52 Limited

Arrogance. Ego. Too much emphasis on profit. All of these can lead to the death of culture in a creative agency.

In two days this week I had meetings with three management level people that have seen the cultures of their employers, creative agencies in town, shift dramatically away from employees and toward the bottom line and/or a founder(s) arrogant vision.

This is an all too common mistake that companies make. With many local agencies being founder-based it can set up challenging dynamics when it comes to establishing and growing culture. It takes a healthy ego to start a company. As your company grows, at some point it becomes your employees that are growing and sustaining the company, not the founder(s). This is a realization that many either do not make, or do not believe. To successfully grow and maintain growth founders need to empower their staff and maintain a positive employee-driven culture.

Ego’s can often get in the way of this because, after all, the company grew around the founder(s) so they are always the key component. Not true once a level of growth has been obtained.

Too much emphasis on the bottom line can kill culture. Employees want and need to know that the company is making money and they will get paid, but it generally is not what motivates them daily. What motivates the typical person in the creative industry is whether they made a difference…through good work, good creative, good service to clients and co-workers, not that they brought a project in under budget and made the company some extra bucks. That’s for management to worry about….and for management to monitor and communicate in a strategic way. Staff communication should never focus on the bottom line. It has to be addressed of course, but cannot be the focus of every message. If it is, it is just a matter of time before employees begin to think of themselves as just another cog in the wheel, a step on the assembly line.

Once this occurs, your culture is gone. Employees will begin to look for other opportunities that will enrich them. Quality of work will begin to suffer….why put in that extra effort when you are just another cog? And once the quality begins to suffer….you run the risk of losing clients. If that happens, things start to spiral out of control quickly.

Building the company back up, changing perception in the recruiting landscape, and patching the culture are now the biggest challenges. When really, it would have been much easier and more sustainable to have paid more attention to the care and feeding of the culture to begin with. Because a funny thing happens when the culture is healthy…people perform better, feel empowered, and produce strong results. Which, not coincidentally improves the bottom line.

How many times do you hear the phrase, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? Well, to a large degree it’s true. But it does not mean what you may think it means.

What is does is point to the power of networking in a job search. I advise that people do 3 main things when looking for a job. 1. Following job posting boards is a necessary evil of the job search. You may find a job here, but you are just one of thousands of people looking at the same posting. 2. A placement agency like 52 can open doors and provide opportunities that never show up on job boards. A placement agency is also a function of the next and critical step. 3. Network. Often networking is the most important missing piece. It’s also of course, the hardest one and the one that requires the most work.

So, getting back to the “who you know”. It’s not really who you know as much as it is what you know and who you know. If you don’t have marketable employment skills, it really doesn’t matter who you know, chances are you still are not going to be hired to run your mom’s friend’s marketing department. The key is to know as many people in your chosen profession and specialization as you can. If you are good at what you do, you should have a network of people that know it. When looking for a new job, you tap into that network and let it work for you.

If you need to build a network, it takes time, effort and focus. When you make a contact make sure you also ask that contact for a referral. That way one contact becomes two. And always follow up. Keep track of your contacts and the activity you have had with them. When trying to build a network on a job search you need to ask yourself…who would hire me? As in, what is the position or job title of the person who would hire me? If you are a graphic designer, it might be a creative director or marketing manager. Those are the people then that you target for your networking. You also target people who would be doing the same work as you, but they are more able to refer you to opportunities, the higher level people may be the ones doing the hiring. Either way, it’s still networking and building your sphere of contacts.

It’s good to get this skill down early because it is a recurring theme. A job search through proactive networking is very similar to the business development cycle that companies pursue. And it’s hard work. But, it is worth it because you never know the opportunities that will present themselves, either in the short term or years down the road.

Because, it’s all about who you know.