Give me a C!
On the role of motivation and creative assets.
Motivation is one of the key elements in creative asset management. You can bring on board the most awarded creative team, but without proper motivation it can become the dullest team in no time.
Some years ago, I was put in charge of a creative team that had limited creative accountability, meaning that the agency had never set a bar for creative excellence and the team was performing within a very broad comfort zone . One of the first moves upper management bought into was a program called Rewards for Awards where, based on the amount and type of award, they were willing to reward creatives for their performance. From cash to a trip to Cannes, it was their way of putting all their chips into reconfiguring the entire creative culture. After presenting the program, a creative who had been at the agency for many years smirked and said “yeah right”. A couple of weeks later it dawned on one of the partners that we were paying creatives “to do what they are hired to do”. Everyone missed the point. Shocked and frustrated this was to become my first lesson in creative asset management; context.
Context: Before embarking in any motivational crusade, make an assessment of your creative team’s past and current state. Deep rooted corporate cultural cues regarding creativity may work for you or against you when motivating a team so it is best to sit down with the team and be clear on historical performance, current state and true desire of the team. This will help in maximizing your energy distribution by identifying on which assets to invest more and build a solid cultural core and at the same time allowing lifers a bit more time to adapt to the traced path and vision.
Mentoring: Anibal Quiñones, Creative Director at Contáctica believes that a key element for motivation is mentoring. Younger talent may need a little extra showing of the ropes and mentoring is an excellent managing tool to connect with new creative assets. Mentoring is not being a boss within the confines of structure and job descriptions. Mentoring is all about connecting and tracing a path to goals that really matter to the mentored and the mentor is able to be a part of that path, creating a deeper bond than any office yacht party can achieve. Aníbal currently holds a lunch mentoring program called Beautiful Minds where they match women in leadership positions with young, emerging creative talent. So mentoring is not about you. It is also about finding the right mentor for the specific need of all members in your team.
Flexibility: Aníbal aso mentions that within the reality of the amount of time required from creatives, creative management must be flexible in granting time and space to creative people for special personal projects. This allows for creatives to shift their mindset and in embracing the fact that creativity spans beyond the agency. Regardless of the space or the task, creativity must be held at the highest priority level.
Language: Motivation is all about two-way communication between manager and team. Jacqueline and Milton Mayfield have studied motivating language theory and propose three elements for effective motivational language:
The first element is uncertainty-reducing language. The Mayfields define it as the moment where the leader communicates “precisely how to do the task at hand by, for example, giving easily understandable instructions, good definitions of tasks, and detail on how performance will be evaluated”.
The second element is empathetic language where the manager “shows concern for the performer as a human being”. “It can include praise, encouragement, gratitude, and acknowledgment of a task’s difficulty.”
The third element is meaning-making language and it focuses on outlining the true importance of the task at hand. This involves linking the organization’s purpose or mission to listeners’ goals. The intriguing part of this element is that it humanizes the task by including “the use of stories — about people who’ve worked hard or succeeded in the company, or about how the work has made a real difference in the lives of customers or the community”.
Empathy: This may be a bit controversial for those creative managers who belief that creativity is all about business. Before we hire a machine to do the creative work (there already is a beta test for a creative writing machine in China) we are managing human beings. One interesting exercise practiced by Uri Alon, a scientist who runs a research team, is that before any problem-solving meeting that is work related he assigns the first 30 minutes to discuss non-work related issues. They talk about what happened to them that week and any issue that they might be personally dealing with. What this achieves is a level of empathy between every team member that brings down any wall or filter that they might have dragged into the office and allows everyone to see the human side of each team member. “It’s like a creative group rather than a critical group.”
“Motivation is receiving a paycheck, motivation is having a job, motivation is having a roof over your head.” We get how some upper management teams may feel like that is enough motivation but creative motivation is about much more than a paycheck (although it never hurts to get paid). If for no other reason, there is science. On Psychology Today, Susan Reynolds, a neuroscience specialist writes that “negative mood variance disturbs your interaction with your environment, affecting your ability to perceive, remember, and reinforce existing or create new neural connections, while being happy improves your ability to be more cognitively alert and productive.”
A solution for many skeptics of motivation as a tool for creative asset management is to create a position that focuses on such task and establish kpi’s of some sorts. A set of key performance indicators can be set along with deadlines. Cheerleaders optional.
Originally published July 2017.