Veksner asks: Who gets to fire who? – If anyone knows why it is that suits get to fire creatives, and not the other way around… please tell me
August 27 2012, 9:39 am | | 10 Comments
Scamp creative director Simon Veksner asks: If anyone knows why it is that suits get to fire creatives, and not the other way around… please tell me.
10 Comments
‘The page you are looking for does not exist.’
But responding to the question in the header, the last I checked it is management that gets to fire both. Most, but not all management has a background as a suit, and it is largely about who has the best relationships with clients – otherwise known as the business, or even more plainly, money.
Most creatives are not as good at forming relationships with the money as suits are. There are exceptions and they do well.
Agencies keep their cards to their chests in terms of money, generally, but because suits earn bonuses (creatives mostly do not) based on performance targets when the shit hits the fan it’s the suits who know how much a creative is costing and so gets pulled in to the meeting about whether or not to fire him/her. Thus, suit gets to ‘fire’ the creative, but as No Huge Mystery points out, it’s really the management who is doing it.
Yeah, slightly misleading semantics from Mr Scampi that don’t really raise any substantive or debate-worthy point.
It’s not “suits’ who fire “creatives”, it’s the fact that the MD/CEO roles (and hence the ultimate authority over such decisions) are normally filled by those with an account management background. (Though I’m sure a Goodby or Hegarty or Brown or Droga could get an MD’s office vacated, pronto.) An Account Director doesn’t fire a CD per se, though I’ve seen some who thought they could.
In the rare cases where the management top dog (as opposed to Founder-creative) is from a creative background, does this generally work out better than a suit? (Can it? Should it?) That would have been a better question to ask.
It comes down who is the captain of the ship. However, the captain may not always be the one to do the firing face-to-face having chosen a worthy lieutenant instead. At the end of the day, getting fired is a fait acompli and, if you had it coming, I don’t think there would be preferential treatment whether it was a CEO/MD or a CD.
A more pertinent question might have been, why do senior staff always put their personal financial targets above the well being of the agency at the end of the financial year? You see it time and time again with agencies owned by the big multis- they might have had a great year, picking up awards and keeping clients happy. But because they missed out on one big piece of business (which went to a mate of the client) they’re a mill down. Which means they don’t get their.bonus So the time-honoured solution is to approach the heads of each department for sacrificial lambs. Each head, having some skin in the game also, is only too happy to shaft those who have worked so hard for them all year. Or settle old scores. And before you know it there is a raft of retrenchments and bingo, the bonus targets are magically met for this year. The board promise each department money in the next financial year to re-staff and in the meantime with a bit of creative titling, they can fill the roles with freelancers. This happens everywhere, all the time and is a direct result of senior staff having flexibility to meet targets from whatever sources the can. At the end of the day, it is invariably the most useful members of the agency – the mid-weights – who are let go, as their retrenchments packages don’t cost as much the tired old senior, but their pay makes more of a dent in the shortfall than a handful of inexperienced juniors.
Some great insights and opinions have been posted in this thread. It’s actually a interesting read. Respite from daily slagging matches if you get my drift. The Sydney advertising community is quite small, some would say it’s even a cottage industry. Good reason to ensure that if you’re responsible for firing someone, it’s handled with integrity, honesty and transparency.
There are two ways to increase profit on paper (vs real profit). Win more business or sack people and make the rest work twice as hard.
Of even greater concern is the dangerous work conditions created to achieve a higher margin (and meet our bonus structures). In the last few years I’ve interviewed more and more hard working, responsible ad folk close to burn out, and been lucky enough to snare the better ones.
Unfortunately, there isn’t an endless pool of talent, and quite often it’s the more talented that end up being the least protected from burnout – due to the high demand they create for their skillset.
When our agency shifted focus from profit and awards to cultivating talent and culture, suddenly the awards rolled in after a long drought of bronze and finalists. The money followed. It was amazing how easy it was to do. We promoted people regularly with fairly insignificant pay rises, which fostered loyalty. As soon as they had a sense of responsibility they started working longer because they wanted to, not because they had to, which actually led to less burnout.
There was one very talented person who was ‘on the edge’ primarily from being overworked and under valued. Finance wanted him out, instead I fought for a 5% rise and a change of title, with slightly more responsibility.
The awards and new business he’s won since has been staggering, and he’s now one of our top guys. I’m still fighting to keep him, but not with finance, with other agencies.
Simple, small acknowledgments from management can really turn a place around, but only if you put people before profit.
Well said, Catfood. If only the top brass in the larger networks cottoned on to that – so many sad cases of trying to play God by remote control, and driving good people away in the process. I think the homegrown agencies still have more sense.
Catfood,
You nailed it. This post should be reproduced in the print edition so the movers, shakers and bean counters will read it. If it convinces one senior manager to question their Wicker Man approach to appeasing the gods back in France, the US or UK, it will have been worth it. Small, incremental pay rises and regular promotions working better than a culture of fear. Who’d have thought it?
I’ve worked in an agency where a key part (25%) of my KPI was staff retention – whether I fired them or not. Was a fantastic place to work for.