Creator's Block

One of our long-time listeners, Frances Bowman, reached out to us awhile back with a request -- to talk more about how to give good feedback to creative marketing pros like us. 

While we've dipped our toe into this topic before, her note got me thinking about one of the most challenging instances of when knowing how to give good creative feedback matters the most. 

How do you give effective feedback to your marketing creative -- whether that's a designer, developer, or a copy nerd like myself -- when they give you a draft that is below the quality or caliber of what you were expecting? 

Because it doesn't matter why it happened, ultimately. You're still faced with the situation of course-correcting the creative project in front of you and providing constructive feedback without blowing up your relationship with that creative -- or your agency, if that's your creative setup.

So, this week, that's exactly what we're going to do. Instead of talking to creatives like us, we're talking to the marketers, the leaders, and the collaborators that have to work with us.

Enjoy! (And thanks for the topic idea, Frances!)

Marcella and I are back with a brand new episode. This week, we're answering a very important question:

What do you do when your personal life starts to leak into your work life?

We spend a lot of time talking about how to react to change, but we've never really discussed what it means to be an agent of change at an organization, and how to implement change effectively.

Now, if you're a creative or marketer just starting out in your career, you may be wondering why this conversation is relevant to you.

Well, at some point your career, there's a good chance you will either want to do more or will be asked to do more in a way that influences those around you -- and goes beyond the scope of just doing the thing.

It could be as small as a new process or tool being rolled out, or you could be a part of a sweeping organization change. But here's the tricky thing about change, and I've said this before -- even when change is positive, it's still, by its very nature, disruptive.

So, how do we make changes effectively and positively when we're asked to step up to the plate?

To answer this question, I brought in IMPACT's Chief Strategy Officer (and my mentor) Tom DiScipio to talk through some of the most important insights and pieces of advice we have for those who are stepping into those big change management shoes for the first time.

Enjoy!

We're back! And, for very selfish reasons, I am really excited about today's episode.

Not too long ago, I had a lot of fun collaborating with Chris Duprey (our COO) on an article which has since been published on the IMPACT blog: 

Flash to Bang Leadership: Are You Reacting or Responding to Your Teams?

Whether you're a leader or someone who aspires to be one, one day, I highly recommend you read it.

Or, if you're more of a visual person, he also did a video of it:

At one point in that original article, Chris discussed his mindful meditation practice, and how it influences his actions not only at home, but also at work. 

While he noted that he's still a "beginner" with his practice, I did want to share my favorite passage:"It has allowed me to live more in the moment -- to put things in perspective, before I respond. What I've found is that this has made me a better communicator at the office and at home. (And, it's slowed down my flash-to-bang!)When you can create this space between stimulus and response -- maybe it's through mindful meditation, or something else you find that works -- you are more present in the moment.You are able to actually understand what is being said. To think through things and to ensure that the actions we take aren't rushed. You will also help mitigate the second- and third-order effects of our actions."

However, as Chris also rightly points out, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about mindfulness out there.

Keeping in mind that none of us are mindfulness experts, we invited Chris back to the podcast this week to help us unpack mindfulness from the perspective of leaders -- or just professionals in general -- who have heard about it, maybe have some limited experience with it, but don't really get the practical applications it can have not only at home, or at work.

Enjoy!

Last week's episode with Kathleen Booth about carefrontations got me thinking about the different types of conversations we have every single day as creatives at IMPACT. 

As I pondered life and existence and work, it dawned on me that there are two critical conversations all of us have throughout our career. And not just once -- many, many, many times.

When we need to tell someone we're going to be late or miss a deadline, and when we need help.

What's interesting about those conversations is that they both deal with managing broken expectations. On top of that, they're completely unavoidable -- nobody's perfect -- and are not exactly fun to have.

So, we're going to tackle each of these conversations individually in this episode -- the dos and don'ts for each, and how to minimize the number of times you need to have them in future. 

To be clear, having to tell someone you're falling short is never going to feel great. But there is a way to have them be much more productive than they are painful.

Enjoy!

Marcella is off this week, so I invited Kathleen Booth -- IMPACT's VP of Marketing and the host of our Inbound Success Podcast (check it out!) -- to join me once again.

Our topic? One of the most powerful communication techniques Kathleen taught me back in the day at Quintain, which also has the worst name in the history of space and time: the carefrontation.

Yes, it's a goofy word. But if you work on a team or you're a people manager -- or have any aspirations of the latter -- you need to know how to give and receive carefrontations.

So, what is a carefrontation? Why do they work, and how do you have one? That's what we dissect in this episode.

Enjoy!

We've talked about change before in the big, global, life-quaking kind of way. Switching careers. Going to a new company. Starting a family. Moving.

But today, we're going to address a different kind of change that's specific to the workplace.

Where you're not moving, changing your life, or pivoting your career by choice. Instead, you're going about your business one day at work, and suddenly change starts happening to you and around you -- without warning.

These can be little changes, like a new process or a new hire you didn't expect. Or they can be bigger, like mergers or internal restructuring in responsive to rapid, positive growth.

It's a bit of a different mental state, because in those moments, it can feel like things that are outside of your control. You were fine with how things were going at work -- or maybe you weren't, but you at least wanted to be consulted on the solution. 

The challenge is that even when those changes are good, change, by its very nature, is disruptive. So, your knee-jerk reaction might be one that isn't totally positive at first.

How to should you handle yourself when moments like that arise? 

Enjoy!

This is going to be an emotionally honest episode, because I went into it feeling both motivated and excited, but also somewhat defeated. 

On the one hand, it's the start of a new quarter. And during our team meeting yesterday, we talked about new objectives, new processes, and all of those great "turning over a new leaf" feelings. The kind of stuff that makes you feel refreshed and ready to take on the world.

On the other hand, the end of last quarter, which concluded last Friday, ended in… well, failure. Quite a bit of it. And I was still emotionally licking my wounds.

It was a shame, too, because, in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the end of the quarter, I was energized about what I was working on. I felt positive about it. But then, on Tuesday, things began to unravel. 

By Friday evening, I felt like I had just survived a Michael Bay movie. (Unfortunately, not in the, "I saved the world!" kind of way. In the, "My home that I just remodeled was blown up by aliens or evil robots from space," kind of way.)

But the point of this episode is not to rehash those nitty gritty details -- that's not healthy or productive. Plus, don't let this temporary dip fool you; I didn't choose the agency life because I wanted to do something easy. 

Plus, it's failure. We've all failed in some way or another. We've all been there.

I know this because we're drowning in think pieces on Medium, Inc., Fortune, and every other rag that caters to entrepreneurs about how failure is a necessary pre-requisite to success.

Failure has been re-branded and romanticized to the point where we've forgotten how much it can really hurt.

So, that's what we're talking about this week. How you emotionally pick yourself back up, dust yourself off, and get back on the horse. Because it's not always as easy as it seems.

Last week, we announced the bittersweet news that Jessie-Lee was leaving the Creator's Block podcast to take on her new role as co-host of the IMPACT Website Throwdown. 

That's why we decided to dedicate this week's episode to the concept of change. More specifically, those moments where we need to make big choices -- tough choices -- that facilitate professional growth.

What's weird about those moments, however, is that even when you know something bigger, better, and greater is on the other side of your choice, the decisions we need to make to get there can be very painful and uncomfortable. But why?

That's what we're unpacking this week -- the good, the bad, and the ugly around making the big choices that can make or break our careers.

Enjoy!

Last week, I devoted close to two days of my life revising, refining, and reworking the copy for a new piece of pillar content that will be launching later this week.

It was all about growth-driven design.

As a content and inbound marketer nerd, I've always understood the high-level value proposition of growth-driven design.

"The traditional website process is costly, painful, and out-of-date. Growth-driven design is agile, better, leaner, meaner, etc. It's the future of website redesign, because it's built on a framework of continuous improvement."

This all sounds amazing. In theory.

But as I continued to work through the content, I couldn't help but feel a little overwhelmed by the demands of growth-driven design, especially given that sometimes it's put forward as a less painful website redesign approach.

You need to create your strategy. You need to research your users. You need to create what are called fundamental assumptions. You need to create a wishlist. You need to prioritize that wishlist.  You need to prioritize that wishlist again. You need to create hypothesis statements. Lots of 'em.

Then, after all that, you need to go through a miniature version of that broken traditional website build process -- messaging and content, UX, wireframing, design, QA, etc. -- to get your launch pad site live. 

And all of those steps are to occur within approximately 30 days or so, and then you can get your hands dirty with the growth-driven design iteration cycles.

So, this week, I decided to challenge my two favorite designer and developers with a question I'm sure other marketers are wondering:

Is growth-driven design really better? Or is it just a different kind of pain? Because it sounds like a lot of work.