Savage counsel – the importance of collaboration
Each week in Encore, STW’s Chris Savage answers your agency and career questions. This week he talks about the importance of collaboration.
Hi Chris,
Our major client is becoming fickle, pitching out almost every piece of work. Increasingly they are hiring several specialist agencies to execute the brief and insisting we collaborate. I don’t like it. Working with other competing businesses is uncomfortable. They often take the credit, steal ideas, erode budget (though I guess we do that to them too). Is there a way around having to work with these other businesses? How do I persuade my client to have us do the whole project like we did in the good old days?
Time to grow up and get real about business today. My answer to your question lies in this very simple story. Read it, and learn.
But in the example you give, there was still only one driver of the vehicle – Piet.
‘Dictatorship has its benefits’ is, probably deliberately, missing the point. In Chris’s story, the overall quality of the experience for the client was delivered by a number of competitive players working together. Piet was a very important part of the experience and delivered on some of the critical components – but he couldn’t have delivered the whole thing by himself.
People just need to accept that inter-agency collaboration is necessary and relax their egos. Strong collaboration also requires great culture building – inter-agency, intra-agency and client-agency. Building collaborative culture in this respect is one of the single most important functions of senior agency team leads/MDs right now. It can’t be done without straight talking at senior level between client and agencies, and agreement on a combined vision/behavioural direction for the various teams involved.
Shame that this happens relatively rarely. It’s why things are, as the original author notes, generally ‘uncomfortable’, which inhibits performance, process. confidence and dialogue – four keystones necessary to deliver great output to clients.