You mentioned your education. How important do you think it is to have a relevant education to work in advertising now?
As a person who has collected 3 diplomas: 2 higher education ones and a certificate on Executive MBA business school graduation, where I even acted as a guest expert, I would say it won't hurt. But even in 2016, when I was receiving my last diploma, the information that was taught at universities was somehow obsolete and not always applicable. This is true. Market and technologies change so rapidly that they cannot be captured by a relevant educational program. However, all the universities I studied at taught me a useful skill: think in the right way and ask the right questions in various situations.
For example, when entering the managing position, you work within the expertise you have gained, your problem assessment focus is narrow. However, your picture must be much bigger, you need to consider many aspects that you previously paid no attention to. If you do not have a focused education, having this bigger picture in your mind is rather hard. First of all, university teaches you to ask questions and it does you a world of good.
I got my first director position with a team of 12 people, back in 2010, when I was promoted from a senior manager. Then I had my own clients that I was developing, it was the level of freedom and responsibility when nobody interfered with what I did. However, at first, I was not so efficient to manage the team — I made the mistakes common for young executives. It is recognized that now the managers' age has decreased, but unfortunately, many young bosses lack sufficient skills they can gain from experience.
How does inefficient management look?
Well, when I did not see people's loyalty to the team as the most important factor, I thought that first of all a talent has to be efficient and no one was indispensable. I was very black-and-white in my actions.
However, actually, it is not quite right, because you need to develop a dialog with every person. The idea of emotional intelligence and communication flexibility was the basic issue I then tried to fix.
You must have chosen your own management principles, based on this experience.
Yes. First, I realized that there are no bad employees. It can be that the position is not suitable for the person. I started watching it, noting strengths and weaknesses, correcting people's inner development, and learnt to offer people a choice.
Second, the principle I based all my teams on is creating the environment, where everyone feels involved in the common cause, without giving crazy KPI and building a sweatshop system. It is as important when you have the idea of the team belonging: you do not think that a screw up can lead to losing your bonus, you think that you will let the team down.
Tell more about the Partners' Lift program. Why does KB-12 need young executives?
Let's start with KB-12 initially being a player that went cross-current, developing unlike others on the advertising market. Our company has always adopted the partnership cooperation philosophy, instead of a strict top-down structure. We have a matrix system with a bunch of teams. Of course, the teams should be headed by strong specialists and managers. Translating this model to the traditional one would have this manager as an executive director or a partner of a small boutique agency. There are not a lot of people like this on the market. Hiring this kind of professional once in 12-18 months, makes it a complicated process. Such positions never get to hh.ru, as well as such talents also do not place their resumes there.
As a rule, it implies another way of search and communication, these people should be interested by something. Money is not always the key point here. These talents can value their level of freedom, competences and self-fulfillment much more, because they already have a good salary where they work and everything is fine. However, they can either get bored or have a superior manager who interferes with their business.
One way or another, building relationships with the candidates and hunting them to KB-12 takes quite some time.
Considering ambitious goals of our company on the advertising market, we realize that this manager search track hinders our energetic and dramatic growth. Hence, we decided to look to the managers that hold slightly lower positions than partners and executive directors, and are now client directors and account directors.
These talents have sufficient expertise work-wise, good understanding of business processes, and skills in building relationships; they think in both creative and economic categories. Young managers know what project efficiency is and assess their job through business indicators in general. However, they may lack some qualities for comprehensive management.