By David C. Baker
The draw of working at an in-house communications department has not changed much over the decades. In general, in-house careers offer better benefits, more rungs on the career ladder, greater financial stability and significantly more structure. It’s a myth that in-house creatives are less creative—they’ve simply weighed the pros and cons and chosen certain career paths that align more closely with their goals.
What’s changing, though, is significant, and it has implications for in-house departments and for the independent firms that work with them. The main change is that the employee count on the in-house side is rising. That I know for sure. While I don’t know the following for certain, I strongly suspect that this time the increase will be permanent.
How will this change impact outside creative firms? First, they will have to become comfortable handing off conceptual work to others who will implement it. Designers are crazy sensitive about this, largely because they see themselves caring more than the client and fearing that “their work” will not be translated well as it takes shape. Even if that’s true, you cannot care more than your client and at the same time maintain a sustainable approach to your craft. There is a direct relationship between caring more than your client and burning out early and leaving the field.
Second, you will have to be comfortable working yourself out of a job. Fortunately, the job you’ll be training others to do is the lower-level work, so this is something that should thrill you. If it makes you paranoid, it’s quite likely that you don’t have a clear idea of what makes your skills unique, thus placing you in the death-spiral category of “replaceable within one week.” For the life of me I cannot understand why anyone would fear losing lower-level work. Embrace it, help them set up the right systems (like PTI’s MarcomCentral), staff them, train them and be a terrific resource.
Third, you’ll have to craft a way of working with an inside department without it looking like it’s only necessary because it’s not doing its job. The more clueless c-level executives often come to that very dangerous conclusion about the in-house department: “If you were doing your job, would we really need these outside people?”
So a few things are changing, but largely they are the same. The frustrations have simply become more acute. If you don’t work at an in-house communications department, consider reading the short remainder of this article for no other reason than to understand and help them deal with their plight. If you do work at an in-house department, maybe you can take these suggestions, see which you agree with, and then improve your department’s relationship with the mother ship. Here are the eight most common problems I see at in-house departments, each followed by a simple suggestion for improvement. There are an additional half dozen issues, but they are minor.
One, and perhaps most important of all, you are not considered experts. We all know that because you are thought of more as a pair of hands than a sharp brain, you aren’t brought in very early in the process and other departments sometimes treat you like a glorified Kinko’s. The reason is simple but the solution is not. The reason is that you are too accessible and in developed cultures like ours, the experts are the least accessible people. And you are right down the hall. (In undeveloped cultures, the most accessible person, like the village elder, is the one with the most expertise.) You are not likely to have the freedom to move into another building at the edge of the office campus, but you can quit jumping every time someone yells for something. What message do you think you are sending by constantly shielding your internal clients from their foolish decisions?
Two, and the other really important point, is that you have a client concentration problem. In the outside world, that means that you simply have one client who represents too much of your business. They would consider themselves in jeopardy if any single-related source represented more than 25 percent of their billings, but here you are with a client that represents 100 percent of yours. What happens in those circumstances? The same thing that happens on the outside: you quit telling the truth, pushing back, guiding them with courage and swimming upstream. You become a genetically wired “yes” person in order to keep your job.
Three, and regardless of the titles you use, you too frequently combine the roles of account service with strategic leadership, and clients don’t want to hear big strategy plans from their day-to-day contact, for the same reason I’ve explained above. There should be a daily contact and there should be a strategy person who moves in-and-out of the relationship when appropriate to preserve their mysterious impact.
Four, you have all sorts of little companies within the same department, yielding a chaos that only John Cage could sell. Your “account” people are generally running things, viewing the project managers as subservient to their needs, clamoring for work from the same shared pool and making promises without any regard for real capacity prediction. Do not let your “account” people run things! That’s like letting the foxes watch the hen house. Front line people are genetically wired to say yes, and a thoughtful, humming department needs project managers at the same level who can bring greater objectivity to the workflow.
Five, there is seldom a real currency to assign value to various requests that your department receives. About one-fourth of you have some sort of chargeback system, which leaves three-fourths of you with no means of filtering stupid requests. What to do? Other than the obvious choice of implementing a chargeback system, develop other forms of (black market) currency that can be used for the same purposes. For example, you might secretly assign a higher priority to clients who give you enough time, complete the project brief, ask for more strategic contributions, are nice to you and so on. This isn’t rocket science, folks. You will always have more demand than supply, and so there might as well be some method behind the prioritization.
Six, your client doesn’t appreciate you like you imagine they should. Again, this is your fault. You are taking your client for granted, subconsciously assuming that there is no need to market yourself because there is no need for traditional new business activity: You are already busy. But with that approach you are missing so many opportunities to help your client’s perception keep pace with reality. Offer classes on marketing, initiate yearly strategic planning so that you can participate without it happening behind your back, select and synthesize trends that will affect the way they approach go-to-market strategies in their department, and always suggest newer, better, more efficient ways to accomplish their goals. Aren’t these the same things you’d do for your client if you were in an independent firm?
Seven, you have way too many clients, and only about one-third of them are qualified. I’ll illustrate by describing an unqualified client. They don’t know how long things take, they don’t know what value you can bring to the table, they don’t distinguish between the higher-level work you should be doing versus the lower-level work they should be sending somewhere else and so on. In an external agency, not only are you typically working with a higher percentage of qualified clients (still not high enough, by the way), but you are working with fewer of them because they demonstrate an appropriate respect by consolidating your contact points down to one or two people (who are more qualified, by the way). When I say that you have too many clients, consider this: The most effective client-facing employees in outside firms have between one and four clients. The best way to solve this is to meet with some power source who can mandate more consolidation and fewer contact points. They will do this if you can clearly explain why it’s important for them too.
Eight, you have not determined how to say “no” to certain requests from other departments, even when your “no” is appropriate. You might feel that way because the solution they are requesting is not viable, there is insufficient time and/or money to implement it or it’s not a core strength of your department. The solution here is fairly simple. Put on your big boy (or girl) pants and start being honest. Your biggest fear is likely that you will no longer be considered that all important team player who climbs the ladder. Phooey on that. No expert always says yes, and anybody—expert or not—who never says no is not awarded real credibility every time they say yes. Quit thinking so much about consequences, start doing what’s right for the company, and to hell with what happens. You not only need to sleep well at night, but you’ll eventually get the reputation as someone who not only cares, but really knows what they are doing.
Let me close with one final observation. Every time I’ve been asked by a c-level executive to analyze an in-house department to present a fiscal argument for its existence, it has been clear that having an in-house department is more expensive than using outside firms. Please remember that the reason to have one is not financial. No, it’s because you are SMEs (subject matter experts) in what the company does in a way that an outsider could never be. Is that how you are acting? If not, start. ca
What’s changing, though, is significant, and it has implications for in-house departments and for the independent firms that work with them. The main change is that the employee count on the in-house side is rising. That I know for sure. While I don’t know the following for certain, I strongly suspect that this time the increase will be permanent.
How will this change impact outside creative firms? First, they will have to become comfortable handing off conceptual work to others who will implement it. Designers are crazy sensitive about this, largely because they see themselves caring more than the client and fearing that “their work” will not be translated well as it takes shape. Even if that’s true, you cannot care more than your client and at the same time maintain a sustainable approach to your craft. There is a direct relationship between caring more than your client and burning out early and leaving the field.
Second, you will have to be comfortable working yourself out of a job. Fortunately, the job you’ll be training others to do is the lower-level work, so this is something that should thrill you. If it makes you paranoid, it’s quite likely that you don’t have a clear idea of what makes your skills unique, thus placing you in the death-spiral category of “replaceable within one week.” For the life of me I cannot understand why anyone would fear losing lower-level work. Embrace it, help them set up the right systems (like PTI’s MarcomCentral), staff them, train them and be a terrific resource.
Third, you’ll have to craft a way of working with an inside department without it looking like it’s only necessary because it’s not doing its job. The more clueless c-level executives often come to that very dangerous conclusion about the in-house department: “If you were doing your job, would we really need these outside people?”
So a few things are changing, but largely they are the same. The frustrations have simply become more acute. If you don’t work at an in-house communications department, consider reading the short remainder of this article for no other reason than to understand and help them deal with their plight. If you do work at an in-house department, maybe you can take these suggestions, see which you agree with, and then improve your department’s relationship with the mother ship. Here are the eight most common problems I see at in-house departments, each followed by a simple suggestion for improvement. There are an additional half dozen issues, but they are minor.
One, and perhaps most important of all, you are not considered experts. We all know that because you are thought of more as a pair of hands than a sharp brain, you aren’t brought in very early in the process and other departments sometimes treat you like a glorified Kinko’s. The reason is simple but the solution is not. The reason is that you are too accessible and in developed cultures like ours, the experts are the least accessible people. And you are right down the hall. (In undeveloped cultures, the most accessible person, like the village elder, is the one with the most expertise.) You are not likely to have the freedom to move into another building at the edge of the office campus, but you can quit jumping every time someone yells for something. What message do you think you are sending by constantly shielding your internal clients from their foolish decisions?
Two, and the other really important point, is that you have a client concentration problem. In the outside world, that means that you simply have one client who represents too much of your business. They would consider themselves in jeopardy if any single-related source represented more than 25 percent of their billings, but here you are with a client that represents 100 percent of yours. What happens in those circumstances? The same thing that happens on the outside: you quit telling the truth, pushing back, guiding them with courage and swimming upstream. You become a genetically wired “yes” person in order to keep your job.
Three, and regardless of the titles you use, you too frequently combine the roles of account service with strategic leadership, and clients don’t want to hear big strategy plans from their day-to-day contact, for the same reason I’ve explained above. There should be a daily contact and there should be a strategy person who moves in-and-out of the relationship when appropriate to preserve their mysterious impact.
Four, you have all sorts of little companies within the same department, yielding a chaos that only John Cage could sell. Your “account” people are generally running things, viewing the project managers as subservient to their needs, clamoring for work from the same shared pool and making promises without any regard for real capacity prediction. Do not let your “account” people run things! That’s like letting the foxes watch the hen house. Front line people are genetically wired to say yes, and a thoughtful, humming department needs project managers at the same level who can bring greater objectivity to the workflow.
Five, there is seldom a real currency to assign value to various requests that your department receives. About one-fourth of you have some sort of chargeback system, which leaves three-fourths of you with no means of filtering stupid requests. What to do? Other than the obvious choice of implementing a chargeback system, develop other forms of (black market) currency that can be used for the same purposes. For example, you might secretly assign a higher priority to clients who give you enough time, complete the project brief, ask for more strategic contributions, are nice to you and so on. This isn’t rocket science, folks. You will always have more demand than supply, and so there might as well be some method behind the prioritization.
Six, your client doesn’t appreciate you like you imagine they should. Again, this is your fault. You are taking your client for granted, subconsciously assuming that there is no need to market yourself because there is no need for traditional new business activity: You are already busy. But with that approach you are missing so many opportunities to help your client’s perception keep pace with reality. Offer classes on marketing, initiate yearly strategic planning so that you can participate without it happening behind your back, select and synthesize trends that will affect the way they approach go-to-market strategies in their department, and always suggest newer, better, more efficient ways to accomplish their goals. Aren’t these the same things you’d do for your client if you were in an independent firm?
Seven, you have way too many clients, and only about one-third of them are qualified. I’ll illustrate by describing an unqualified client. They don’t know how long things take, they don’t know what value you can bring to the table, they don’t distinguish between the higher-level work you should be doing versus the lower-level work they should be sending somewhere else and so on. In an external agency, not only are you typically working with a higher percentage of qualified clients (still not high enough, by the way), but you are working with fewer of them because they demonstrate an appropriate respect by consolidating your contact points down to one or two people (who are more qualified, by the way). When I say that you have too many clients, consider this: The most effective client-facing employees in outside firms have between one and four clients. The best way to solve this is to meet with some power source who can mandate more consolidation and fewer contact points. They will do this if you can clearly explain why it’s important for them too.
Eight, you have not determined how to say “no” to certain requests from other departments, even when your “no” is appropriate. You might feel that way because the solution they are requesting is not viable, there is insufficient time and/or money to implement it or it’s not a core strength of your department. The solution here is fairly simple. Put on your big boy (or girl) pants and start being honest. Your biggest fear is likely that you will no longer be considered that all important team player who climbs the ladder. Phooey on that. No expert always says yes, and anybody—expert or not—who never says no is not awarded real credibility every time they say yes. Quit thinking so much about consequences, start doing what’s right for the company, and to hell with what happens. You not only need to sleep well at night, but you’ll eventually get the reputation as someone who not only cares, but really knows what they are doing.
Let me close with one final observation. Every time I’ve been asked by a c-level executive to analyze an in-house department to present a fiscal argument for its existence, it has been clear that having an in-house department is more expensive than using outside firms. Please remember that the reason to have one is not financial. No, it’s because you are SMEs (subject matter experts) in what the company does in a way that an outsider could never be. Is that how you are acting? If not, start. ca
