Adapting to a Modern Workforce

In years past, it was difficult clients that wore you out and planted the seed that maybe it was time to move on. But now it’s something else.

But first an admission. I’ve been sitting on this article longer than any article in the queue, afraid that I would get this wrong. And I might, of course, because talking about this stuff can be a third rail. But it seems spineless to ask you to be courageous if I’m not willing to be courageous myself. So, I will humbly take a stab at addressing something that you may be experiencing.

Switching First & Second Place

In the past, as I just noted, it used to be weariness with clients that made you second guess your long-term commitment to the industry. Unreasonable, slow to make decisions, delegating authority downward, stupid payment terms, nervous about taking creative risks, etc. A bunch of that is still true, though there are fantastic clients who are sprinkled in there. No, that’s not what’s changed.

What’s changed is that now your weariness with managing the team is likely to have moved up the leaderboard. It’s what's on your mind when you close your laptop Friday night and talk with your SO, what you dread Monday morning, and what perplexes you the most.

If this isn’t true for you, congratulations. You’re doing a great job screening new team members and quickly correcting your hiring mistakes when you need to. For the rest of you, keep reading.

Influences on the Team

I don’t think this is a generational thing. I don’t buy all those broad, sweeping generalizations about how people born between X and Y all think the same. I think that’s overdone. Having said that, I do think that external influences shape how we think about the employment experience. So, it’s not something intrinsic (genetic, if you will), but rather a confluence of forces that shape a collective experience. When a pattern emerges in how a collective group is raised, you’ll see a pattern in how that collective group interacts with the workforce after they graduate and enter the workforce.

What are those forces? What are the big influences that deliver unique employee experiences?

• A misunderstanding of purpose, which sometimes relegates “meaningful” above “profitable”.
• Cultural expectations that we should follow our heart and that we deserve to enjoy our work.
• Shifts toward safety and accommodation, where poor performance can’t be called out but rather explained and put in context.
• A perspective, fed via social media, that everyone has a voice and that an engaged team is a team with democratic influence on the big business decisions.

We seem to be slowly evolving to a point where business is less about your clients and more about your employees. This creates new challenges.

What Is This? And Why Now?

At first, I thought this was an activism of some sort, but I think it stops short of that. An activist is someone who wants to force change where they have no actual control, and it’s not like employees are going on strike to force your hand, like they were recently at the NY Times.

Members of the Times tech guild, which represents approximately 600 workers, went on strike on Monday over stalled contract negotiations. The strike threatens to interfere with the paper's election coverage. The workers of the Times are demanding "a ban on perfume in break rooms, unlimited break time and accommodations for pet bereavement," Semafor, Nov 2023.

That’s an extreme example of something that is not happening in our field, and hopefully it won’t. But employees do feel free to express their opinions and they expect you to listen…and they further expect you to shape your decisions based on their feedback. Their actual “power” rises and drops, of course, based on the push and pull of demand and supply in the labor market. When businesses are struggling, employees have less power. When business is booming, employees can hold out for more pay and benefits…and accommodation.

There’s something else at work here, too. For the last two decades, the marketing field has aligned very closely with an urban, progressive, labor-focused perspective. In many ways, our industry wants to lead the way out of a capitalist dominated world in very public ways: what clients they work for, how inclusive their employee base is, what they do with the money they do make, and what sort of footprint they are leaving on the environment. We want to be very diverse when it comes to race and sexual orientation (not so much politically or socio-economically, but I guess that’s a different article).

If you don’t believe me, consider this. Boasting about your work for a cigarette brand is out, replaced by work for social minorities. Any display of wealth by a principal is out, replaced by a move toward B-Corps, ESOPs, and worker cooperatives. Carefully calculated time off and timesheets are frowned on, replaced by unlimited time off, work from anywhere you want, and take care of yourself, using your own judgment, etc. Any work for the extraction world is left to evil firms, while solar and EVs is righteous (unless the most visible representative of the EV world aligns with the other side).

Or even think about the role mental health plays in the work environment. Please don’t misunderstand me, either; I’ve written about my own challenges, and I’m quite sympathetic to the mental health issue. But in a world where the vast majority of young workers view their mental health challenges as “an important part of my identity,” all of a sudden it’s harder to have those challenging conversations that any healthy business needs to have.

Finally, think about this for a minute: 94% of political donations from the creative field (Bloomberg, 2020 survey) were directed to progressive candidates. I don’t have any data on this, but I would guess that donations from principals is probably more evenly split, but when your team is heavily aligned with a particular perspective on labor and employee rights, your culture is going to reflect that. There will be healthy tensions to resolve, and if you don’t resolve them like adults, you’re not going to enjoy work as much as you did.

Why This Matters

Very few firms are birthed as adults, broken off as a group of 20 people who are instantly part of a sizeable firm. No, they usually start very small and grow. In those early days, you, the principal, are heavily focused on the work and the clients that you work for. There aren’t many team members yet.

Then the marketplace rewards you for that great work and the buzz that surrounds it, and they send signals that you should grow. And so you do.

What happens next is very gradual, like boiling a frog, and so you don’t notice it. But slowly you hire other people to do good work, and you focus on financial controls, new business, and maybe some processes and IP. While you welcomed client interaction, now you’re sort of excited to give it up. That extends your engagement level around clients, but it’s replaced with something else.

Because then you wake up one day and you realize that something has changed: “I am now in the people business. My firm’s success will depend on my skill at finding the right people, leading them well, and managing the chaos of all these strong personalities.”

That brings us to where we are: how you feel about your firm is closely tied to how well you adapt to managing this great team you’ve built, heavily influenced by the culture around them.

The Culture We’ve Created

Dean Leak wrote about this on LinkedIn recently: “In trying to make everyone comfortable, we’re making the workforce miserable.” That statement on its own didn’t make much sense to me until I read further.

“Our low performers are scoring highest in our engagement scores, and high performers are those least engaged…. Businesses have hit the accelerator to create environments where everyone feels heard, valued, and included. Yet, we’ve arrived at a place where workplaces prioritize comfort over courage and agreeableness over constructive disagreement. It’s time we took the foot off the pedal and looked in the rear mirror to consider the damage that’s been done…. The workplace has transformed into a damp, cold corridor where no one dares to offer constructive criticism or spark new ideas.”

The article goes on to note:

We see this in team meetings. ‘Show and tell’ standups that focus on feel-good optics, where any sign of challenge is seen as not ‘playing nicely’. All the while, colleagues talk about what they really feel in separate team channels, wrapped in cozy comfort blankets, in the luxury of working from home. Everyone wants to be involved in everything. Collaboration, once seen as fuel for creativity and problem-solving, has become an endless parade of calendar invites. Except, it’s reduced to nodding heads while real problems fester beneath a veneer of forced friendliness. No wonder there’s a meeting culture crisis in companies.”

Ouch. Not sure how much of that mirrors your own experience, but I hope it’s rare. Having said that, please be aware of your own desire for control. You can’t go into the reading of an article like this thinking that employees are the entire problem. They aren’t, and bosses the world over, for as long as there is life on earth, need to be very self-aware about how they are leading people for good and not for evil.

The Near-/Far-Shore Datapoint

If I’ve just pissed you off so far and you aren’t buying what I’m selling, let me just add one datapoint.

Never, especially in the United States, have we depended this heavily on labor outside our primary market. That labor was largely offshore in the early days, and now there’s a larger mix of nearshore team members. This has given principals a firsthand opportunity to compare work cultures, and you know what they tell me every day? Often under their breath when the other team members aren’t listening?

I can’t believe the difference in their attitudes, their work-life balance demands, their lack of complaining, and their simple gratitude for a job.

Lest you think I’m overstating this, here’s a recent comment from a principal:

Not specific employees, but in general. It's super tough to work with a large group's sensibilities. Employees now have LOTS of opinions on literally everything. I remember things were different in the past. Everything seems to be critiqued and evaluated skeptically from things like the clients we bring in, our decisions, and our policies. Also, in general, critical thinking is hard to come by. Even in our higher-level employees basic critical thinking is often skipped.

Who to Hire

How do you fix this? What kind of team members should you look for? I’ll start with this:

• Skilled but curious
• Resourceful
• Resilient
• Independent
• Thoughtful
• Empathetic
• Grateful

Essentially, you’re looking for a world where constructive conflict doesn’t have people running for cover and where everyone isn’t walking on eggshells, Or, you could go with the flow and encourage everyone to bring all of themselves to work…and then live with the consequences of running a firm that’s over politicized.

We were recording an episode of 2Bobs years ago, and Blair made a statement that's always stuck with me. Playing the creative constraints game, pretend that you could never sell your firm and were thus locked into running it until you dropped dead. What would you fix to make that more tenable? What about your current team dynamics is going to wear you out?

You are responsible for those hires. You decide who belongs and who doesn’t. You set the standards and decide what behavior is exemplary and what behavior you'll overlook.

But here's the simple point I'd like to make: while the specifics of the culture you create are a mix of good and bad as you grow as a leader, something else is always bad, no matter what. And that's the extent to which the culture is not a reflection of what you want, with one caveat: you need to be a self-aware leader who wants the right things.

Do not let your firm become a place where you don't want to work.

There are toxic workplaces where people are marginalized…or worse yet…mistreated. But then there are workplaces that mirror legitimate differences and are created around your own preferences. Don’t cross that line, but there’s nothing wrong with creating a workplace where you want to be, either. Bad workplaces are evil dictatorships. Strong workplaces have a hierarchy, and it’s not evil to exercise it.

Finally

You want to be doing this for a long time and not be forced out by your own frustrations, right? So picture this.

Picture an agency owner that you’re friendly with who wants to grab coffee one day and you agree, curious about what might be going on. It turns out that they have some significant management turmoil taking place, and your friend just wants to pick your brain.

He unloads on you. One employee keeps undermining a junior. And the account person is well-loved by the client, but won’t collaborate with the team like he expects and they are becoming a single point of failure. Another team member always has a reason why they can’t attend the “kind of mandatory” weekly team meeting, and they are out of reach at key times. And so on. He ends the download by lamenting how workers are different these days.

You’ve listened carefully to your friend. In your mind, you know that there are lots of little things happening that contribute to this employee chaos, but you’re busy, a little impatient this morning, and you decide to have one of those difficult conversations you’ve read about. So you say this to the frustrated principal who has decided to vent his employee frustrations with you.

Hey, let me cut through all the details and ask you a question. Don’t be offended, because I’ve been where you are and I understand the frustration. But whose fault is this? Yeah, there’s clearly some bad behavior happening, here, but ultimately, two things are true: you hired these people…and after they are hired, you communicate what acceptable behavior is, right? Your team expects you to screen new people carefully, and then if you make a mistake, to attempt to correct the behavior, and if that doesn’t work, you protect the team (and the clients) by correcting your hiring mistake.

So again, let me ask this question: does the team know, very clearly, what you expect of them? And assuming they do, what’s keeping you from intervening more forcefully? What sort of angst or fear does that strike in you?

Now, I suspect you know where I’m going with this, right? You can flip this around and apply it to your own firm. You are entirely responsible for setting and then upholding the standards of behavior at your firm.

Decide what you want and thoughtfully speak in clear terms with the team. Slowly, one by one, reconstitute your team to create a place where you look forward to working every week and not one that you resent, and cuts short your love affair with this field. If you need a bumper sticker for this, I’ll make one up for you right here: “Build a team that’s inquisitive and not inquisitional.”

While I was writing a first draft of this article, I began to tell myself that things were getting better. I was kind of hopeful about it. I felt like we were growing up a little.

And then, sure enough, like clockwork, here comes an email hitting my inbox with a big disclaimer:

Receiving this email outside of work hours? Managing work and life responsibilities is unique for everyone. I have sent this email at a time that works for me. Please respond at a time that works for you!

Really? We really need to say that? Surely the kind of people you want on the team are not that fragile.