The critiques we live by

Over the years I’ve received my fair share of critiques. I want to share them here because we glorify so much what we’re great at, but we need to be more ok at recognising what we’re not great at, and what we can do about it (and when we can’t).

Especially after you’ve worked for a few years and you realise your brain just isn’t built in some ways, and it works better some other ways. This isn’t a sign that you’re not good, or not worthy of being at the table, it’s just you come with a fairly unique set of features.

So, let’s do a bit of a self-roast in the hopes that you too can feel more ok with the critiques you might have received in the past. Some of these will be like yours, and you will have others I cannot imagine. Some of these are ongoing inadequacies, others are circumstantial things, others are simply features and there’s little we can do about it.

“You’re too agreeable.”

It’s true. I can be. I’m a recovering people pleaser. And I want people to get along. Which means sometimes I try to find consensus instead of forcing hard decisions. But on the other hand, I’m also quite good at finding links between what different people say. So in some environments, this can be useful. Others, less so. Speaking of which…

“You don’t challenge enough.”

Agencies love to challenge. And frankly I get it. It’s just not my default mode. My default mode tends to be “do the best you can with what you are given”. But sometimes you do need to challenge the underlying assumptions behind what someone is asking.

The trick I am slowly learning here is how to challenge in a way that is respectful. You can disagree with someone, and they can disagree with you, and you can both still be ok after, and you can still feel they don’t hate you afterwards. The real thing for me comes from feeling you were hard on the problem, not the person. More on this in a second.

“You don’t stress enough.”

My first boss literally said this to me. I probably fit this under “nothing I can do about it” territory, but also I think he probably meant I wasn’t as on top of a project as I should be.

And this is the day I learned I was simply a very bad account manager. But the idea of not being stressed enough always stuck with me, because I do stress a lot about things. I just don’t show that to others. It all percolates within like a wonderful internal tornado.

Probably one to file under “what the hell are you talking about”.

“You’re not focused enough.”

A former head of strategy of mine said this to me, and today I really get their point. I had cultivated a bit of a fame in the agency I was at as the guy who wrote very weird but somewhat wonderful emails. It got me some short-term cachet. Salience works!

But deep down, I was insecure about my own self-esteem and needed to constantly reassert my cleverness in, let’s be fair, pretty erratic ways. I wasn’t being strategic about it. I wasn’t building any equity, just doing random product drops, if you will. Working on this as we speak, as it makes a world of difference when you run an expertise business.

(So yeah Nicky, you were right. As you’ve been about so many things before and since.)

“You get angry too quickly.”

This was never explicitly said to me in these terms, but people get surprised I have a relatively short temper. Maybe it’s because I’ve worked a lot with British businesses and it’s frowned upon to simply say to someone to calm down, but either way I can sometimes tell people get uncomfortable when I get short fused about something.

Now, anger is an interesting concept because when strategically applied it gets things done. And I rarely get angry at people, more at problems and processes. I’m impatient at heart. Something I’d label under “nothing I can do about it (for now?)”. I find it hard to apologise when I point out that we can find better ways of working. Life’s too short.

“Your slides look terrible.”

Let me qualify this further. My first boss in the UK once said to me, and I quote, “this is the ugliest slide I’ve ever seen”. I don’t know if they meant it truthfully, or were being sarcastic, but either way I was a pile of walking anxiety at the time and shit like this didn’t help. Not blaming it on them, I had deeper shit going on, but it really didn’t help.

It was also energising though, as I tripled down my energy for the following months on getting really fucking good and clear and precise about presentations. It’s probably why to this way I get irrationally obsessed with things like alignment and word economy in slides and total slide counts, as if there’s an optimal mathematical balance we can achieve. It’s a “something I mostly fixed” thing, but a critique I’ve received all the same.

“You can get too tactical.”

This one has happened a few times, and it’s partly because my bias continues to be that of someone who started as a community manager and worked upwards into strategy. Basically I constantly navigate between the conceptual and the concrete, but when I get nervous about something I do default to the tactical because it feels easier most times.

This definitely falls under “forever working on it”, especially as I spend more time doing brand and comms strategy work which requires more abstract things like positioning, messaging, tone, comms models, emotional and functional benefits, and so on. But it’s a critique I’ve experienced before, rightly so, and it’s ok as long as you notice it early.

(In fact a great deal of these sorts of critiques and being aware of your own weaknesses is not so much about totally aspiring to fix them, but rather to aspire to spot them early enough so you fall less on their traps. Improving your abilities is a probabilities game!)

Phew.

So there you go, a list of things I’ve been critiqued for, and there are plenty others which my brain probably decided to omit from my conscious mind to protect my sense of self.

Jokes aside, I decided to do this because a) I was bored on a flight, and b) I feel like we need a greater dose of just getting real about how often the jobs we do aren’t ideal. And we mess up. And the pressure gets to us. Or we get distracted. Or we’re still learning.

And we make mistakes when we’re nervous, and we have biases, and we have encoded behaviours and worldviews and tendencies which are hard to shake. If some of this felt true to you, congrats, you’re a feeling human who’s aware of their own insecurities.

Which, frankly, is better than the alternative, where you morph into a sociopathic smart ass who in their minds can do no wrong, and therefore ignores any and all chances to get better and be better to work with. I’ll take insecurity over arrogance any given day.