A chat with James Ninness, creative director
“If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life” is one of those benign platitudes that’s been around so long its original author has been lost to time. Credit aside, truer words about work have yet to be spoken. A recent survey from Pew found that more than half of all Americans enjoy their work, but what makes work, “work” for the happy among us? The secret sauce, believe it or not, is work culture.
What Is Work Culture?
Work culture is the collective attitude, belief system, behaviors, and values that define how employees interact with one another and how an organization operates is said organization’s work culture. It’s something you feel in the air. Research indicates that workplace culture stands above all other factors, including salary and easy of commute, when taking a new position or staying at their current employer.
How Mad Genius Does Work Culture
There are many ingredients that go into the Mad Genius work culture stew. There’s the standard stuff like driven supervisors that trust in their employees’ abilities. There are flexible employees who not only expect, but want to be given ever-changing and challenging projects to work on. There’s healthy competition between creative minds, always looking to push the limits for both our clients and the agency. Our vision, “deliver the unexpected,” speaks best to what Mad Genius’s work culture is all about.
Each department within Mad Genius fosters a unique environment that feeds into the overall work culture. Try to think of our various departments as vital organs, or part of an engine, for more squeamish readers. These parts need to function well individually for the whole to perform at its best.
One of those parts is the creative team. At Mad Genius, this is where a lot, but certainly not all, of our artistic muscles are flexed. It’s where our graphic designers, copywriters, and animators ideate, design, and create the feel, tone, and look of everything from billboards to award-winning commercials.
Captaining this merry band of loveable misfits is James Ninness. To get a handle on work culture within the creative team, James was kind enough to sit down for a chat about approach to leadership, team building, and more.
Q&A With James
“Define the Mad Genius Creative team’s work culture in three words.”
Trust each other.
“What strategies do you use to manage stress and workload, ensuring that the team remains resilient and focused?”
Creative is the most chaotic department at Mad Genius. That’s just the nature of this beast. We’re the only department that artistically touches almost every job the company takes on. And whereas web or production can work on the same job all day long (often for months at a time), creative has to touch five, six, seven (or more) projects each day. We jump around a lot, and have to disengage and reengage without losing a step, ensuring we deliver the best to every effort.
This job is stressful. There’s no getting around it. We take a two-part approach to salve this stress.
First, I treat my team like adults, not employees. These are full-grown professionals. Each person on the creative team knows their job and knows what it takes to get that job done. They can also use the restroom, get some coffee, chat with others, and enjoy their breaks without my input. (Wild, right?) I ask my team to (a) give me eight hours a day, (b) finish all the work in their queue on time, (c) exceed the already high expectations of our clients, and (d) be respectful.
That’s it. That’s all I need them to do. And I assume they can do all of that until they prove otherwise. They don’t need me to hover or nag or check-in before something is due. I trust them to be pros, and they trust me to cultivate a work environment wherein they can thrive. Easy-peasy.
Second, I fight for the downtime. I despise agencies that expect salaried employees to work 50–60 hours per week. They’ll tell you that it takes that level of commitment to succeed. And I’ll reply that the only reason it takes them that much time is that they’re not actually good at their job. Yeah, I said it.
Creatives need downtime. Creatives need to be off to recharge and exist in the world. They require space away to ideate and nurture ideas. We all need to balance our work with everything not-work. And for the most part, the everything-not-work stuff is the reason we work in the first place.
If my team needs to work past five-ish to finish something, they have to convince me that it must be done. I work hard to shield them from requests to stay late or work on the weekends. And I do everything in my power to convince them that the guilt that inspires them to work late isn’t as important as their mental, spiritual, or physical health.
Here’s the thing: we hit deadlines. Our team can do the work we need to do in the time we’re allotted to do it. Do we occasionally have to stay late? Yes, absolutely, but it’s the exception, not the rule. For many agencies, the opposite is true.
“Can you share how you celebrate milestones and achievements within the creative team, and how this recognition impacts team morale?”
Mad Genius has several cool recognition programs: profit sharing, quarterly shout-outs, and various culture club events. Outside those things, just within the creative team, we have quarterly team lunches, the occasional let’s-leave-work-and-all-get-a-cup-of-coffee-together outings, and our Discord channel where we regularly pat one another’s back. The backscratching is omnipresent at Mad Genius. If someone goes above and beyond, we let the world know.
“How do you approach skill development and training within your team to keep everyone at the top of their game?”
If I’ve done my job right, the people who make up Mad Genius’s creative team want to be the best at what they do. We’re a team of writers, designers, and animators who work in harmony to achieve more for our clients than any of our competitors—at least, that’s the effort we make. To accomplish that, we have to be the best writers, designers, and animators Mad Genius can offer. It’s not enough to coast here. Times change. Technology evolves. Clients grow. Demands shift. And we creatives have to change, evolve, grow, and shift accordingly. If we’re not up-to-date, our clients will go to an agency that is.
Every member of the creative team is offered time to develop as a professional. We will carve out time from their schedule and dedicate it to growing them professionally. I encourage my team to leverage this as often as possible—even if that means putting in a request to go to a convention, expo, or special event. Get out of here. Go learn something cool and bring it back to the office. Now let’s use it for our clients. When my team improves, Mad Genius improves. Rising tide and all that.
Creative agencies are problem-solvers. We’re only effective if we understand all the paths toward solutions available to us. And that only happens if we offer our people the resources they need to grow, learn, and understand what’s out there—over and over again.
Side note: Everything above includes me. As a creative director, I have to be constantly refreshing my approaches, toolkit, and expectations. That whole “It’s not enough to coast here” thing applies to every one of us.
“How do you create opportunities for team members to take on leadership roles and develop their skills?”
The first thing to understand is: does the creative want to take on a leadership role? I think the assumption is that everyone is ambitious and wants to move up the corporate ladder—that just isn’t true. And the last thing I want to do is put someone in a position they’re uncomfortable in, with no feasible benefits. Assuming they do want to move up, we develop a plan.
Now, I have never liked reviews. I could write a series of blogs about why I don’t like reviews. This isn’t that. I know, I know… Some people love reviews. If you’re one of those people…cool. I’m not. So, my approach to development foregoes the traditional annual-review path to promotion.
I do have development meetings with each member of the creative team every year. At these meetings, the creative and I review two things: how they’re performing in their current role, and how their training is going for the next role.
This process begins with the creative, who, before our meeting, refers to their current job description and writes down how they feel they are performing—what’s going well, and what could be better? When we meet, I offer my two cents, and we discuss our points of view. That discussion is turned into actionable items of two flavors: things the creative can do on their own, and things the creative needs from me. I owe it to my team to give them what they need to flourish as creative professionals.
It’s the same for the second half of the meeting: the creative refers to the job description of the job they want and writes down how their training is going—what’s going well, and what could be better? I give them my two cents, and we both leave with action items.
Over the course of the next year, both of us search for opportunities to check off those action items. Whether that’s leading a project, developing client face time, or learning a new skill, we both work to develop the creative in the direction they’d like to grow.
And when it comes to filling an open position, I always prefer to promote from within. By keeping the creative team in a constant state of development, we’re able to maintain a talent pool rich enough to fill positions as they become available.
“Can you discuss how you encourage innovation and experimentation within your team, and why it’s important for your projects?”
I’ve worked at many an agency—either as a full-time employee or a freelancer. Each one of them said that they “embraced failure” in one way or another. The only way to stay ahead of the curve is to try new things, and to try new things, you can’t be afraid to fall on your face once or twice or two dozen times.
Here’s the truth: None of the agencies I worked with before Mad Genius actually embraced failure. They said they did, but they were far too focused on time management or the bottom line or looking stupid to be okay with failing in any substantial way. They had to say it to look cool, but they were almost all talk.
At Mad Genius, the creative team wholeheartedly embraces failure. If my team doesn’t screw up often, they’re not trying hard enough. We celebrate big swings, even though they usually whiff. Sometimes—just sometimes—they don’t. And then we end up with a campaign or brand identity or piece of collateral that wows us, the client, and their audience.
If my team is playing it safe, I tell them so. And I’m not sure if there’s anything more cruel to hear—from me—than that. My bet is that the creative team would rather me spend hours monologuing (which I will, don’t test this) on the reasons why their creative approach to any given problem is amateur trash (okay, maybe I wouldn’t do that, it seems a little mean), than hear me spend three seconds saying, “You’re playing it safe.”