If you are a leader of any kind, especially in a creative field like marketing or advertising, you'll want to pay attention to this post.
If you are anything like me, you want to lead a team of individuals who always show up with good ideas. Employees who push the envelope. Who challenge assumptions to create innovative solutions. What you don't want are teammates who sit around and wait to be told what to do. Employees who only give you the bare minimum, and nothing more.
There are many ways to build a team like this. One of the most important ways is to delegate outcomes and not tasks.
What does this mean exactly? It means that you need to present challenges to employees that allow them to use their own experience, intelligence, and unique skills to solve a problem. After all, those are the traits that moved you todid hire them in the first place. When you form your instruction in this way, it allows the employee the opportunity to take ownership of the project. This will result in a teammate who is more engaged, happier, and ultimately, more productive. Not to mention, that you'll likely get more interesting solutions and insights to the problem you're trying to solve. Everybody wins.
Conversely, the manager who delegates individual tasks tends to get the opposite result. This person is sometimes unfortunately known as the "micro-manager." Delegating a set of specific tasks ultimately leads to employees contributing the bare minimum because they know that their ideas don't matter. The best and brightest minds won't tolerate this for long, and you'll quickly see attrition among your best employees.
This methodology isn't easy. It requires a lot of patience from the leader. Instead of "cutting to the chase" you'll often find yourself delicately re-directing your team over and over again as they work their way to the solution. One metaphor that I like is that the manager acts as a set of “guard rails” to redirect their team as they move forward toward the goal. In a deadline-driven industry like advertising, the time required to get to a solution using this method can be exceptionally challenging.
Of course some problems require a more direct form of leadership. Examples might include the aforementioned restraints imposed by deadlines, or working with particularly in-experienced teammates like junior designers and copywriters or interns.
Like all good lessons, this was one that I had to learn the hard way. If you are having trouble with your employees providing the kind of creative insight that you originally hired them for, you might start by looking yourself in the mirror and asking yourself if you're delegating outcomes, or if you're delegating tasks.