New Tool Benchmarks In-house Team Performance. Check Out the Surprising Results! By Jackie Shaffer Cella Consulting and Relationship Audits and Management (RAM) recently published the PartnerPulse™ Aggregate Results Report, in which we compared and contrasted the results of in-house groups with the results of external agencies. More specifically, PartnerPulse is a tool for in-house ...MORE
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Learn How to Supercharge Your In-house Team By Ed Roberts What are the key characteristics of a high-performing in-house team? What makes some in-house teams more highly valued than others? It isn’t just talented people and awards—trust me. We all know the basic foundation of a solid in-house team lies in its ability to ...MORE
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Life is all about relationships. With your parents, kids, spouse, significant other, boss, co-workers. And if you manage them well, hopefully you’ll keep “therapist” off the list. As an in-house creative, one of the most important relationships you’ll have is with your internal clients—your stakeholders. You know, those people down the hall, up a floor ...MORE
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By Donna Farrugia, Executive Director of The Creative Group Breaking into the design industry can be challenging – particularly for recent graduates with no relevant work experience. And landing an internship doesn’t appear to be much easier: Nearly six in 10 (58 percent) advertising and marketing executives surveyed by The Creative Group said their ...MORE
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Years ago I participated in a 360-degree assessment. Peers, colleagues, management and direct reports all had the opportunity to anonymously tell me how I was doing. And based on their responses, I was doing pretty well. But there were a few comments that I didn’t expect and one in particular that stopped me in my ...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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One BIG Lesson Learned By: Ed Roberts If you are a member of a small in-house team and find your circle of local “go tos” for professional advice exist only within the confines of your company, are steadily dwindling, or even worse—nonexistent. It's probably time you hit the road (figuratively and literally) and look for ...MORE
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Now that I have your attention, I’d like to discuss the other “F” word. A word that represents a data file comprised of glyphs, characters or symbols and can bring designers to their knees and their blood to a boil—all with the mighty power to crash a computer. I’m speaking, of course, about “Fonts.” Not ...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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