Use your voice. Blow sh*t up. A newsletter about creativity, visibility and the way women lead.
What Art Gensler Said About Your Team...
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The theme during our Brand Maintenance call this morning quickly moved to team building. One client was onboarding an Architect and a Senior, and another was determining what roles would build her best team while she's serving two coasts. The org chart, renumeration, duties and culture are all systems that, if you get them right, plug into a larger vision. That big vision is something that matters not only to you but to that team member who is joining your firm. You might want a doer, but mid-career firms also need leaders. That is unless you’re okay being the bottleneck. Arthur Gensler said it best, “Every leader in the organization has three key roles to play. They need to be Guardians, Champions, and Protectors of your firm and brand.” Can you define your brand in a sentence? Can every single person on your team? You’re the one who had to live through every pivot, teardown and re-build from the ground up. You know what you’re in for when your client puts their signature on the dotted line, so you better choose wisely who you’re in with. Your design firm is only as good as what your weakest link doesn’t know. That means not everyone can come in as a freelancer. But a bad hire typically costs between 30-40% of that hire’s first year of salary and can surge up to 5 times the salary if they’re Senior. So you want to get it right and that means you have to have enough internal structure to know exactly what you need, and how those new people will plug in. Ask yourself, are the people supporting me the cream of the crop? Are they committed to playing their A-game? If you’ve never hired someone who is more qualified than you because you’re worried about the cost, the problem you’re experiencing is not actually financial. Have you hired someone into a position that focuses on their strengths? Because people who get to focus on their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged. How would things shift in the way you deliver your services if every person on your team knew exactly why you’re in business. What if they were fully committed to your vision and to championing your brand from the moment a new client walks in the door? What if they brought that client too you? If this is something you can't imagine Reader, let's talk about getting you structured for support. |
Voice Lessons Podcast
Use your voice. Blow sh*t up. A newsletter about creativity, visibility and the way women lead.
Many of us, especially those of the creative persuasion, struggle with something that can undermine the growth of our business: focus. Research has also shown that multitasking creates bottlenecks in the brain. People who multi-task are pre-disposed to error. They actually take longer to get things done than those who tackle one thing at a time. That's because multitasking wasn't designed with humans in mind. The concept was originated by computer engineers and refers to the ability of a...
The only way to the other side is through. I take that back. You can jump over the problem, pivot around it, ignore it entirely and for a while that works. You get busy enough that you don't have to look at it. You land a good project and it falls back. You hire someone and it shifts just enough to feel manageable. But it comes back. It always comes back. Because it isn't the problem that’s the problem. It’s a pattern that you’ve you built, one reasonable workaround at a time. What you’re...
Chat GPT has been on the scene for almost four, full years and now Claude, Perplexity and all the other AI "thought partner" tools have started to peak throughout 2026. I’ve heard plenty of designers complaining on and offline recently that their clients are using it to visualize and then to try and change the designs the’ve agreed to. As you know, AI is no designer. I get it. In the word of brand marketing, designers are using AI to write crap copy that can’t define their brand soul and that...