The big vision and the details
Or, how to learn to embrace the wonders of subjectiveness
The more senior you get, the more subjective life becomes. When you start out, you’re assigned things. Jobs are simpler. More tangible. More tactical. Write this. Deliver that. What do you need me to do? Ok, I will do that. It’s not less challenging because you’re more junior. But you could say it’s simpler because it’s more specific.
Or so it should be.
I’ve been thinking about the role of managers. Senior managers. People who know the work well enough to supervise others doing it. But also people who need to make hard decisions when answers are uncertain. In an agency, for example, that can mean many things. How you organise a first meeting with a senior client. How you negotiate a contract. How you organise the budget into a scope of work. Who you hire. Which freelancer you bring in. Whether you need a freelancer in the first place. Which urgent thing to tackle first when you have 200 unread emails and 10 minutes. Or whether urgent things are not yours to tackle because important things come first.
No one ever said leadership was easy. I think its toughness comes from it being subjective. Junior people rely on mentors’ judgement. Who do the mentors rely on?
The hard balance to strike seems to be between vision and details. Different people approach this in different ways. Some are more inclined to worry about the biggest possible picture. What’s the vision for this client, this brand, this company? Where do we want to be in 10 years? 20? Others rely on their attention to detail to add value. They need the thinking to be consistent but the execution to be excellent. Stephen King once labelled these groups the ‘grand strategists’ and the ‘advert tweakers’. With cultural differences aside, it’s the same logic here.
In a strategy deck, for example. The first group will worry more about how bold our ambitions are. The second will worry more about how well structured the presentation and reasoning is. Or how the work’s quality is defined by its details. It’s inevitable, I think, to fall under one or the other. And saying you worry the same way about both is cheating.
Or, say, when discussing a marketing idea. The first group will worry more about how strong the concept is. The second will focus more on how the type is just right.
Or when putting together a brief. The first group will say out loud the importance of aiming high. The second group will make sure the brief explores what ‘high’ could mean.
Creative companies have both these groups of people. I don’t think one is particularly more right than the other. The work needs both vision and details to be good as possible. Therefore, the work needs both ‘grand strategists’ and ‘advert tweakers’ arguing… sorry, discussing in the same room.
But it does bring back the dilemma of working at a more senior level — who validates the decisions we make? Do we rely on ourselves alone? Do we rely on our boss’s input? Do we rely on the client’s feedback? Do we rely on the public’s opinion once the work is out? Do we rely on the results once the report is in? Maybe it’s a mix of all these. Maybe it depends on who asks and who answers. Maybe I’m overthinking it (you could have told me sooner, man).
Agency life is hard. And as much as we want to ‘just make cool shit’, thinking about this matters. We all want to do great work. And doing great work means having great ambitions that result in great ideas. But it also means understanding those who sit next to you and knowing how you make use of one another. It’s not politics. It’s not manipulation. It’s basic understanding of human nature and team work.
It’s easy to just point out the things others aren’t as good at. It’s far more important to understand where their priorities lie in a project. Because we’re not all great at everything. Some people are great at discussing grand visions and ideal scenarios. Others are great at delivering awesome execution that’s on time and within budget. In a way, that’s why diversity in agencies matters more than ever. We deal in integrated thinking but we can’t do it alone. And the more different raw materials we have on the table, the better the final outcome will be. Or so I hope.
So when the big vision and the details are all but one big subjective question mark, who do the mentors rely on?
On each other, of course.
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