Three important traits to produce good agency work

Beyond – and in support of – creativity.

Curiosity is one of the most preached about traits of anyone who wants to make a difference in this love-and-hate industry of advertising and social media. As they say, only if you are truly curious about something can you have the mental flexibility to adapt to new problems, figure out new things, understand new businesses, products, services, and think creatively around that. Curiosity is certainly tied to good agency work.

But that’s not enough.

It’s not enough to just be curious because curiosity in itself doesn’t really solve things when the going gets tough (and agency goings get tough more often than not). Martin Weigel said it way better than I ever will by highlighting the importance of being angry:

Curiosity is about wanting to know how things are. It’s about wanting to look under the hood of things and discover their workings. But being angry is about being dissatisfied with how things are. And wanting to change them. Now.

So this got me thinking, what are other important traits that help produce good agency work? Curiosity of course, as a powerful spark for insight and creativity (and maybe driven by fear?), but what else?

I agree that anger is also an important one, especially to get things done. The anger to push things forward when nothing seems to suggest it’s going to work but you won’t have it any other way. Those days when you’re literally always running around, talking with different people, not stopping for a minute because there’s just so much to do and you want to ensure it gets done, that can be anger speaking. Not necessarily anger towards the project itself, but rather anger to make sure it results in good work.

Anger goes hand in hand with stress, or rather care, because it’s a source of raw energy channeled towards a productive goal. Ever heard someone saying that someone else is too relaxed, or too laid back? That can be tied to lack of anger, which is fine in many circumstances, but every now and then just makes things draaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag on and on.

But while curiosity helps explain how things are and anger makes us want to change how they are, I think we need something else to unlock the ways with which we make those changes.

Empathy.

Speaking with clients is vastly over-demonised in the sense that people think it’s damaging to their work, or they’d rather just sit in a bunker and work on their shit. Exceptions apply, as with everything in life, but I think that’s an immature way to look at it because clients are our main channel to get things done – they’re ultimately calling the shots, remember?

Obviously this doesn’t mean we need to abide to a culture of soul-sucking servitude, but we most definitely need to adopt a culture of high quality service.

Fostering a good relationship with a client is one of the best ways to cultivate our own empathy to that client’s problems and challenges, but also ways of thinking and working. This not only helps that client trust us more, it also helps us better understand how to present something we really think will make a difference in order to get a bigger buy-in.

This doesn’t mean that getting a sign-off on anything (even shit work) at all costs is the ultimate goal, but if you want to make good work you bet your ass you will need to learn how to sell that thing to your client. Last time I checked, you can’t sell shit if you don’t know who you’re selling it to. And no, (good) selling isn’t lying.

We’ve all heard that people don’t know what they like until it’s shown to them, and I think it’s true to some extent. But clients – and most of us, really – often don’t know if they like something even after it’s shown to them. We are only human and not automatic decision-making machines, so we all suffer from insecurities, questions that remain unasked, and often we just don’t understand what other people are saying. That’s normal.

If a client doesn’t understand what we’re trying to say, it’s very easy to blame him for that – but it’s amazing how often it can also be partly our fault because we didn’t bother to understand how to best explain it to that particular person. The very same thing I’ve seen over and over again agency people say – that their clients don’t understand their customers – applies to our own practice more than we realise and would like to admit.

That’s where empathy comes into place: it puts us in a position to better understand how to frame our solution from a client’s point of view. In short, to step into their shoes and understand what drives them, but also what they will need to equip themselves with to sell an idea internally, for example. That stuff matters and is not driven by curiosity nor anger – it only comes by fostering true empathy for both the project at hand and the person in charge of that project on the other end of the table.

Curiosity helps us understand how things are. Anger drives us to change the way they are. But empathy is how we make other people understand and join our anger, so that we can change things together.