Do you want to show up more creatively for your clients and your colleagues, your family, and your friends?
Do you want to default to thinking about opportunity versus focusing just on problems?
Discovering Hope is full of proactive steps you can take right now, to achieve a more positive mindset or to help maintain the positivity you already have
Getting Positive reveals that more optimism is close at hand
Avoiding A Career Ambush – Be Alert and Bring Your ‘A’ Game
Strategic planners on the fastest career track know that getting to the truth of a client’s challenge is key. It’s is equally vital to understand the truth of the consumers served by your clients.
Getting to a genuine understanding of your client’s business gives you a chance of being relevant and better still, of moving the client forward.
In one of life’s great paradoxes, the strategic planner plays the role of the cobbler that wears no shoes/do not do for themselves what they instinctively do for others. That is, apply the same strategic nous and tools to obtaining authenticity when it comes to understanding a genuine career opportunity from a dud.
I hear of almost daily tales of candidates that got duped. But, the storytellers typically don’t see that they are complicit.
New career enhancing roles lie before them and rather than clarify the fundamentals that will define their success in a new role, much is taken at face value. Naiive? Or, a commendable illustration of their trust? It doesn’t matter. The carnage is the same.
Some basics. Whenever you are considered for a career opportunity, it is your knowledge and experience that is sought after. It is perceived to be able to solve one of a range of challenges facing your prospective future employer.
Ultimately what your future employer is seeing is your ability to either help save or make money and preferably both! And this is where it can get dangerous, for you!
The more your perceived ability to make money combined with urgency by the agency to make a hire, the more exponential the chances that they will avoid communicating, miscommunicate or incorrectly communicate information that might otherwise deter you from taking the job.
I don’t mean to say that hiring managers intentionally mislead. I am saying that many people under enough pressure, hiring manager or agency with a pressing client need, may be economical with the truth. This may help relieve client pressure whilst unfortunately not be optimal for you.
The Group Director hired to become a Head of Strategy takes the job because the agency is independent, moves countries and finds out one month in that the agency is being bought by a holding company.
The Director that moves across country to discover one month in that the client, that they moved their lives for, is leaving the agency.
Clearly the agency has to do what it has to do and perhaps the hiring manager or the department head is not party to much larger forces at play. The take out is therefore, you as the individual seeking a career enhancing move have to be alert!
You have to employ that smart truth revealing expertise to your career and most certainly at the inflexion points of progression from one job to another.
To be fair to those hiring, the more ‘you’ want an opportunity at a certain brand or agency, the more you will compromise, the more details you will overlook, the less you will be ‘on your game’ to understand exactly what you might be getting in to.
Indeed, far from applying healthy skepticism that engenders a pragmatic understanding that what one is being told is correct, you seek to reinforce your perceptions of what you want to hear. And, you fail to see the pitfalls.
When you are ‘on,’ you do not ask limiting questions but bigger questions in your quest to understand the truth. You in this mode are in control and driving your quest versus passively being drawn into a career ambush.
Getting to a Robust Understanding of a Job Opportunity – Some thoughts
- Know what do you want to do next
- Know what outputs you want to generate
- Know what defines your success in a new role
- Know what resources are available and timelines in which to achieve specific goals
- Know whether your goals align with those of the leadership of the prospective employer.
- Seek out not ‘sexy’ agency but dynamic client relationships, wherever they are and with them the opportunity for good work
- Seek out those clients that value your expertise and better still the employers that value your expertise equal or (even better for you) over and above other disciplines.
- Clarify where money is made – This is definitive proof as to what the agency says is does reconciles with what it does.. Good to know!
- Ask better questions that reveal the truth to you and not choreographed answers.
Being A Good Boss
People don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses. And usually when they cease to see a path for progression or growth for which a good boss is instrumental.
This edition of Narrate is about managing and being managed.
A great manager can make a huge difference to both your day-to-day experience as well as your long-term prospects, but a great manager is not automatic. Most managers lack training or formal guidance for the managerial role. Of course, a bad manager is awful.
“Nine times out of ten, when an employee says they’re leaving for more money, it’s simply not true. It’s just too uncomfortable to tell the truth.”
(Alison McMahon)
So how do we get better at this? Fortunately, there’s great material here. The attached links are aimed at making the task of managing a tad easier and being managed, a little more effective. If nothing else, a shared article might facilitate a conversation that needed to happen.
Enjoy!
Stuart
So What Makes a ‘trusted advisor?’
18 Executives Share Their Secrets To Being A Great Boss
5 Simple Ways To Be A Good Boss No Matter How Busy You Are
7 Leadership Style The Best Bosses Use
Want To Be A Good Boss? Start By Understanding Why You Want To Lead
Good Bosses Switch Between Two Leadership Styles
How To Be A Great Millennial Boss
14 Signs Your Employees Secretly Hate You
12 Things Not To Say Or Do Around Your Boss
Standout by Getting Your Employer Working For You Copy
Whilst working at your current agency you should consciously pursue experience, education and connections that enhance your distinctiveness as a business problem solver. You should do what you are paid to do (help optimize the agency of which you are part) but also remember that not also leveraging the agency to build your own value, is a wasted opportunity.
Don’t Regret What Was
It’s only once you cease to work for an agency that you appreciate the many things that provides, some obvious and some less so:
A job;A Team; Resources, (financial/creative); Access; Training; Experience; Exposure.
Your working in an agency can be great for the agency’s and its clients business. It should also be a positive step for your career growth.
The Connection between Great Work and Your Success
Does a happy client and grateful agency means you will have an optimized fast tracked career? Perhaps.
If you have are known for being an active team player, a proactive individual that helps to resolve client challenges and optimize opportunities, does this mean you will have a fast-tracked career. Perhaps
Is your reputation for effectiveness and are the career opportunities afforded you directly linked. Perhaps
Why a great contribution Doesn’t Always Mean That You Benefit
For instance. If the agency loves the way you keep one client happy they may well be reluctant to move you to other accounts. Or, put another way, an agency whose priorities and timeline that differ to yours may prioritize training, work, performance and metrics that do not fairly reconcile your contribution, strengths or priorities; Or, you deliver but others claim the credit.
Delivering Consistently Means (In the absence of conscious career management)
If you do deliver consistently and others notice, you should survive (but don’t always).
If you are noticed you might not necessarily be rewarded at all or proportionately or in the way you might want to be.
Delivering tangible metrics yet without a career advocate, throws the recognition and aligned progression you deserve in to question.
Putting Your Employer to Work for You – How?
Accept responsibility for your career progression.
Always have an idea how you want to grow next even if you don’t know what you want your next challenge to be.
Have your own ‘purpose’ and pursue it, even if you don’t believe in the purpose of your employer, or its clients.
Ideally, anticipate what your next career step will be. The clearer you are about this the better able you will be to start harnessing the experience, knowledge and connections you will need to make you a shoe-in for the next role.
Standout by Getting Your Employer Working For You
Whilst working at your current agency you should consciously pursue experience, education and connections that enhance your distinctiveness as a business problem solver. You should do what you are paid to do (help optimize the agency of which you are part) but also remember that not also leveraging the agency to build your own value, is a wasted opportunity.
Don’t Regret What Was
It’s only once you cease to work for an agency that you appreciate the many things that provides, some obvious and some less so:
A job;A Team; Resources, (financial/creative); Access; Training; Experience; Exposure.
Your working in an agency can be great for the agency’s and its clients business. It should also be a positive step for your career growth.
The Connection between Great Work and Your Success
Does a happy client and grateful agency means you will have an optimized fast tracked career? Perhaps.
If you have are known for being an active team player, a proactive individual that helps to resolve client challenges and optimize opportunities, does this mean you will have a fast-tracked career. Perhaps
Is your reputation for effectiveness and are the career opportunities afforded you directly linked. Perhaps
Why a great contribution Doesn’t Always Mean That You Benefit
For instance. If the agency loves the way you keep one client happy they may well be reluctant to move you to other accounts. Or, put another way, an agency whose priorities and timeline that differ to yours may prioritize training, work, performance and metrics that do not fairly reconcile your contribution, strengths or priorities; Or, you deliver but others claim the credit.
Delivering Consistently Means (In the absence of conscious career management)
If you do deliver consistently and others notice, you should survive (but don’t always).
If you are noticed you might not necessarily be rewarded at all or proportionately or in the way you might want to be.
Delivering tangible metrics yet without a career advocate, throws the recognition and aligned progression you deserve in to question.
Putting Your Employer to Work for You – How?
Accept responsibility for your career progression.
Always have an idea how you want to grow next even if you don’t know what you want your next challenge to be.
Have your own ‘purpose’ and pursue it, even if you don’t believe in the purpose of your employer, or its clients.
Ideally, anticipate what your next career step will be. The clearer you are about this the better able you will be to start harnessing the experience, knowledge and connections you will need to make you a shoe-in for the next role.
Attaining Trusted Advisor Status
Each year, unfortunately around Thanksgiving and as the end of the financial year approaches, many agencies prune their ranks. One way to bolster your job security? Pursue trusted advisor status. But what does it take to attain it?
IPA Effective work? Cannes awarded creativity? Making your client a success story? Some argue that you give the client what they want. Or is it what they don’t know they want? Either way, they have to trust you. They need to believe that what you recommend has their best interests at heart and not simply your agency’s bottom line. Who is best able to deliver on this promise?
The brilliant communicators? The great listeners? The connectors of the disparate? Of course, all the above but as with a great meal, great ingredients are not enough. How and in what order you combine them is key.
The attached links provide some expert views on how to bolster your position at this vulnerable time of the year.
Enjoy!
Stuart
So What Makes a ‘trusted advisor?’
- Trusted Advisor Marketing: Why You’re Asking the Wrong Questions?
- Scaling Trust: Marketing on a New Key
- Selling Strategies: How to Become a Trusted Advisor to the C Suite
- Trusted authority or Trusted Advisor – What and Why?
- 9 Traits of a Trusted Advisor
- Virtues of a Trusted Advisor
- Five Tips For Creating Relationships That Drive Sales
Agency Vs. Client-Side Planning
Companies that no longer work with outside marketing agencies continue to rise, reaching 27%, up from 13% a few years ago.
Do agencies really fail to provide sufficient value? Look closer and significant trends are at play. Certainly, some of the larger agencies are too slow and seemingly entrenched with traditional media. Clients that want to be faster moving can sometimes find speed by keeping/bringing things in-house.
More telling, the type of work being conducted client-side is changing, with a preference for strategy being pulled back in-house. Clients certainly seem to be hiring more strategic problem solvers from the consulting side of the business. There appears to be a recognition, in large part because of the importance of data, that the strategic conversation is something they really should stop outsourcing and better still, actively develop in-house. This in turn requires a re-tooling of talent.
From your perspective, agency or client, big brand picture or activation focus, how do you see things playing out? Hoping some of the attached reading clarifies things for you.
Enjoy!
Stuart
Articles and commentary that might be of interest…
- 6 Reasons Marketing is Moving In-House
- How Agencies Are Wooing Ex-staffers To Return
- Agency Versus Client-side. Is The Grass Greener?
- Working For A Marketing Agency Vs. Client-side Marketer
- Agency-side Vs. Client-side. Should You Make The Switch?
- Chapter 1 How To Choose The Launch Pad For Your Career In Marketing
- Shifting From The Client-side To The Agency-side –Is It Really ‘The Dark Side’?
- Three Top Marketers With Agency Backgrounds Reveal Why They Switched Roles
- Client-side Vs. Agency-side
- Living On The Other Side Of Moving From Client To Agency
- How To Retain Top Agency Talent