20/20 Hindsight By Jackie Schaffer None of us do everything right the first time around. Being able to reflect on what you would do differently is a healthy exercise. Doing so allows you to course correct, help others learn from your missteps and demonstrate professional growth. Across the past three years that I have been ...MORE
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What Drives Similarities in Creative Groups? By Jackie Schaffer Creative leaders often ask Cella “how are others in my industry doing this?” And while there are certainly opportunities to learn from other creative teams within your industry, it’s not always the best common denominator to use as a source of comparison. For example, we ...MORE
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Learning to Let Go By Jackie Schaffer To advance in your career, you need to manage things within your control to positive outcomes. For example, if you are a designer and someone helps you with part of a project, you review that part of the project before sharing it with the client to ensure it ...MORE
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Avoid Extinction: Keep Your Skills and Your Team’s Skills Sharp By: Jackie Schaffer During a recent series of roundtable meetings with creative leaders, we asked whether each team had training budgets and whether they were adequate. The answers were across the board. The most generous approach included a set amount per team member per year ...MORE
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Posted in All Posts, InSource, Jackie Schaffer on Dec 17th, 2012
Setting Goals for 2013 By Jackie Schaffer Whether setting personal or professional goals for the New Year, it’s important to include a mix of stretch goals and more easily achievable goals. Be sure to include a few that will be “hit it out of the park” goals (of course, you will need to put effort ...MORE
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By Jackie Schaffer At the beginning of 2012, I pledged to read at least six books that would support my professional development. I am going to fall short of that goal—I am hoping to finish the fourth book in the next week or so, but am disappointed I didn’t meet my goal. I made the pledge ...MORE
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By Jackie Schaffer Being happy at work is much more than being well compensated. Though, when college seniors are fortunate enough to receive more than one job offer, typically salary is the primary differentiator. And even those of us who have been in the workplace for some time are often swayed by higher compensation offers. But ...MORE
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Recently a few members of an in-house creative team stopped me mid-sermon to say “Jackie, we’re not anti-time tracking. We just want it to be easy.” I had falsely assumed the team didn’t want to time track. But in reality the team had already bought into the advantages of time tracking, they just were unwilling to time track using their current homegrown tool.
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You are not alone…common “battles” of the in-house creative team By: Jackie Schaffer There are some challenges in-house creative teams face that don’t have easy solutions—and some are more challenging and pervasive than others. This posting doesn’t provide too many solutions, rather hopefully a little comfort that your creative team is experiencing similar challenges as ...MORE
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There are a lot of qualities you look for when hiring managers—functional expertise, strategic thinking skills, a knack and interest for developing people, leadership qualities. If you peel the onion back on leadership qualities, there are several things you look for. Two that are really important to me are charisma and passion…and sometimes these can be difficult to ascertain in an interview setting, so creating interview questions designed to under cover these traits is important.
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