I run an in-house marketing agency for a hotel management company. The agency started as a solo gig five years ago and today has twelve team members. The company is doubling in size in the next 18 months, so things are busy around here.
Our systems for managing our workflow are straining. For example, we have thousands of images we’ve produced for websites, print materials, and social profiles stored in a patchwork of clouds and floundering on the hard drives of our over-burdened content creation team. After much research, we adopted a fancy cloud-based digital asset management platform to manage this mess. We needed to organize, download, upload, name, and tag thousands of images. It was a huge task, and it wasn’t getting done.
I took charge (that’s my job, right?). I announced that we would do this together today in the conference room. I forced the Millenial wild ones on my team to do something tedious for eight hours. They were bored, frustrated, and anxious about not getting to their scheduled work. They were rolling their eyes in open exasperation and resistance. It pissed me off. Spoiled brats. Don’t they know how hard I worked when I was their age? The day ended with me feeling brazenly cranky, which caused their resentments to bubble to the surface.
They told me that I have great big amazing ideas but that I do not give them the time to enjoy the creative part of…
