Leadership

Articles: Leadership

Platforms Give You Pounceability

“Today’s choices yield tomorrow’s results.” I repeat this message so often and in so many contexts – at companies, conferences, in interactions with taxi drivers and checkout clerks – that I sometimes feel like a broken record (or a scratched CD…umm…corrupted mp3 file.)

But it’s a message that can’t be emphasized enough in today’s “results-now” world. The choices we make today about where we spend focus, time and energy directly impact our ability to pounce on opportunities tomorrow.

It all comes down to building the right platforms. The main definition of a platform is a raised surface that provides an elevated view for you and/or your audience. Building a platform gives you an increased ability to see opportunities and take advantage of them. In other words, platforms give you pounce-ability. (more…)

“Be a Laser Not a Lighthouse” & Other Creative Leadership Essentials

Leadership

A few weeks ago I was privileged to hop a plane to St. Louis to spend some time with a great group of creatives wrestling through organizational growth and how to establish new systems to deal with it. After a morning session with the large group, I had the chance to spend about 90 minutes (before hopping a return flight) with a handful of the team’s leaders. We discussed the essentials of creative leadership, and I was asked to distill down what I’ve experienced about great creative leaders as fodder for discussion.

Here are the five principles that I believe every (EVERY!) leader of creative teams must live by if they want thriving teams. (more…)

Are You Smoking What You’re Selling?

Creating

Leadership

Are you smoking what you’re selling? In other words, are you actually living out what you’re saying to others? Are you walking your talk? Or – said more bluntly – are you being a person of integrity?

As a leader, there is very little room for hypocrisy or laziness around lining up objectives with day-to-day activity. When you fail to line up your actions or your team systems with your words, it will significantly affect your team’s ability to do great work. Here are a few signs of this:

What you say you are about is not what your systems are designed to do. Strategic thinking is irrelevant, so the team stops thinking strategically. When systems are out of alignment, strategy just takes too much effort.

What you say is important isn’t what you really reward. People will do what they are ultimately rewarded for. You need to have rewards systems that line up with what you say the organization values.

You don’t deliver on commitments. Every compromise – whether you are late on a delivery date or to a meeting – is a crack in the dam of trust. Over time the results can be catastrophic.

Doing great creative work is challenging enough without having to deal with the complexities of misalignment. Do an audit of your team systems and your commitments and see if there are any inconsistencies. The result of bringing these into alignment will be better work for you and your team.

(Photo credit: spacepleb)

7 Ways To Fail On The Web

Leadership

Actually, I probably should call this “7 Lessons From Failures On The Web” …but you know… it’s just not as catchy, is it?

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, because I know that there are a lot of AC’ers who are involved in direct or ancillary ways in web development/design and web-based businesses. Last night I spoke as a gathering of Cincinnati-based web entrepreneurs headed-up by Mindbox Studios and shared the top seven lessons I’ve learned about how to (not) find traction on the web. These are all attached to painful experiences I’ve had over the past several years of pushing AC onto the web and working to find a way to connect creatives in conversation about their process.

I don’t think these ideas are limited to the web by any means. They also apply to creative teams and organizations who are trying to do something meaningful. It’s hard work turning an idea into something beneficial to others and it takes discipline, focus and a willingness to learn. Here are my learnings:

1. Leverage enthusiasm early. When people get very excited about what you’re doing, have a simple, direct next action for them. Equip them to spread the word about your venture, then get out of the way. Six months later, the fire will be gone.

2. Taking ground is 90% grunt work, 10% air coverage. We were given a serious gift of major news coverage very early in the life of AC. There was a feature article in a magazine boasting a circulation of 10+ million (yeah…it was a big one) and we’ve received other major coverage since. And truthfully, I’ve seen significantly higher returns on my everyday, plug-away work ethic than I did from any of the big news coverage. There is no getting around hard work, and there are no “magic bullets” for instant recognition and success.

3. Consistency breeds loyalty. In the first four years of AC on the web, we changed platforms 4 1/2 times and switched up our product offering 3 times. Confusion leads to apathy leads to disinterest. Be consistent and clear in setting expectations for your customers.

4. Relationship (not content) is king. Broadcasting should be left to big media. If you don’t like people, don’t start a web-business. Period. You need to be prepared to build customers and loyal enthusiasts one interaction at a time. And you have to care about the results. If you’re not ready for that, don’t even think about it. Go get a corporate job.

5. Simpify. Simplify your platform, simplify your systems (and automate them as much as possible), simplify your product offering. You need to focus your efforts on high-impact tasks and projects, not on maintenance. That’s the sure path to getting stuck in the muck.

6. Understand your platform(s). You don’t have to know how to build a website, but you need to understand how they work. And you need to know how to have an intelligent conversation with developers about what you expect. Many developers are not visionaries. You will get what you ask for, and if you don’t know how to explain it to them, you will wind up with something less than what you want.

7. Find sounding boards and resonant voices. You need (a) sounding boards, or people you can bound ideas off of and “ping” to stay aligned, and you need (b) resonant voices in your life, or people who stretch you and challenge you to think in new ways about your business. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely world and it’s easy to get lost. You need both a compass (resonant voices) and a map (sounding boards to identify landmarks in the terrain.)

I would love it if you would share any additions to this list based upon your experiences. Some of the most powerful insights into my own work over time have come from simple conversations about what others have experienced. Failure is only failure if you learn nothing, right?

Echo Chambers

Leadership

I’ve been thinking lately about how easy it is for us to set up “echo-chambers” in our lives and especially in our organizations. An echo chamber is a confined system that amplifies any input by reflecting and reinforcing it. We hear what we want to hear, we look at every project with revisionist eyes and we rationalize our decisions so that they seem “strategic.” This creates a kind of “bubble of invulnerability” but it’s based upon a false premise: we can do no wrong.

And the worst part of all of this is that it creates a significant amount of dissonance within the organization. Not only does it silence dissension and free thought, it causes all of those involved to live in a constant state of tension between “what IS” and “what we SAY is.” No matter how hard we try to ignore this dissonance, it will eat away at our creative energy. And over time it will cause the artists in our midst to shut down, generally disengage or “play along”, but the organization will NOT get the best work and thinking out of them.

This is not just an organizational thing. Creative people can be tempted to present the best parts of themselves and ignore the rest. (By the way, “the rest” is usually what makes us interesting.) When people connect with and approve of the part we present, we can begin to feel a sense of disdain for the other parts of us (the part we hide.) So the approval of others (the echo-chamber) becomes a kind of “judgment” on the parts of us we hide. So by pretending to be something we’re not, we’re setting ourselves up for judgment and extreme self-criticism.

Leaders: are there echo-chambers in your organization? Are you being brutally honest? Are you setting good rails? Do you have good metrics? How do you know you’re succeeding (other than “gut feel”)? Are you cultivating a culture of truth-telling and trust?

Artists: Are you pursuing self-awareness? Do you have people in your life who will tell you the truth? Are you “positioning” and wearing masks so as to hide certain parts of you? Do you find yourself being extremely critical of your work, your life, your decisions?

Good dissonance is what leads to great creative. It’s the tension between what IS and what COULD BE that propels us forward. Bad dissonance zaps our creative and mental bandwidth. Let’s destroy the echo chambers and commit to being a culture of radical honesty and self-awareness.

On Being Humble(d)

Leadership

One of the things that stands opposed to good creative leadership is the unwillingness to be humble.

When was the last time you admitted a mistake?
When was the last time you took the fall for a team decision?
When was the last time you submitted to someone else’s intuition?
When was the last time you asked for advice? I mean REALLY asked for advice?

Pride builds walls around us and isolates. When pride becomes our mode of operation it will inevitably leak into the organization and will eventually create little self-defensive “silos.” When the leader is always right, everyone feels like they must always be right as well.

The need to be “right” creates an culture of backward-justification. We’re always looking for ways to prove that we were right even when the evidence doesn’t add up. And in the end, it creates a sense of helplessness in the organization because it has lost all sense of objectivity about metrics. And it also justifies mediocrity.

If you need your ego stroked, great…go for it. Somewhere else. But don’t look to your team for it. It will – in the end – destroy any hope of making something meaningful. And in the end, if you refuse to be humbled, someone else will probably do it for you.