Career
I’ve never really thought much about ‘careers’ - especially my own. So far it’s been simply a random succession of distinct roles rather than an ordered procession keeping to its planned route. Perhaps like a bead necklace, with, I suppose, me as the thread apparently giving the beads a semblance of coherence? No, that doesn’t seem quite right - too sorted - I give up. How reassuring it must be to the slimy snail glancing back over his shoulder to the shining continuous path that has brought him to today. Now that’s a career.
I was once interviewed by a pleasant student at the college I then led about ‘legacy’. He wanted to know for the student magazine what I expected my legacy to be? Phew, tricky for someone like me who can’t even make any joined-up sense from my past, leave alone any for the future. Replying, I stammered something trite about a legacy of enhanced creativity for his fellow students. But even I, in mid cliche, knew it sounded unconvincing, and he wisely left it out of his article about the new President, sensible man.
No, career coherence and legacies don’t interest me, safety nets for those nervous of random reality. Once, in a car trip with a friend, we chose the direction to take at every junction by the toss of a coin. Very soon we had no idea where we were but were never lost, for we always knew which direction to take at the next junction. To my mind a much more realistic, fun, and actually optimistic model of life than careers and legacies.
Working with Creatives
I run a tiny consultancy company called Working with Creatives, it attempts to suggest to organisations how they can safely allow their employees to become more creative. I’ve said it’s a ‘tiny’ consultancy, actually, ‘miniscule’ would be more accurate, it’s just me. There maybe several reasons why it’s not yet listed on a major international stock exchange, but one might be that few organisations see lack of creativity as a problem. The real problem being that bothersome creativity gets in the way of implementing the corporate plan. So creativity has to be stamped on rather than energised. But I’ll keep whispering my profoundly annoying and disruptive message about the value of creativity anyway.
Here’s a link to my Working with Creatives website https://www.workingwithcreatives.co.uk/ Here you’ll find details on how I can help your company release its creativity.
I once had a job managing musicians who all worked in a university teaching future professional musicians. It was called a ‘Conservatoire’ and that’s a common name used around the world for such places. In them you’ll often find not only musicians but sometimes actors, dancers and other creative disciples too. If you were starting one from scratch would you call it a Conservatoire? Is a ‘conserving’ institution the same as a ‘creative’ institution?
Anyway, possibly a vaguely interesting question, but not central to this little story. Back on track now. So there I was at the Conservatoire managing all these creative musicians, impressed by their innovative minds, real dedication to the progression of their crafts, continued pursuit of their own creativities, and admirable care for the success of their students. But I also noticed that these colleagues were sometimes exquisitely hard to manage. One of the myriad reasons for this being that they profoundly considered the study of music to be utterly distinct from the wider world of education, and that any contact with this alien environment must be damaging to their subject. Music was complete, separate and different. Some recommended to students that they wear a different college scarf to that proudly draped around the necks of all the other students in the university studying other subjects.
The symptoms of this bubble belief system held by my colleagues sometimes included a resistance to change, in some a defensiveness about sharing ideas, and a more frequent and sometimes debilitating anxiety about the future of their own creativities.
Not surprisingly I was warned against accepting the request from the President of the university to go and help a local independent drama college planning an application to join us. ‘No point, drama is so different, it just wont work. Drama teachers are so not like us musicians.’ I nevertheless accepted my university president’s challenge and found the drama staff to be difficult to manage because they too considered themselves unique whilst sharing with the musicians exactly the same ambitions, skills, and worries that I had known for so long.
After a few more years of teaching music and managing musicians - it is impossible for me to overstate the importance of understanding the rules of sixteenth-century counterpoint to a fulfilled life - I took a job as Principal of a London Drama College. I was quietly confident about what I would find, and I was right: loads of creativity but expressed through people sometimes hard to manage if all the manager has is a repertoire of techniques derived from ‘good practice’ learnt through managing less creative people.
A few years later I was the President of a multi-faculty College of the Arts in Southeast Asia. The same people, the same creativity, the same challenges.
Phew, it took me a long time, but I had eventually gathered together a few guidelines about how to manage creative people, and it these that I have distilled into my consultancy ‘Working with Creatives’ Through WwC I attempt to pass on to organisations - whether within The Creative Industries or not - how to release and grow colleagues’ creativity.