Notes on Creative Culture

Brendon Derr of Cella Consulting describes it as “the elephant in the room that nobody knows is there until it moves in the wrong direction.”

“A healthy corporate culture”, Derr explains, “can be one of the most, if not the most, valuable assets to a Creative Executive. The quantifiable outcomes of a healthy corporate culture can be tied to increased productivity, higher employee retention, accelerated learning, and more consistent innovation. If the culture is healthy and has been that way for a long period of time, you may never even realize how much you’re benefiting from it. However, when the cultural health of a creative organization goes south, you’ll quickly begin realizing its negative impact.”

Derr also points out that the creative industry has always had a problem with defining career paths, noting that “creatives tend to reach the highest rung of the corporate ladder much more quickly” then their counterparts in Human Resources, or Accounting, for example. This is something that I’ve experienced first hand; I was hired on at a company in 2005 as a Marketing Coordinator, and in about a year was promoted to Marketing Director. A promotion in title wasn’t possible, so it remained the same (but my salary grew) through my tenure there. To take Derr’s point a step further, when one is promoted quickly and has nowhere to go, one’s learning curve plateaus. Once this happens, morale drops (almost infectiously), and culture is negatively affected.

In Derr’s post, he chats with David Olson, President of Walton Consulting, Inc., who suggests,

“The key word is not ‘advancement’ but ‘contribution.’ Most companies from every industry under the sun have this problem. Intrinsically, employees want advancement so they can feel like they are growing and contributing. In an organization that is flat in the area of advancement, you need to engage the employees in other forms of growth, measure the contributions, and encourage them and reward them when their contributions grow.”

Furthermore, Olson explains that when a creative department is feeling isolated from the rest of the company, that fixing it is a leadership discussion.

“It is the leader’s job to show how each department plays a role toward helping the organization succeed, hit its goals, win the game, reach its vision, fulfill its mission, etc. It’s also important, when relevant, to show each department how they serve one another so they feel like they’re on the same team. Bottom line, leadership in any corporate function needs to define company and departmental objectives and then become evangelists in the effort to communicate it on a regular and consistent basis.”

Both men mention that keeping an eye on the culture of a team (and the organization as a whole) is something that should be done at all times.

Via the CreativeExecs Blog.