Virtually Workable

Inc. magazine has embarked upon an interesting challenge: after writing about the ups and downs of virtual work, they've decided to pack up their offices for a month and publish the magazine remotely. Cool. And of course, they'll be blogging about it, so be sure to follow them.

The folks at Inc. are very used to sitting down with one another...this kind of creative work often seems to benefit from face-to-face discussion. Max Chafkin writes in their blog that "Working remotely is never easy, and we may face particular challenges coming from an industry where it is still common for an editor, a designer, a photo editor, and a writer to gather around a table to look at a page proof." Rather than jumping on the telework bandwagon you should first look at your work processes and decide if they can be done as well or better if done remotely...or if, perhaps, you would benefit from different work processes altogether.

The staff at Inc. isn't jumping into this blindly. They prepped for it with plenty of reading and spoke with the authors of some of those books they found most useful. They're also soliciting input from readers as they go along, trying to find the best way to function and realizing they need to be open to change as this process goes along.

We've talked a lot here about telework and going remote, the plusses and minuses you can expect and how to limit the costs while maximizing the benefits. But in the end, you'll only know if it works for you by trying it out. If you're intrigued by the idea of going virtual, maybe a month-long experiment would be worthwhile for you. Don't just jump into it, but instead, have some goals you'd like to achieve and some metrics for measuring your success, and be sure you're as prepped as can be before starting it. You'll get your best understanding through experience, and you'll get your best experience through good preparation.

Flat Mentorship

Everyone likes to say they want a flat organization, whether they really do or not, because it's the thing to say these days. It's useful to flatten out your firm's hierarchy, with fewer levels of oversight between the worker bees and the CEO and fewer stovepipes that limit collaboration. But you need to consider all the likely effects before you do it.

There are a lot of benefits to a flat organizational structure for Creatives. It allows for more independence and initiative, allowing them to exercise the skills you hired them for. It makes things move faster, with less review and fewer meetings, so work can get done without a lot of holdups. It cuts your overhead costs, so you can focus your time and resources on your Creatives and not on layers of oversight.

But one downside to this is that with fewer leaders and managers in a firm, you have fewer people available for mentoring. And if your firm is full of Creatives who really need mentoring, that’s going to be a problem.

We know that mentoring is an important part of leadership. But if we’re also trying to create a more effective firm by having a leaner structure, that doesn’t leave a lot of people in formal leadership positions who can take on protégés. One architectural firm told me they went from having 1 leader for every 8 people to 1 for every 20. While that brought about some good changes for the firm, it also led the CEO to say in a meeting, “we are not a schoolhouse.”

There are ways you can continue mentoring. First, figure out what kind of mentoring you need to do. Helping a protégé develop their creative skills is time consuming; helping them map out a career path is less so. Your mentorship objectives need to be realistic in light of your manpower.

Remember, too, that mentors don’t need to be in formal leadership positions over their protégés. In many cases, it’s better if they’re not, because it’s tough to counsel someone about a problem with their leader if the problem is you. So consider making mentorship a part of senior Creatives’ job descriptions. As people gain seniority and earn more there’s a reasonable expectation that they should be assuming more responsibility. Plus, it helps prepare them for leadership positions someday. Don’t just rely on current leaders, or you’re likely to not have enough people.

Of course, there are limits to how much mentoring you can do, so you also need to think about who you’re hiring and how much guidance they will need. Going back to the architectural executive’s views on training and schooling, you need to think about hiring the right people to fit into a flat organization. Since you want independent people with a high degree of skill, you need to look into hiring experienced people rather than those just out of school. If you’re hiring people new to your field, they’ll need more advice and guidance, but honestly, they’ll need more supervision, too, and that doesn’t fit the concept of a flat organization.

So, while having fewer leaders may limit your ability to mentor, the people you hire into such a firm should require less anyway.

The firm mentioned earlier hasn’t really taken that approach. As they’ve gotten flatter, they haven’t revamped their hiring strategy so they’re likely to be hiring the wrong people. The result is requests for mentorship, with no one to provide it. Something’s got to change, or the conflict between needs and resources is only going to create more problems.

Controlling the Use of Teams

Some people just aren’t happy unless they’ve got a whole team of people assigned to a task. But your use of teams needs to be balanced against the requirements, and the culture, of your firm.

The proper use of teams is one of the trickiest aspects of leading Creatives. In the right circumstances, organizing your Creatives into teams encourages a kind of synergy that provides results far beyond what any individual could accomplish. But under the wrong conditions, insisting on group work can hurt not just a particular project, but your overall organizational culture as well.

When you assign someone a project, ask yourself what they need to be successful. If an assignment requires multiple skills sets to be integrated in a complementary fashion, then yes, you should consider forming a working group to bring all those skills together. In advertising, for instance, the copywriter, the artist, the marketer, the client account manager, the lawyer...all of these have a role to play, and its generally better to get them together from the start rather than doing the work piece by piece.

But if all your Creative needs is information from others, then you should consider having them run solo and simply collect the inputs they need from others.

Why? Well, much of it comes down to the issue of control. When you have an individual working on something, they decide what the end result looks like and then pass it up to you for approval. When you form a team, though, everybody in that group gets a vote. It doesn’t come to you until everyone’s reviewed it and approved it. This not only slows down the creative process, it also leads to mediocre results as the group tends toward the least common denominator in order to gain consensus and move on.

Frankly, you often don’t need this. Creating unnecessary hurdles for Creatives stunts their innovation. If all you need from other people is information, why give them a say in decision making? Don’t create hassles for yourself when you don’t need them.

Insisting on teams can also affect your Creatives’ morale, and their interest in doing good work. A colleague of mine used to work for a boss who ended every assignment with “now, you’re going to need a working group...” “The implication,” says my colleague, “was that none of us were capable of accomplishing anything on our own. I don’t think that’s what he meant, but the message that came across was that he didn’t think much of our abilities.” As a result, a lot of the more motivated people left, leaving behind a group of employees who preferred not to accept responsibility. If you want a successful creative firm, these aren’t your ideal employees.

So be judicious n your use of teams. Don’t let a working group be your default position. If you can, let your people do the work you hired them to do, and maximize the creativity coming up from the ranks to you.

Save the Politics for November

Some people see a leadership position as a chance to inflate their ego, maybe make up for something that was missing earlier in life. Or maybe they find it easier to get satisfaction from the relatively easy method of playing office politics than from actually doing something productive. Whatever their reasoning,you should avoid being one of them. Because these people suck.

Office politics take different forms. Some leaders try to advance to higher positions. Others try to get more resources for their departments, not so much to do more with them as to simply have more than everybody else. Some are setting themselves up for another job somewhere else. And some simply have nothng better to do.

They don't help. Worrying about that kind of nonsense distracts you from the company's business, but worse, it distracts the people around you, too. Your employees suffer because they're trying to do good work and they don't get any top cover from you becaue you're focused on yourself. Your peers suffer because they have to deal with your childishness and try to keep it from interfering with their work. Your leaders suffer because they can't trust you to report accurately and objectively. Overall, the whole firm suffers from office politics.

Creative firms in particluar suffer because they require an environment that supports creativity and innovation. The negativity associated with office politics sucks the creative energy out of a group, wrecking everyone's focus.

Now, let's not be naive. Office politics are a normal fact of life. There will always be "those people," and sometimes even good leaders need to fight for their people. You need, though, to keep it to a minimum, and not play into it someone else's ego. If you're focused on inflating your ego rather than inflating your profit margin,then a leadership position probably isn't right for you.

Keep Your Focus

It's tempting to focus on your process.

Business books and business leaders spend a lot of time addressing the need for process improvement. And of course, that's because the process IS important, contributing to the quality of your final output and affecting the costs you incur as you produce it.

While you're improving your process, though, you need to remember why you're doing it. It's easy to get caught up in improvement for the sake of improvement and lose your focus on your ultimate result. As you work to improve your business practices or your organizational structure, be sure there's a reason for doing so, and make sure what you're doing contributes to that reason.

Consider the example of Best Buy and the Geek Squad. Best Buy bought Geek Squad, a small computer customer support company, and integrated it into their corporate structure. Geek Squad is huge now, you'll find them in Best Buys everywhere. Much is made of the Squad's style of dress and their lingo, and they're known for their innovative management methods, such as communicating between stores through online games. The Squad is a cool bunch of geeks and their customer satisfaction ratings are through the roof, all of which is good for Best Buy.

The Best Buy/Geek Squad integration is touted as a case of a company incorporating unique processes, breaking through corporate bureaucracy to take a new approach. But try this: go into a Best Buy store and find a retail associate who can help you decide which router is right for you, or which printer you should buy. How does that work out for you? If your luck is anything like mine you'll find someone who can tell you where they are but can't give any advice on which is best for your needs. I'm sure there are some very knowledgeable sales associates working at Best Buy, but overall, the innovation found in the Geek Squad hasn't translated into better performance by the retail staff. And retail, of course, is their main focus.

Now, it could be that Best Buy wants to shift their focus from retail to service, and if so, then Geek Squad can lead the way. But they're still building big new stores, and I don't see any sign they are planning to move from sales of electronics to servicing electronics as their primary moneymaker.

Though this example addresses customer service, that doesn't mean it's not applicable to you in your creative field. Whether your mission is to produce hairstyles, video games, or advertising, you need to stay focused on it. If you want to change your mission then change it, but don't say you're moving in one direction while making changes more suited to another. This isn't to say you shouldn't make improvements in areas beyond your primary mission -- Best Buy's purchase of Geek Squad has improved the company's reputation, which can help increase sales -- but you should do that in addition to, not in place of, your main area of focus.

Employing Free Agents

What role can free agents play in your company? A pretty good one, if you use them right.

Free agents are folks who aren't employed by your company but instead work for themselves, taking on contracting or subcontracting gigs as the mood (and their rent payment) strikes them. Sometimes they choose to remain fully employed, in other cases they only work part-time or do this as a side job. Some leaders hesitate to use free agents, but they bring a lot of advantages and can be pretty useful if you manage them well...but that's a discussion for another day.

One of the big advantages is that they can bring fresh ideas, or at least, a fresh set of eyes on a task. Your in-house employees can, through no fault of their own, start to get stale over time. A free agent not only brings new ideas to a project but can also spark renewed creativity among existing full-timers. They can also piss off your full-timers, which means good leadership from you is needed...but again, a topic for another day.

Free agents also provide you a lower-cost employee, allowing you to bring in talent when you need it but not be paying for it when you don't. With free agents you don't have to deal with health benefits, Social Security or 401(k) contributions, paid vacation time, etc. You may not want to be paying for workers that aren't 100% employed, so you can use free agents when you need them but let them go when you don't.

Along these lines, free agents might be especially useful when you need a special skill for a current project but it's not something you want to pay for on a regular basis. If you need a specialist in a particular programming language or database design, or if your salon is prepping for prom and you know you'll be doing a lot of up-dos over a weekend, you might want to bring in a specialist temporarily.

You might be in a situation where paying for full-time employees simply isn't an option. If you're starting a new business you may not have the resources to commit to paying people for full-time work, and you might even still be figuring out exactly what kinds of employees you need. Using free agents to help you get off the ground allows you to right-size your business and build up some cash before you take on the obligations of full-time employees.

You could also use free agents as a "tryout" for full-time positions. Lots of free agents go back and forth between free agency and regular employment. Rather than hiring an unknown quantity, you may want to bring someone in for a project as a way to see how they'd fit in with your company. In this case, it's probably best if you let them know what you're thinking and see if they're interested...if not, you can still use them, or you might check out someone else instead.

For many firms free agents will be one part of your employee picture but not the whole thing. For some others, hiring only free agents is the way to go. If you understand the needs of your business and the roles that free agents can play, you'll be in a good position to strike the right balance.

Can Bureaucracies Be Creative?

Can bureaucracies be creative? Yes.

Will they? Well, that's another matter...

We have to remember that bureaucracies aren't designed to be creative. Instead, they exist to make sure that repetitive tasks that need to be done the same way each time get done repetitively, the same way each time. This is why creative people often avoid working in bureaucracies.

But even bureaucracies sometimes need evolutionary and revolutionary change. Evolutionary change, as the name implies, happens over time as the organization adapts to small-scale things. This might include changing some internal processes because of budget reductions, or meeting new legal requirements ("Yeah, did you get that memo about the new cover sheets for the TPS reports?"). Often times this can be handled by the bureaucrats themselves, though suggestion programs or "empowering" the employees.

Revolutionary change, on the other hand, comes about when a massive shift in your environment (usually external to the organization, and usually out of your control) takes place. In that case, the whole reason for your organization's existence may change, and your priorities and values may need to shift quickly as well. A private company may face extinction if it doesn't change, and even government agencies may face irrelevance and accompanying budget cuts, even if they're safe from going out of "business." When the shift from mainframes and workstations toward desktop computers started picking up steam, IBM was faced with a need to change its focus. When the Cold War ended, the US military needed to find a new role and claimed it was undergoing a "revolution in military affairs."

In this case, the repetitive-minded folks who are buried in your bureaucracy might not be in a position to see the need for change -- very often, all they see is their own little piece of the world. You need someone else to look at your group's role in the broader world and see what needs to change. You need someone educated, someone open-minded, someone interested in doing great work without worrying too much about exactly what that work is...you need a Creative.

And preferably, more than one.

Smart bureaucracies have these people. They might call them "Strategic Planners" or a "Red Team," or some other term to show they have a different role than the rank-and-file. They aren't better, they just have a different function. And it's a necessary one.

The organizational culture of bureaucracies is naturally resistant to change, so leading Creatives in a bureaucracy presents some unique challenges in terms of communication of new ideas within the organization and defining your vision for the future, as well as in terms of morale when your Creatives feel nobody's listening to them.

Still, while there are challenges to overcome, overcome them you must. A large company needs its Creatives to help them adapt to the little changes and survive in the face of the big ones. A government bureaucracy needs Creatives to help it understand how it's role changes so it can serve the public's needs. Creativity in a bureaucracy can be tough, but at times, it's vital. And with the right people, it's possible.

About 10 years ago, when I was working in a government agency, a friend complained about how hard it was to get new ideas through the system. Our boss said, "You're frustrated because you know you're doing work, yet it's hard to get it approved. But think about this: what if you were stupid...and it was EASY to get things approved?" We agreed that would be worse, but that still didn't make him feel better.