Creative people can be wonderfully independent. And they can be frustratingly independent.
I know from personal experience.
My first job was working in the art department of a Farmington, Maine, printing company, which featured three people. The top guy had been with the company for nearly 30 years. He did all the customer contact as well as the design for the more important jobs. He also managed to take credit for everything good that happened in the art department.
The No. 2 guy designed whatever the No. 1 guy didn’t want to do.
I was guy No. 3. My responsibility was camera operation and paste-up, literally pasting type on the page with rubber cement. I also did whatever the No. 2 guy didn’t want to do.
Once I was given a catalog to paste-up. All the pages had been meticulously detailed by the No. 2 guy, even to the point of taking photocopies of the set type and placing it where the actual type was supposed to get pasted. Well, I got to a page that didn’t make any sense. It seemed clear to me what needed to be done to fix the problem. So I just did it. The page now made sense to me so, in my mind, I made it better.
No big deal. Apparently it was a big deal.
It was company policy that a No. 3 guy was never supposed to do anything that was remotely related to design. Silly me, I thought I was allowed to think. The No. 1 guy severely reprimanded me. He told me to only do as I was told. He allowed me to keep my job and hoped I’d learned my lesson. In the end, the customer actually liked the changes I had made, which then the No. 1 guy promptly took credit for. Lesson learned. Over the years, I worked my way through a variety of art departments, eventually becoming the No. 1 guy at one of the largest advertising agencies in Vermont. I was now in charge of people who would do what I wanted. I knew how to solve all their problems. All they had to do was listen to me and take my direction.
Funny thing is, my staff of creative people didn’t want me to dictate their every move. Instead they fixed things on their own, with no regard for my authority. How could this be? That first year of managing creative individuals was the most difficult year of my career.
One day my boss, one of the agency partners and an award-winning copywriter, saw that I was frustrated and upset.
He took me into his office and listened to me patiently as I ranted and complained about all those creative people unwilling to do what I told them to do.
He then gave me the best advice I ever received. He said, “You can’t push a rope.”
From that time forward, I never pushed talented people. I learned to lead by example and trust that they would follow. I tried to offer direction and guidance, but allowed them to offer their own ideas and solutions. And it was challenging. Creative people aren’t afraid to offer an opinion. And they often won’t accept the status quo.
I found they come up with wonderful solutions, sometimes to problems you didn’t even realize you had.
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