I’m Done Being a Lazy Leader. You Should Be, Too.
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My foray into advertising was something of a happy accident. A friend had just landed her first agency gig and said they were looking for an admin intern. I’d love to say that I was hooked by the idea of working in a creative environment, that I was excited about a potential springboard into an exciting industry, but in reality it just sounded like a way to pay rent. But soon enough, I fell in love.
Three months later I was hired full-time and became an agency producer.
At the time, it seemed incredulous that this was actually a job — a seemingly perfect confluence of my obsessions with organizing, nurturing, and getting shit done. My mentor and I became a dynamic duo, forming a shared brain with complementary personalities. Where he was more analytical, I was emotional. He taught me how to see things through a lens of systems, and together we saw a future in which those systems could help free creatives (and people in general) from the trivialities of work to allow time for actual thinking. I truly believed everything we were building would benefit the people we worked with, and was more than happy to find ways to communicate our vision.
We perfected our system and processes over five years and three different agencies. At our third stop, though, something changed. Our go-to tools and processes didn’t seem to fit this group. Before, I would have blamed the people. Processes are objective. I believed ours was better than the reality of the agency when we arrived. But this was the place I had found my group. I considered these people family. I trusted them, and by extension their feedback.
A few months later, he left for another job. After his departure, I took on many of his responsibilities. I was eager to reframe the department as a resource for the agency. I knew that a purely analytical approach hadn’t been a fit for this place or team. I knew I wanted things to be less grounded in spreadsheets and more about the human inputs — or, even better, just humans. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm didn’t bring this about magically.
I wrongly made the transition more about personality rather than tactics. I was the friendly, bubbly one with a stronger stomach for office diplomacy. What was less apparent to me at the time was that I was still focused on the exact same things things we had been before. The black and white. The numbers. The goal was exactly the same: efficiency. It didn’t occur to me that it should be anything different.
After leaving that agency and fleeing my city for a year, I made an admirable but misguided attempt to recalibrate my career and marketed myself as an operations consultant for small agencies. I’d taken a break, spent some time in nature and now I was going back where I belonged. As I interviewed, I was completely confident that I could fulfill each touted task, namely to implement processes that promised increased efficiency…but ones people actually liked…with a smile. Somehow, without any fundamental change from before, this was really going to be “it” this time.
You saw this coming, right? A matter of months later I found myself unhappy in a role I created exclusively for myself. Cue the quarter-life crisis.
Despite my so-called apathy for agency and business management, the topic easily still comprises 75% of my reading and I just finished The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. I devour pretty much anything that this man says, but a certain passage stuck out in my mind. I began to see a thread running through every professional disagreement, every doubt, and every episode of burnout I’ve experienced.
“When problems arise, performance lags, mistakes made or unethical decisions are uncovered Lazy Leadership chooses to put their efforts into building processes to fix the problems rather than building support for their people. After all, process is objective and reliable. Or so we think. … When leaders use process to replace judgement, the conditions for ethical fading persist…even in cultures that hold themselves to higher moral and ethical standards.”
It is now glaringly obvious to me that I have become all but allergic to “process.” I practically flinch at the word. Though perfectly capable, I have made excuses for not developing them. In bizarre contrast to the platform I used to land my jobs, I often stood against imposing more structure. I thought I was doing this out of boredom or burnout, but am now understanding that it’s a reaction to something deeper. A balance was off; I’d been ignoring the people.
Looking back, I’d unwittingly angled my career towards the less exciting, less human, and ultimately less fulfilling area of process development and implementation. I said I saw teams as actual people and tried like hell to use this to differentiate myself, but there remained a massive disconnect between what I wanted my job to be and what seemed to be in demand. Everyone was excited by efficiency. If a problem was encountered more than once, a process should be developed. If the human was the problem, how can they be removed or their involvement reduced? In less and less time at each agency I joined, I awkwardly found myself arguing against “solutions” from my own portfolio. I just couldn’t articulate why. Now I can.
The moments of each job I’ve held that I loved have been about relationships. The agency where I met my chosen family was not life-altering, but experiencing that time with those people taught me to prioritize the wellbeing of my team, and that was. The happiest week of my time in Maine, which technically actually took place in Vermont, was spent with an incredible crew that became dear friends. And most recently, a project that involved a month of 70+ hour weeks spent with two of my very favorite people.
Until recently, I’d seen these moments through a personal lens. To an extent, they are. I love many of those people dearly. But what truly sets those times apart is that each team truly came together. It wasn’t fluid; it wasn’t always pretty. Those are some of the hardest projects I’ve ever produced. Each kicked my butt and, even if I didn’t see it happening at the time, each taught me how to be a better leader. And during each, I was anything but lazy.
There’s no process for motivating a team that’s been borderline abused by a client. You take care of them. You protect them as much as you can.
There’s no process for handling a forgotten wardrobe piece in the middle of the night. You get in the car and drive it where it needs to go.
There’s no process for seeing that your people are tired, when they need to vent, when they need hugs, or when they need you to just go the hell away for a minute. And there shouldn’t be.
But let’s be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m not suggesting abandoning organization or process wholesale. As Sinek points out, some processes are good. Particularly when things are less human.
“Process is great for managing a supply chain. Procedure helps improve manufacturing efficiencies. … [But] counterintuitive though it may seem, we need people — not paperwork, not training, not certifications — to fix people problems.”
I can be a fan of automation. I recently configured a Siri shortcut to order my Starbucks while I drive to work. I think certain areas of life or business largely benefit from procedure, like billing or even blood testing. Particularly when consistency and safety are paramount, reinventing the wheel every time is often not the best approach.
But in an agency setting, which for now is my current world, creativity beats out reproducibility. And to allow for that creativity, things probably should stay a little looser. A little more nimble. Perhaps jotted on a napkin before carved in stone.
It’s worth saying that I see process and organization as two very distinct concepts. I am, and will always be, a huge advocate for personal organization. Organization helps me be efficient with time, which is also very different than being efficient with craft.
I don’t want to spend more time than necessary working on something. Who does? But how much of what I do will change when I now stop and think about why I’m doing something and if my method truly makes sense for the task? Am I really being lazy when I think I’m being efficient? Am I really solving the problem or just designing for a different outcome? Which one will actually lead to a better result in the long run? Which makes me a better leader?
What I do advocate for is ending the creation process for the sake of it. What happens when we advance one step further and examine intention before implementing more procedure? Not the warm and fuzzy thoughts you may call to mind at the beginning of a yoga class, but the actual why of doing everything you do. (Another popular Sinek-ism. Told you I was a junkie.) It can be an admittedly crunchy position to take, but I’m going to try to focus more on that why and keep myself on the more human side of things.
I’d like to arrive a tidy summary of what the healthy balance of process and humanity looks and sounds like, but I can’t. Until I can, I’m going to work off of a kind of mission statement. It’s still in draft form but goes something like this: No matter what company or industry I am a part of, I’ll contribute whatever possible to help make life more fluid, more exciting and healthier for the dreamers of the world. They deserve more than lazy leaders.
