Being Creative with a Gun to Your Head

 

Marketing leaders, like other shared services departments, are inundated with work requests on a daily basis. Having been a contributor and led marketing projects for many years, I can relate to the almost constant barrage of conflicting priorities and demands that are often placed on small teams and limited resources. It's like being asked to be creative with a gun to your head.

Every stakeholder feels like their project is the most important thing you have to do (whether or not it really is). People spend so much of their time managing stakeholders and one-off ad hoc initiatives that they don't have time to creatively approach the high-priority work where they should be focused. What's more, this forces people to stay late into the evening to get done what they should have been able to accomplish during the work day. Ultimately, the stakeholders who complain the loudest get their work done, while everything becomes less creative, less thoughtful and less effective.

Our colleagues in other shared services situations like IT, finance and HR face many of the same challenges. Some of the best practices used by other shared services teams can help marketing groups find more time for the right side of their brain while slowly putting the gun down.

1. Don't ignore small one-off work because it's not a project or other major marketing initiative: It's seldom the single, fatal, shot that brings down a marketing team. It's usually death by a thousand cuts. I envision those little tiny dinosaurs from the movie Jurassic Park, the Compsognathus, that might not kill you with a single bite, but a few dozen of those little guys will tear you to shreds in just a few minutes. The combined weight of a few dozen small and individually insignificant requests can derail progress and put important initiatives as risk. Marketing leaders need to make sure they have visibility into all the work their teams are doing.
2. Evaluate and manage all those in-bound marketing requests: I'm a big fan of creating a request queue. It doesn't necessarily have to be really formal, but someone (and I don't think it should be individual contributors on a team) should be collecting, prioritizing and evaluating all the requests that come into the department. If we force team members to become relationship and  work managers, we limit their ability to do what they do best—be creative. Plus, when that happens, all those in-bound marketing requests start managing the marketing team and not the marketing leaders.
3. Reduce reliance on heroic efforts: In other words, when people are required to spend late nights and extra hours on every major marketing initiative we don't get their best work. I'm convinced that after nine or ten hours, most people start running on auto-pilot and creativity drops. What's more, mistakes increase. And, too much caffeine and too many late nights aren't good for people's heath. After years of being a self-acknowledged workaholic, I must admit that I have often crawled into bed early into the morning to a less than friendly reception. Those kind of additional stresses make it difficult for creative people to be, well, creative. I admit, heroic efforts are needed from time to time, but if marketing leaders rely on them, they are handicapping their ability to do great work.

When marketing leaders can successfully manage and prioritize the work their marketing teams are doing, they can keep their organizations focused on those initiatives that provide the most value—instead of getting distracted by requests for a new t-shirt design or coffee mug. What's more, adding some structure to the way teams do their creative work actually gives people more time for the right side of their brain.