Collaborate Fearlessly

COLLABORATE FEARLESSLY

JOYCE KING THOMAS

Chairman and Chief Creative Officer, McCann XBC

I have not had many great ideas in the shower.

Maybe a few notions have hit me at the gym while I was flailing on a boring elliptical machine.

But that’s definitely not where the ideas that most impacted my career happened.

The gems have bubbled up in rooms with one, two or three people I trust, building on their thoughts, or using them as jumping off points for new ones.

And my collaborators were not always people from a department with the word “creative” in its title. The most important quality of a good collaborator is that you respect them. And this has nothing to do with experience level or department.

It’s a trick, working with other people to create ideas. You have to turn down the volume on your own ego and dial up being open, objective and even generous.

Here are a few ways to do that:

DON’T BE AFRAID TO BUILD ON SOMEONE ELSE’S IDEA.

Back when we were pitching the Mastercard business, another creative director called me into his office to show me a line he had.

There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s Mastercard.

I instantly loved it. He had a couple of executional ideas, but nothing as insightful as that lovely sentence. “What would you do?” he asked.

My art director partner was not keen on working on someone else’s idea, but he was a sport. And on a Sunday morning, the two of us came up with an idea called priceless, a sort of “grocery list” of things you could buy that led to something you couldn’t buy, something priceless.

We had made a good idea into a better one.

Over the next fifteen years, I watched some of the best young people in the business build on that idea themselves. People like Leslie Sims, CCO of Ogilvy U.S., and VCU’s own Vann Graves. They gave the work their own unique spin and perspective.

TALK ABOUT YOUR EMBRYONIC IDEA TO ANYONE WHO WILL LISTEN.

There are people who hold their ideas close, guarding them from thieves and naysayers. I don’t recommend it.

Once you have an idea you love, don’t shut up about it. Listen to and, more importantly, watch how people react to your idea. Use their reactions to fine tune your thinking, and express your notion more powerfully.

Ideas aren’t usually born beautiful. They take nurturing. They have to evolve themselves into existence. To help them along, you’ve got to invite the right people in. And keep the wrong people from steering your thought into a ditch.

BE CONFIDENT ENOUGH TO JOIN A TEAM AT ANY STAGE.

When McCann asked me to join the Fearless Girl team, a young art director and writer already had the concept. My role was to help sell the idea to the client, ensure we got the details right, and shepherd her through the challenges (and, oh boy, there were lots of those). One of the best moments of my career was huddled in the rain at 5 AM on the morning of International Women’s Day 2017, watching Fearless Girl assume her place in front of the Wall Street bull. Nope, I did not have the original idea. But I made some key contributions. And a bonus: the two women who came up with the idea will forever be my friends.

It’s freeing when you stop demanding that ideas have to spring from your mind whole. You can be more adventurous in your thinking. You can listen to, and really hear, other people’s ideas. You can let your work evolve and stop worrying about credit. And you can focus on what’s important: putting inspiring things out into the world.