Julian Schreiber: Where have all the ‘soft skills’ gone?
The creative industry hasn't done enough to harness 'soft skills' in younger generations, argues Julian Schreiber, Special Australia partner and chief creative officer. They're skills that help them genuinely progress in their careers, outside of thinking of great ideas.
I watched Succession with a fever every Monday night. It was dinner with the Roy family, no excuses.
It was the writing, the acting, the taking down of the rich.
And when I think about it, it was just being in awe of how the central characters treated people. They were basically unrelenting nightmares towards each other and every person they met.
To say these people didn’t care or understand how to act with empathy or how to get the best of everyone around would be the understatement of the century.
A classic case of what I would have to describe as seriously lacking the ‘soft skills’.
What are soft skills, you ask? Well for the sake of the conversation, let’s create a division of skills in our industry.
Let’s call the skills and talent around actually having a brilliant idea and then knowing how to craft it – i.e. write, art direct, design, CX, and yes, even using AI, etc. – the ‘hard skills’. These are the easily defined skills, with clear edges that everyone commonly understands are the job of a creative in the agency.
But then there’s a whole bunch of other, much less defined, much less discussed skills floating around right beside those hard skills. The skills and talent required to get people to understand an idea, judge an idea on its different merits, create momentum around an idea, organise all the do-ers to make an idea, sell it through an organisation – to just get it made – not to mention get it made exactly how you want.
Let’s call all of these much more fuzzy-around-the-edges skills ‘soft skills’.
How people learn and develop these soft skills in the advertising world is a question volleyed around by a lot of people leading creative departments. And though it’s not considered this way often, advertising is fundamentally an apprenticeship industry.
I know that makes us sound like plumbers (who make truckloads by the way).
But we don’t learn from books, but largely by osmosis, absorbing the how of our trade by watching and working with people more experienced than us. We sit in meetings, unconsciously studying how other people do it, how they win over the crowd, how they convince everyone around them to get on board.
One of my earliest meeting memories is watching in awe as a senior creative suddenly burst out in song, getting up from his chair to elegantly swan around the room, performing like a 50-something clearly uncoordinated cabaret singer.
The sheer entertainment value of that move made everyone love not just the script he was presenting, but I suspect him. They just wanted more of that energy, more of his enthusiasm.
It was like everyone got a little taste of the excitement he was anticipating if the work got made.
To be clear, I am definitely not suggesting we all get musical in meetings, unless that’s what floats your boat of course, but what I did learn that day was that the soft skill of showmanship was a necessary part of the job.
And not just putting on a show but working out precisely who needed to see the show versus who didn’t.
I don’t think as creatives we openly discuss enough the development of soft skills and the idea of hoping our creatives are self-feeding, osmotic sponges. Particularly with Zoom now part of our daily work lives, just seems a little unrealistic.
Talking about this with the AWARD Council recently, we realised that right now, there’s a gap in our education pathway for creatives in Australia. One that sits very much between people just starting out all the way to becoming creative directors. Education that helps them genuinely progress in their careers, outside of thinking of great ideas.
A gap we decided we should try and fill.
So, this year we’re instigating a new education program for creatives right in the middle of things, to give these soft skills a nudge forward. A program called AWARD Uni.
AWARD Uni is going to be about creating your own turning points in the industry. Its goal is to help creatives be better at all the other things they have to deal with outside of coming up with amazing ideas.
All the things that help make great work happen and make progress overall.
It will be an opportunity to hear first-hand from creative leaders about how they do it, how they get the best out of their agency, out of meetings, out of clients and most importantly out of themselves.
The program is set to launch as part of this year’s This Way Up festival in August and will include a host of Australia’s best creative leaders offering their insights and advice.
They include the venerable Jonathon Kneebone from The Glue Society, Barb Humphries from The Monkeys, Mandie van der Merwe from Dentsu Creative and many more.
AWARD Uni could be just the thing for a creative trying to improve their trade.
After all, not all of us have a multi-billion-dollar media empire to inherit and/or potentially sell to a Scandinavian tech giant.
Sigh. I will miss you Kendall, Shiv and Roman. But then, The Great season three has just started
Find out more about AWARD Uni.
Julian Schreiber is a partner and chief creative officer at Special Australia.
They’re stuck in pre-March 2020.
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Brilliant observations, spot on. So many in the industry don’t even seem to have either hard, or soft skills…
Where is the mentoring and training by example?
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