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
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. Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 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
Planning Your Future
Two questions I’m frequently asked by planners: ‘What makes me most marketable?’ and, ‘What are my career options?’
The good news for planners is that the career options are extensive. We’ve seen planners (good ones) go to branding agencies, PR shops, media players, digital homes, design spaces, innovation boutiques, research houses, client-side, start-ups, consultancies of all hues, many have freelanced and others have set up their own businesses in unrelated areas.
And what makes planners most marketable? Perhaps the best insights come from your peers that took the plunge.
- For me today the virtue most needed for folks wanting to change the fortunes of brands is fearlessness’ Michael Fanuele, Chief Creative Officer, General Mills
- A tendency to listen more than to speak’ –Katie Dreke, Global Brand Director/Advanced Concepts, Nike
- ‘What matters most is intellectual curiosity and an aptitude for change’–Ivan Wicksteed, CMO, Old Navy
In my experience strategic planners in most demand have a business mindset with a results focus; an ability to communicate and gain confidence through understanding client or colleague motivations; and an appreciation of the role that technology plays in building brands.
Looking forward to taking with you about your career progression.
Stuart
Articles and commentary that might be of interest…
- Do you think FAST or think SLOW? Here’s why Brand Leaders need do both
- The Thinkers50 Ranking 2013 (and bios)
- Forward Thinkers: What You Can Learn From Nintendo’s Weird and Wonderful 125 Years
- Getting Outside the Box: The 5 Behaviors of Successful Leaders
- Why Your Best Performers Usually Make the Worst Leaders
- Heads-Up Leadership … leading a customer revolution
- Great Entrepreneurs Are Creative Thinkers
- From Basement to $15M: One Woman’s Journey To The Top
Contact me for a list of resources –Best Visa, Passport and Work Permit Websites
Career Self-Assessment
Paid employment consumes at least a third of our working hours and in many cases much more, yet most of us don’t give it the planning it deserves.
Satisfaction at work has an outsize impact on overall life a newsletter for creative strategy/brand planning professionals satisfaction as well as our mental health.
Optimizing workplace happiness is an obvious and perhaps ‘natural’ thing to do, yet too few of us invest the time to assess and plan for success.
Intermittent checks and on-going benchmarking against goals set are vital not only to achieve objectives but to bring clarity, help feel in control and provide a way to show progress in your career… and life.
Please find below a series of links addressing your career success in 2016 and beyond. While the quality of questions you ask yourself is key, so is asking the questions in a context that gives you the time and space to answer such questions honestly. This is the focus of my most recent articlepublished just last week
All the best,
Stuart
Articles and commentary that might be of interest…
- The 8 Self-Assessments You Need To Improve at Work This Year
- Schedule Your Career Health and Wellness Checkup
- 10 Tips For Making Self-Evaluations Meaningful
- Online Career Assessment Tools Review Rankings
- Top 5 Career Assessments To Direct Your Career Change
- Reflect Self-Assessment And development Tool
- What’s Next –Life Values Assessment Test
- Selecting Assessment Tools –Online Assessment Tools
- Entrepreneur Self-Assessment: 9 Professional Tools and Tests
- Career Assessment
Building Brands and Careers
Attributes needed to build brands are much the same as those needed to power a career. And two important similarities are critical for both.
First and foremost you must provide ‘a real difference that is valued’. Whether a brand or employee, this matters. The most valued employees show excellence in addressing critical business challenges, specifically helping your agency attract and retain profitable client relationships. In our field of advertising, this ultimately translates into developing better ways for clients to communicate to their customers. Which neatly brings me to the second point.
This value not only has to be present, it has ‘sold’ so it is recognized as well or in Bill Bernbach’s words, ‘A unique selling proposition is not enough. Without a unique sales talent it may die.’ Successful brands and careerists alike excel at communicating and selling themselves, perhaps loudly, perhaps quietly, but always persuasively.
See some of these links for some broader thinking.
Stuart
Articles and commentary that might be of interest…
- Good Companies Are Storytellers. Great Companies Are Storydoers
- How to Tell a Great Story
- It Was A Dark And Stormy Night… –11 Examples Of Storytelling In Marketing
- Brands Need To Stop Trying To Play Hero
- 5 Ways For Consumer Brands To Become Great Storytellers
- When Storytelling Goes Bad
- Airbnb Tells Emotional Berlin Wall Story Of Reunification
- 7 Examples Of Great Storytelling For Boring Brands