their full effort into it.

Is it equally easy for their bosses to stay engaged? Short answer: no. Longer answer: Probably not.

Even though we hope our leaders are in those positions because they enjoy leadership, the reality is that leadership and management may not hold the same excitement as actually being in a creative position. Yes, leadership is very challenging, and can be very rewarding, especially when you see your employees doing great work and you know you contributed to that. For many people, though, being promoted to leadership positions took them out of a job they enjoyed and into one where they’re doing a lot of administrative tasks and occasionally playing the part of the bad guy. Many leaders get into bureaucratic cycles when it comes to things like budgeting, performance appraisals, and other requirements, and too often one day can seem awfully similar to another.

So if you feel yourself falling into a rut, how to you get more energized about what you’re doing?

First, focus on what you DO enjoy about leading. Rather than complaining about the less-than-fun tasks, keep the good parts front and center in your mind. Whether you’re mentoring someone, or publicly recognizing someone’s work, or helping wrap up some successful projects, there should always be good things about your job that you can emphasize.

Speaking of mentoring, look at that as an opportunity. While it’s probably better not to mentor someone who reports to you (it’s awkward when they complain to their mentor about their boss, and they’re one and the same!), if your company is big enough you can probably find someone with whom you can work in a mentoring relationship.

Consider your own professional development. One of the things that gives your Creatives such a rush is the opportunity to improve their skills and do something new; why don’t you do the same? Whether it’s taking classes, attending a seminar or two, or getting into professional reading, find something that will help you be better at your job and then challenge yourself to put it to use.

One thing you want to avoid doing is getting in your Creatives’ way. Don’t go back to being “one of the boys” and trying to insert yourself into their work. They have their jobs, you have yours. Yes, you need to know what they’re doing (and to a certain extent, go ahead and live vicariously through them if you need to), but that doesn’t mean you should do it along with them.

Leaders are visible to everyone and the example you provide will set the tone for your Creatives. If you seem disengaged, they’re likely to spend time wondering why rather than focusing on their work, or maybe just lose interest themselves. If, on the other hand, you stay positive about the work you do, you’ll encourage them to do the same.

And if you don’t have any interest in being engaged – if, instead, you’re only in it for the paycheck – it’ll show, through your Creatives work as well as your own.

Get Them Talking

Workers in repetitive industries need relatively less feedback than Creatives do. Assembly line workers or bureaucrats who do the same thing over and over may not need to be told "yes, you're doing it right...just like you did yesterday, and the day before, and the year before."

But Creatives, by the nature of their work, are always doing something new and different (well, we hope so, anyway). And that means they need more feedback, because each new attempt might be a good one or a bad one, and if we want to capitalize on the good and push the bad by the wayside, it helps to understand what worked and what didn't. Feedback in the creative environment is very helpful.

But does it all have to come from YOU? No.

Your Creatives, whether they work independently or in teams, are linked to, and observed by, other Creatives in the company. Even if you're hiring free agents they can, in most cases, ultimately see the results of each others' work. So, how about if they offer feedback to each other?

There are some advantages to getting feedback from peers. First, if it all had to come from you, then you wouldn't have the time to give all the feedback your Creatives might find useful. Also, it's less threatening for them if it comes from someone who doesn't pull the strings of their career. Peers can also be specialists while you may be more of a generalist, so they can provide more detailed feedback than you might be able to.

If your people are comfortable sharing openly, then give them an open environment. Maybe encourage one-on-one discussion, or have a group lunch or something along those lines where people can openly discuss each other's work. If you have a large group, or if they're competitive or not so tight-knit and you're afraid this would turn into a group "slam" of someone, maybe encourage some sort of online feedback mechanism. There is some software out there specifically designed for groups to provide anonymous feedback, and you may find this a worthy investment.

One of the great potential advantages of working in a creative environment is the sharing of ideas among creative people. This sharing can happen during the design stages, but it can come after the fact as well. Improvement comes about by learning from each experience and finding better ways to do things while holding onto what works. If you encourage your Creatives to share feedback with each other, you're more likely to see the kind of continuous improvement that is the hallmark of a profitable creative firm.

Put Responsibility Where It Belongs

You can delegate authority. You can't delegate responsibility.

What's the difference? Well, authority is what someone can do. Responsibility is what they have to do. Typically, they go together. If you're given the power to do something, then you have the responsibility for getting it done right. Likewise, if you're responsible for getting something done, you need the authority to do it.

If you have the authority to do something, you can grant that power to someone else. If you're responsible to someone else, though, for getting something done, you can't just absolve yourself of that responsibility and decide you don't want it anymore...if your boss is holding you accountable, you don't simply get to decide you're not.

But...

...even though you can't pass off your responsibility to your boss, you can make your Creatives be responsible to you, and if you're giving them greater authority, you should.

We talk a lot in the leadership literature about empowering your employees and pushing decision making down to the lowest possible level. That's great for creative fields, because Creatives need freedom of action in order to exercise their full potential. When folks get that power, though, they need to be held accountable for exercising it appropriately. They need to realize that if they're given the freedom to make decisions then they need to make good ones, and if they don't, they'll be held accountable. At the end of the day, YOU will still going to be responsible to the people above you, but you need to make sure the same sense of responsibility flows from your Creatives back up to you.

Authority and responsibility go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other, so make sure you don't give one without the other, either.

Breaking Memory

Earlier this week I met with a personal trainer for the first time since leaving Singapore over a year and a half ago. We've discussed my goals and have agreed on building up my body for marathons -- with 2 scheduled for next year and the possibility of a third, and with some lessons learned from recent races, I know I need to build up my core muscles. So, that's what we're working on.

I'd mentioned to my trainer that I have some pronation when I run -- that is, each of my feet tends to pivot a bit when it comes down, rather than coming down straight. This isn't really a great thing, and when I buy shoes I aim for those that limit the pronation, but I've never thought about how to make it step.

With this knowledge, my trainer had me do some very strange walking: first, 25 meters walking on the outside edges of my feet, then back on the inside edges, then repeating the 25m walking on my heels, and finally walking on my toes. The idea, he said, was to break through the "muscle memory" that I'd developed by running this way for nearly three years. I need to force my body to do things differently, so it can forget what it's used to and be open to doing something different, before I can try to run the proper way.

When the time comes for your firm to change, you too need to consider "breaking the memory." A company has a corporate memory and often does things a certain way because that's the way things have always been done, and it seems to work. There may come a time, though, when it doesn't work anymore, but switching to something new -- whether it's a new method of production, or a new product/service altogether, or new HR policies -- may require you to break that corporate memory, getting people out of their routine and opening their minds to the idea of doing something differently.

What you do to break that memory doesn't have to be related to the changes that are afoot. You might schedule an off-site event in which you do some exercises that put people in new roles or have them do things in a way that's outside the norm. If you don't want to take a day away from work, look at instead changing some non-critical policies in your workplace and letting people see how results can be achieved through new methods. In other words, you can "start small" and work your way up to breaking the memories where change is needed. In the case of me and my trainer, walking 25m on the sides of my feet isn't going to get me through a marathon -- but it's a start toward something better.

We are all creatures of habit, sometimes on purpose, sometimes subconsciously. When we try to break those habits we can create dissonance between the way things are now and the way we think they're supposed to be. It's important to break old habits before we can create new ones, but it's also pretty tough, so to be effective at it you're going to need to put some effort into it. Don't be afraid to break things in order to make things.

The Comeback Kids

One of my students recently mentioned a program at her company: The Comeback Kids. It's a recruiting program that focuses on bringing back former employees. It's the sort of thing you might want to consider.

Having Creatives leave your firm is not necessarily a bad thing. They will gain experiences that can make them better, and do so at no cost to you. By leaving they may get to try their hand at leadership, or work on a project requiring skills you haven't needed. Their new company may send them to training, whether to simply enhance some skills, learn some new ones, or earn a certification. They might even sponsor them for higher education. If nothing else, working in a new environment can enhance their creativity. If you're able to lure these improved Creatives back to you later, then the benefits come to you rather than staying with your competitors.

Ideally, if they leave you for someone else, they're moving toward something, such as a cool opportunity, rather than away from something, such as you and your management style. If that's the case, if they leave without hard feelings, then there's really nothing preventing them from wanting to come back, if you can offer them something worthwhile in the future.

How can you do that? Well, the important think is to stay linked with them. Consider sending them an exit survey about a month after they leave, not only to get some useful feedback from them, but also to show you're still interested in what they have to offer. Try to stay connected through LinkedIn or Facebook, so there's always an open line of communication, plus you can see what they've been up to. If your Creatives are involved in local groups or associations, or even just happy hours, there's a chance to stay connected with your former employees through public venues. Some firms even have "alumni associations" to maintain even closer contact with former employees. With a little effort you can keep a network of potential future recruits with whom you're already familiar.

All of this will be pretty tough, of course, if you're enforcing a "no compete" clause in employment contracts. If your former Creatives know they aren't supposed to be working in your industry for one of your competitors, they won't stay in touch with you for fear of being sued. Realize that people are going to leave your firm and try not to stand in their way too much. The short-term benefit you think you get from a no-compete clause may cost you potential rehires in the future. "Fluid" employment is not at all uncommon among creative fields, and rather than seeing it as a problem, you should explore the benefits of it and see if you can capitalize upon them.