Notes and news, insights and inspiration from the autonomous collective mind of GS.

I recently overheard a comment that startled me: The average tenure at a well-known agency is only 18 months. In and out in less than two years. Wow. In other words, as soon as you get to know your coworkers (or, more importantly, get to know how to work effectively with your coworkers), you go your separate ways, lose that learning and momentum, and start all over again.

The nature of our work these days requires input from lots of different players – strategists, designers, user experience architects, writers, developers, project managers, photographers, and many more. This is truly a team sport. The most effective teams exhibit qualities like trust, commitment, accountability, and a focus on results. Getting a team to that place takes a lot of time and effort. There’s no shortcut or easy path. It just takes time. With that in mind, the notion of tolerating a “revolving door” culture – where the belief is that one can easily replace a designer or developer with the next one in line and everything will still be okay – seems incredibly counter-productive to me.

Great work and great service come from great teams. So it’s imperative that an agency focuses on cultivating an environment where people want to stick around. Where people want to stay, learn, develop, contribute, stretch, and help the collective team in any way possible. The longer you work together the better you know each other. The better you know each others’ idiosyncrasies, strengths, and weaknesses. And, most importantly, the more you trust one another. Trust is critical in fostering open dialogue and vigorous debate around ideas because you need to feel safe that it’s okay to say what’s on your mind without fear of being looked at as stupid, being punished or even fired. Because you trust that your coworkers and managers have your best interest at heart – and vice versa. Everyone wins – especially the client.

Which ultimately gets to the heart of the matter. It’s in our clients’ best interest that we field the most effective team. The work is better, processes are more efficient, knowledge is retained, and service is more consistent. At GS, employee retention is a key measure of our success. It’s one thing to attract great talent. It’s a completely different thing to keep and develop great talent. If we’re not doing that, we’re not succeeding. We strive to make this agency the kind of place where people come prepared to stay, and so far we’ve been incredibly fortunate. For example, of the 40 people currently on our team:

• 78 percent of them have been here at least three years, with the average tenure just shy of nine years
• 60 percent have been here at least five years
• 42 percent have been here at least seven years
• Our first employee is still with us after 22 years

The result is a close-knit team dedicated to learning from one another and supporting one another, with the sort of stability, efficiency, effectiveness, and better overall agency experience that clients appreciate.

So should you ever be interested in working with GS or for GS, please be prepared to make yourself comfortable – you’re going to be here awhile.

Additional reading on the importance of effective teamwork and the impact this has on creativity can be found here:

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni
Easily one of my favorite books on teamwork. Lencioni’s assessment of what makes effective teams is so on point, I dare you to read it and not say to yourself “This is sooo us.” It’s just that good.

Innovation lessons from Pixar: An interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird
(free registration required)
The man behind “The Incredibles” (pure movie-making magic IMHO) dishes about how important team dynamics are to the creative process.