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
Strategy Jobs Market Update – June9th, 2023
Strategy hiring Latest June 9th, 2023
‘Functional hiring’ predominates at the moment as opposed to ballsy risk-taking investment of whole teams.
Where the hiring is happening? In replacements for those leaving the business, by agencies that have won business, for clients insisting on a personnel change or, perhaps for a maternity/paternity fill.
Clients are cautious and even AOR work I hear feels more project focused, more performance oriented at the moment. Yes, even clients wants to keep their jobs!
A whole lot of anxiety – It’s palapable – Yellow skies don’t help the sentiment!
Stay positive. For yourself if not for others or better still stay positive through others.
While I’ve always kept my sanity through physical exercize, I’ve increasingly found that the best anditote to anxiety caused by job uncertainty, (and I hear it and feel it via all the conversations I have most days) is to focus on helping/being kind to others.
Being kind? This doesn’t even mean taking up swathes of time in the service of others, but simply being kind when you interact or, being less unkind than you’d typically be!
Do this and you will feel better about yourself and consequently less anxious. Be kind/be who you want to be, and you may also find that the things you want to manifest happen a little faster too:)
Give yourself a break and feel good by being kind.
Job Security and Career Opportunity – One Key Step
One word I hear much of when talking to clients and candidates today is ‘uncertainty.’ Budgets are being trimmed and with them, jobs.
Whether you have full-time employment or freelance work, fundamental for your career security and success is ‘personal agency,’ defined as
‘Thoughts and actions taken by people that express their individual power.’
Key is having a clear understanding of what you know you want to learn, to achieve, to impact, so that you can proactively work toward achieving these things.
To use the language of creative agencies, write your own ‘brief,’ not for use with creatives, but for anyone that can help you manifest your ambition, your goals.
The best strategists have a clear sense of agency and so do things ‘on purpose!’ Those that struggle, are often either passive, reactive or their efforts to bolster their job prospects are intermittent.
Relying on your boss, your work, even your reputation to secure your existing role or a new one, ignores the champion of success, proactivity, on and off the job. Reputation/quality work alone should be enough, alas reality tells a different story.
Some steps we can all take to enhance our own security and opportunity are outlined below. Think about these in the context of your own agency, passive or proactive or perhaps, haphazard.
Enhancing your chances of Job/Work security:
1. Stay close to the money/cashflow –
2.Be easy to work with
3.A all times, be proactive, known to be the bearer of solutions if not, fresh ideas.
4. Value add beyond your own work –Â Enhance team effectiveness or the culture of the place you work
5. Ensure that those that make decisions know the value you create.
6. Have a strong relationship with clients.
7. Work on the most profitable accounts.
8. Work on accounts where work sees the light of day.
9. Work on accounts where the best creative is delivered.
10. Work on products/services that are more recession-proof.
11. Have an open line of communication to your boss/people that make financial decisions.
12. Focus on your current role but find time to build connections elsewhere.
13. Extrovert/Introvert – Whatever you are, be known for being a positive/’can-do’ person everyone wants around when the going gets tough.
Remember, at the end of the day, it’s not your health (although health insurance is a worry in the U.S.) it’s a job.
Any others, you’d add?
Positive thoughts and hear for you all any time,
S
The Great Agency Talent Crunch
The great agency talent crunch – It’s happening for two reasons:
1. Changed mindset of employees – As the attached article states, the events of the last 18 months have lead to ‘permanantly altered lifestyle changes.’ ie) In what I’ll call ‘the great awakening,’ many of us previously who had no time to contemplate our navels have had a chance to get life in to perspective and become clear about what we don’t want/what we can no longer tolerate, be it the commute or the lack of meritocracy, lack of diversity, or just the incessant meetings and pitching of new business.
2. Meaningful work/Positive use of time – Many of those that have left the agency world have left the business altogether but more have decided to freelance, they are waiting to see if the business will change/keeping their options open. They are waiting to see whether the agency world can become more sensitive to the needs of staff and their desire for personal growth and to have a positive daily experience versus being treated as expendible automatons in entities fixated on short term profit; They are hoping there will be more flexibility in working arrangements, more inclusive working environments, and hoping to find places that walk the talk of new business pitches, where the oft talked words, ‘our employees are our culture, are our business,’ are words that are lived and breathed. Time will tell.
bit.ly/3wsTZRj
#Talentcrunch #Awakening #Greaplacestowork
The number one reason strategists are leaving agencies
One key reason why employees are resigning in numbers is poor management, but what a difficult time to manage! And what truly exacerbates great managament is two agency dynamics that are putting strain on even the best leaders:
https://lnkd.in/d4tNMCKK
Agencies are financially too short term focused – Not just public owned agencies but many private ones too, that copy the public approach – there has not been enough reinvestment into the business. The employee experience has become way too transactional.
Agencies are pitching too much new business – Incessant new business pitching at agencies is a key reason why agencies lose so much business, which in turn needs to be replaced, versus focus on consistently bringing the best ideas to existing clients. This is bad for clients and overworked employees, whose jobs then become vulnerable. Constant uncertainty does not make for a great place to work and it makes it very difficult to make the investments that would help to
create an amazing place that individuals want to work in.
Many strategists, in the ‘great resignation,’ have through COVID 19, simply woken up with a clearer sense of what they will tolerate. And because of this, agencies have been hemorrhaging people.
Strategists deciding whether to work full time. Focus on two key things and you can have a decent experience:
Go to work for an agency that truly values what you do – Strategy
Go to an agency that has five quality people including a great: client, creative team, account lead and manager. If you have
those (whichever the agency) you can still have a good experience.
#strategyplanning #Careersuccess #Manager
The biggest Threat to Agencies and Your Jobs
Planners and strategists, “Agencies are scrambling to attract talent amid shortage.” The article summarizes that talent shortages exist because:Â https://bit.ly/37gVRkn
– Skills shortage – A lack of the right skills,
– Greater flexibility/virtual – ‘Talent’ wanting greater flexibility
– Burn out – employees wanting to get out of the business.
What the article doesn’t mention is the core reason for this talent shortage, a breakdown of the psychological contract,
a phrase coined decades past highlighting, ‘to maintain a positive employee-employer relationship employers pay particular attention to the ‘human side’ of a working relationship, rather than the purely commercial or transactional side.’
Yes, the problem for the business is short termism, which is why agencies increasingly use freelancers, treating people like commodities; Even when they are full time, (again due to short termism) there has been a chronic lack of willingness to train/invest in the next generation of strategists.
The good news – For any planner seeking their next career challenge, there are many great people in this business and some basic rules for identifying a great next career move for you, beyond that is, simply looking at the obvious names, this I’ll cover in my next newsletter.
The Future for Strategic Planning Careers is Positive
COVID-19 has brought to the fore an emphasis on cash flow and short term results. In such times, those that can sell and those that understand consumers, aka strategic planners, see their stock rise significantly and this will carry forward post COVID.
The crisis has accelerated the use by client and agency alike of digital tools. The great thing about digital initiatives is that they are easily trackable. The brilliant thing about this combined trackability with qualitative understanding, is that brands have a powerful ability to impact sales.
Post COVID-19 one lasting impact will be a continued realignment to short term sales initiatives. That said, the smart clients and brands will demand big picture/longer term creative thinking. They will insist that a strategic vision for building brands aligns with and optimises short term marketing efforts and that the team ‘thinks like a brand but act like a retailer.’
Career Options For Strategists Are Greater Than Ever
I’m often nervously asked by planners/strategists where else beyond the agency they could work. Fifteen years ago the options were much more limited primarily to research agency or freelance. Today after so many years of strategists being hired, the pathway to client-side is much smoother. Similarly the pathway to brand consultancies, PR, innovation, media and ‘big tech’ are well worn. There are also opportunities working with big consultancies although they have been heading to the agency world, so perhaps no move necessary! Not to overstate the obvious, any business that needs to understand it’s consumers can use a strategist. The one caveat to all this positivity, the more integrated (qual+quant’) the strategist, the greater the opportunties.
Happy to discuss,
Stuart
Some past newsletters that got plenty of interest.
Humor and Brand Building – bit.ly/3iNjNzK
Impostor Syndrome – bit.ly/3k6P1D2
- Future of Strategy 2020: Opportunities in a Post-Pandemic World
- From Surviving to Thriving: Reimagining The Post-COVID-19
- Business Strategic Planning During the Pandemic:What’s Changed
- Thinking Strategically About Your Career Development
- Transferrable Skills Analysis
- Strategic Planning and the Big Impact of SMALL Data