This week a creative got in touch with me asking for advice on starting a new role at a new agency.
The first piece of advice is to be patient. Don't be the loudest voice in the room. Pick your battles. Bide your time. Listen. Observe. Be collaborative. Make time for others. Go for the small gains first. Win people over.
The biggest challenge? It's not the stepping into the unknown, the clients, or your boss (they have a vested interest that you succeed, because they hired you). It's your new colleagues. Some of them, anyway.
If you are tasked to come in and shape or possibly shakeup the creative culture, there are inevitably going to be feathers ruffled, especially if you ask questions or point out inconvenient truths.
At one new agency, I observed in my first week that they'd never delivered award winning work, and that should be our ambition.
'Well', huffed a clearly indignant fellow director, 'That's because the work we do is....more...strategic!'
This was a moment I chose to bite my tongue. However, the response I really wanted to return was 'There are also awards for strategy. And if the strategy is so good, the creative should be too.'
Secondly, there will be colleagues who do not want you to succeed. Really.
An agency, like any workplace, is a gathering of human dynamics - with bonfires of vanity and ambition burning within. As mentioned, you are the shiny new hire. PR Week may have written a glowing piece about you. There's a bit of a buzz. Many colleagues will be really excited to be working with you. You say you are going to raise the bar. Not just do good work as before, but great work. You are the boss' shiny new toy. And that can really piss a few people off.
Some will wait in hope for you to fall flat on your face. One or two will seek to engineer it. (Why wait to throw you under the bus when they can drive it at you).
Then there are the account teams. The colleagues who deal with difficult clients, who work the longest hours for the lowest pay, and tirelessly to activate campaigns and often bear the brunt if things don't go to plan. They are the heartbeat of every agency, and I know because I was one of them for the first decade of my career.
They take some amount of persuasion to win over, and rightly so because they are in the firing line. So don't ever force lazy whims or vague flights of fancy upon them, and leave them to work it out and make it happen. That merits being thrown under the bus in itself.
Get to understand them, the account, the client, the target audience and the tensions / risks / pressures / opportunities wrapped within all of that as well, if not better, than they do. They are the first people you have to sell to, before you even get to the client. And naturally, that may meet cautious resistance:
'This is the opposite of what we'd normally do...the client isn't expecting this...our Director wouldn't want us to do it this way'.
'I know...and that's exactly why we should respond with something that we wouldn't 'normally do', which the client isn't expecting.' (Guess what, you've just inadvertently annoyed that pissed off director who is now gunning for you even more).
Beyond that, you have to justify why this new / different approach works, and how we sell it to the client. It takes more than time.
The only way you're going to win teams, clients and colleagues over is with success and that requires a good deal of internal management to achieve it. No tantrums, just standing your ground, making your case.
I was on the verge of quitting one agency due to my inability to make my mark and to get ideas signed off. Probably my most successful idea, certainly the most fulfilling, was one called Christmas Tinner. Yet, it almost never happened. I'd had the idea, scoped out the activation, laid it down into slides and sent it to the account team. Days later, as they were heading out to meet the GAME client, I asked them to give it a big push as I thought it was a winner.
'Oh', replied the account director sheepishly 'We took it out the deck. We thought it was a bit weird.'
It went back in. It changed the course not only of the account, but the profile of the agency. A year later it won PR Campaign of the Year (according to the PRCA and Marketing Week).
Which brings me on to the third part of managing colleagues and your own career. Success.
Enjoy it. Share it. Acknowledge and attribute everyone who played a part. Understandably, people will ride the coattails of success. (Let your boss have their moment, though playfully remind them they originally said the idea was crap). But beware. Others will just grab the coat and run off with it.
There is a saying that success has many fathers (and trust me, failure is an orphan). Yet, as a creator or co-creator, who also works across the activation, myself and others have, on occasion, experienced a blatant case of child abduction - especially when the awards DO start rolling in.
In one notable case, I was surprised to see people I hadn't met, let alone worked with on a campaign, claim credit for it. Being in the room, or the same building, is not the same as the thinking or the doing. The long hours, the dead ends, the high risks and the hard yards. Otherwise, Ringo could claim to have written the songs on Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road, and just imagine how those albums would've turned out if he had.
Own it.
If you don't, some other Ringo will.
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