Not too long ago my daughter asked me what I liked about working in advertising.
I told her about how awesome it is to tackle big problems with your imagination. I told her about how good it feels when you work ridiculously hard with your team on an idea you love- and then see it living out in the real world where other people love it too. We also talked about how the agencies I’ve worked in were loaded with all sorts of interesting, ingenious, artistic and funny people who I might not have had the chance to work with anywhere else.
Our conversation reminded me that this industry is loaded with so much potential for magic when the conditions are right.
We sit at the epicenter of everything that has the potential to move the world in big ways. Business. Media. Technology. Culture. It’s exciting when you’re able to look at it as a canvas for ideas and can approach it with unbridled creative bravery.
But let’s be honest- it’s been a wild ride for a while from a business perspective, and the headlines reflect an industry desperate for permission to start dreaming again.
I became a coach when I did because I believe our creative leaders need more support as they work to navigate this time.
A key condition that Creativity needs to thrive in advertising is trust. Trust in leadership, within teams and especially within business partnerships. Trust between people is what gives us the confidence to bring our boldest ideas to the table and champion them through the complicated gauntlet of our day-to-day reality. Trust and creative ambition go hand in hand.
But right now that feeling of trust and shared ambition is being eroded in some corners due to the way the business is changing. There’s a lot of fear of failure in the mix- and our creativity is vulnerable to it.
Fear of failure dramatically limits our imagination. It fuels an overreliance on whatever makes us feel safe, eats away at our conviction and prevents us from taking risks that could lead to something extraordinary.
We often think about this in terms of our clients relying on research or killing work, but it’s also why some creative people resist trying new ways of working or making things.
One of the greatest gifts I was ever given was the privilege to walk past the Fail Harder push pin wall in W+K Portland on most days for so many years. It was a constant reminder that great work requires you to push to places that are uncomfortable and uncharted. It was also a constant reminder of the fact that I had a boss who compelled me to do hard things and that I trusted to help me and have my back.
As Dan Wieden once said “That release from fear of failure is a huge, huge thing. And it’s seen us through a lot of days.”
As a coach I aim to help spread that spirit to as many people and teams as possible. I’ve made it my mission to help creative leaders dispel fear, maintain their conviction, create shared ambition and cultivate much more trust in their organizations and business partnerships.
It holds the key to so much of the magic we love to create, the extraordinary innovation we want to unlock and the creative bravery we all want to get back to.
