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.