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Contributed by David C Baker, ReCourses (see information about upcoming speaking engagements at the end of this article).

Whether or not you have articulated it, your firm is mission driven. (Furthermore, what looks “balanced” to you because it aligns with your own interests might appear imbalanced to someone else with different priorities.) In the absence of a clear statement surfacing this focus, how would I discover the unique nature of your firm or the firm where you work?

Until you look for the right clues, answering that question is like scanning a crowd for the tall person when everyone is sitting down. But just like extraordinary height is apparent once you ask everyone to stand up, so too the subtle “drives” at any firm are apparent if you look in the right places. The intent of this is first to help you see where the imbalances are at your firm, and then suggest a few means of bringing your firm back into balance. All this comes from the belief that intentional imbalance is a lot healthier than unintentional imbalance.
Possible Distortions in Creative Service Firms

After analyzing about 540 firms in depth and thousands of others in passing, I’ve found that there are predominantly six different “drives” that surface in our industry, listed in no particular order except the last one. The description in parentheses after each ties this drive to a particular activity in our ReCourses Functional Model: download a PDF:

• Client relationships (Delivering)
• Employee relationships (Shaping)
• The Craft Itself (Developing)
• New Business (Finding/Closing)
• Quality/Profit (Resourcing)
• Money (none)

Each of the first five must be present to some degree in each firm, but in that mix, which one is predominant at yours? And how would a particular emphasis shape your environment. By the way, when money is the driving force, the original emphasis (one of the other five) has died and all that’s left is money, which eventually destroys the culture. (Please note that money is not the same as profit.)

Benefits of Balance

But why even bother with the notion of balance (or intentional imbalance, if you will)? Well, balance is a zero sum game, and every emphasis (or surplus) in one area creates an orphan (or deficit) in another. So if you are too focused on client relationships, something else is going to suffer (e.g., employees working too hard or insufficient boundaries around your personal life). Or if you are too focused on employee relationships, you may have trouble dealing with difficult employee situations and outsiders will wonder if you’re running an orphanage instead of a marketing firm.

This notion of balance is well articulated, and entire books (like Paul Niven’s “Balanced Scorecard”) are devoted to it. The point isn’t to make all companies the same but to tie execution to strategic goals by first surfacing those goals and then being intentional about how each arm of the business contributes to their achievement. It’s about letting a firm like yours reflect the principal(s) while maintaining a healthy balance. If a principal is driven by new business development, a lot of great opportunities will present themselves; but if new business is too important, perhaps not enough attention will be given to serving clients well. And they’ll leave. “But of course that’s okay because we can easily replace them,” is how the thinking goes.

Unfortunately, that is not acceptable. See, too much of a good thing (new business) creates distortions and poor performance over a longer period of time. Favoring one of the five drives is fine, but some balance will make the business more sustainable, less you drift into the sixth drive (money), which means that you’re one step away from the cliff’s edge.

By the way, balance is nothing more than resting tension. My point is that balance does require tension.

Determining Your Own Public Dysfunction

So back to how an outsider might divine the particular imbalance at your firm. There are several ways of doing this, and when combined, they are almost infallible:

First, ask employees. One of the 25 questions we ask when examining a firm forces employees to assign a value to these different drives, and then we use filters to make sense of it.

Second, arrange all the titles in a hierarchy and see where the greatest title inflation lies. Is it in account service? Project management? New business? Creative execution? Account planning? Lofty titles are good indicators.

Third, where is the compensation focused? There are benchmarks for how much of a firm’s compensation is devoted to account service, for instance, and if a particular firm exceeds that, chances are that they are driven by client relationships.

Fourth, staffing yields all sorts of clues. If there are no account/client service people by title, chances are you have a design firm driven by the craft itself, where the “Developers” may enjoy pay and title inflation. If there are more people than you would expect in account service, chances are they are trafficking their own jobs and running their own little companies, using everyone else in the company to execute their promises. And that brings us to the most obvious clue of all.

Fifth, who is making the promises? Not who is delivering the promises, but where is the power behind those promises? Are they coming from the sales team, the account team, the resourcing team, etc.? Find out from where the promises emanate and you’ll have your answer to the question of what’s driving a firm.

I have a long list of the things to look for when trying to determine which of those options is the drive at your firm (just reply to this email and ask if you’d like a copy), but that last one (who makes the promises) is the quickest route to the truth.

The Healthiest Firm’s Intentional Imbalance

Perfectly balanced forces in a firm like yours is a fool’s errand and there’s no point in wasting your energy trying to achieve it. In fact, if all five of the drives are pretty close, evidenced by the right answers in the five suggestions we’ve just gone over, just call it a day. But if your OCD needs a new battleground, let me leave you with a thought.

In a perfectly balanced system, Resourcing has slightly more power than anywhere else, and when tempted to make promises in front of a client, Delivering is slightly more afraid of Resourcing than they are of the client. Which is why we have developed a new seminar on this to debut June 18 in Nashville (see Events > Seminars at www.recourses.com), or download a PDF with more information). Bringing Balance to Your Creative Services Firm

Upcoming ReCourses Events
Please refer to the ReCourse web site for more information www.recourses.com

• Managing Creatives and Creativity--Being an Effective and Confident Creative Director, San Francisco, Apr 23-24
• Resourcing the Creative Process--Combining Stellar Traffic, Production Management, Workflow, Roles, Staffing, and Systems, Nashville, June 18
• Roundtable for Principals of Firms with 2-7 Employees, Nashville, June 13-15
• Roundtable for Principals of Firms with 8-21 Employees, Nashville, June 20-22
• Roundtable for Principals of Firms with 22-80 Employees, Nashville, June 25-27