The imposter delusion

Another week, another squeaky protest from the creative community about unpaid work.

In fairness, this one was at least backed up by action. The agency in question stopped pitching creative – and survived. But one lone voice won’t change the status quo. The issue of unpaid work will continue to pervade the creative industries, corroding both margins and service quality. (Example: the agency BBH made a virtue of not pitching creative for years. It helped to make that business the leader it is, but few others dared to follow suit.)

It’s interesting to contemplate why many creative businesses continue to pursue clients by throwing away a huge part of their value.

The answer might be cultural, at least in part. For example, we’re big fans of School 21, and its unique emphasis on teaching children leadership behaviours that will help them thrive in today’s market. Creative thinking is one of those behaviours. And it’s not hard to see how the lack of value placed on creative thinking in the mainstream curriculum might subtly diminish perceptions of its worth. ‘Being a creative’ is simply not a status-rich career aspiration in the way that, say, being a lawyer or financier continues to be. This is a crying shame: even in tough times, business success favours lateral thinkers.

Combine this implicit cultural devaluation of creativity with the historic reputation of the creative industries as places of high jinks and low accountability, and perhaps it’s no wonder that many businesses suffer from a big dose of imposter syndrome. But this is a delusion, and it’s one that’s holding an entire marketplace to ransom.

In his excellent book What It Takes, Charles D. Ellis explains how McKinsey explicitly set out to establish management consulting as a profession, with all the status that word implies. It designed its knowledge base, value system, culture and business model to reflect this mission and sense of self-worth. And it policed it ruthlessly within its culture over decades, to obvious success. 

Yet many creative businesses seem to live in fear of professionalisation. They believe that embracing good commercial practice will undermine their creative spirit. This is a false opposition — all creative businesses are by definition commercial. Indeed, the really good ones are the professional ones. They use their unique skill and knowledge to do innovative work, and command sufficient respect in how they do it that they can keep on going — and growing. Many, many others can also lay claim to unique skills and knowledge. They deserve respect, but undermine themselves through fragile self-esteem and an even more fragile grasp of sound business practice — the imposter delusion. Even if these businesses don’t fold, they are squeezed slowly downstream, pitching more, doing less and less of value. This is the category norm.

Professionalism is built on the simple principle that your knowledge, skills and experience have genuine value, and that said value should command a premium. This matters not just to agencies, but to all creative and knowledge-based businesses, including our own. What we do is an innovative reinterpretation of two professional disciplines (management consulting and change management). 

Like all creative work, it is hard yards, and it only works when there is an equal footing between client and advisor. As in all other industries, the only productive creative relationships are ones with clear boundaries, respect, and a sense of self-worth on both sides.

It is sad that so many talented creative people don’t allow themselves to be treated as such. There’s a simple, borderline obvious lesson in all this: behaviour drives outcomes. To which point, an old saying in adland runs that ‘you get the clients you deserve’. Imagine that as the opening chart of your next unpaid pitch, and you might end up getting somewhere.

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