#and I don’t mean ‘oh I’m my partners number one supporter’ that’s mundane

[the-splodge]

I’m pretty neutral on most romance tropes but I adore unhealthily devoted ships where it’s beyond soulmates and now slightly concerning but both of them are equally down bad so it’s fine

[mmand0]

Back To You // F!Reader - Javi

Quantico

05:00

You groaned and tossed in your bed as your watched beeped at you, the light blinking rapidly signaling the start of a new day. Your roommate Wanda was still asleep, but you could hear her protest as her alarm went off. Slowly, you got out of bed and began your routine: grab a towel, your plastic basket filled with shower items, fresh underwear and a bra, and slipped into your rubber flip flops. You braced yourself before opening the door to the living area where another one of your roommates, Marie, was already heading out the door to shower as well. The two of you exchanged a sleepy greeting before heading to the communal showers together. As usual the morning folks were already nearly done with their showers and chatting with one another as they moisturized and got ready for the day. This part of the day was always your least favorite, but you were almost done with the mundane routine of Quantico. You found your way through the steamy room and found favorite shower stall. There was nothing special about it really, but it was tucked in the back and it was the darkest part of the shower room. After your shower, you quickly dried down and slipped into your undergarments before heading to the benches to get ready. Sitting in your underwear with a towel wrapped around your hair, you continued your routine of getting ready- lotion, moisturizer, sunscreen, and minimal make up. You always felt like you weren't much to look at, so there was no point in making much efforts in looking "pretty." Some of the girls put more effort, but you weren't here to mingle.

"Almost done, Y/N?" You looked up to see Marie already dressed with her make up and hair done. She was the pretty one. The men always stole glances at her when they would walk down the hallways. She was bubbly brunette with such a bright smile. Marie was sweet- truly, but she had a ferocity hidden beneath that million dollar smile. There was one incident at a bar once; as you and the other girls were drinking, a man walked by and placed his hand on her rear. Within seconds, Marie had turned and slapped him across the face. This kind of behavior typically gets you eighty-sixed from any establishment, but luckily you were regulars. The man was kicked out immediately, and the crowd cheered.

"Yeah, just need to put on my clothes and dry my hair." You slipped into your khakis, white tennis shoes, shirt, and a grey sweater with your last name printed on the back. Not cute, but very convenient to wear such bland clothes. You do like to keep up with fashion, though you never ventured out to wear outside of certain colors- earth tones, grey, black, white, blue, and beige. Timeless and effortless. You unwrapped your towel from your hair and began to dry it.

"You know you should really just borrow my hair dryer," Marie said as she fussed over your wet hair. You rolled your eyes and began to put your hair in a braid.

"Yeah, yeah."

"No, really! You'd look so gorgeous with a little more volume and-"

"Marie."

"Alright, fine. But just keep that in mind... You never know who might be checking you out." She smirked at you with a twinkle in her eye.

The second eye roll of the morning.

"You're still going with that Javi thing?"

Marie shrugged and wrapped an arm around your shoulders. "I don't know, maybe? I mean you guys have some sexual tension every time we do any training together."

"No, I'm just competitive. That's all, Marie. Besides, doesn't he have a fiancé?"

"I'm just competitive- right. You've convinced no one, sweetie. The two of you just need to do the deed before we all get separated. And yeah, that's what I heard, but I haven't seen a fiancé." You sighed and slipped out of Marie's half embrace.

"Come on, let's get breakfast..."

She was right though. You couldn't deny that sexual tension between you and Javier Peña, but the man was a flirt. He was easy on the eyes, smart, athletic, and charismatic. The girls were always smirking and giving him bedroom eyes. Of course, you had no idea if the tension was one sided, nevertheless, you were attracted to him. Were you going to do anything about it? No, of course not. There two things on your mind: excel and get hired. There was no time for romancing, especially not a flirty hunk (who might have a girl waiting for him) everyone is already swooning over. Despite the attraction and competition between the two of you, you can admit that Javi was a nice guy from time to time. In fact, he does consider you a friend in the academy. Even with the constant bickering and one-upping one another, the two of you would study together every now and then. Sometimes he even worked out or ate meals with you. You always wondered why that was- perhaps just to show he's not all bad? To avoid getting your heart broken and to kill what little hope for a deeper relationship, you have convinced yourself that Javi was just trying to get close to you to ruin your chances on becoming the top student in Quantico. That had to be it.

You and Marie found your usual table in the cafeteria and was soon joined by your other roommates, Eleanor and Wanda. Breakfast was simple today: oatmeal, fruit cup, coffee, and a boiled egg. The girls chatted with one another about the upcoming exams as they ate.

"Can you believe Wilson's giving us another test? That's what? Twice this month already?" Eleanor grumbled with a mouthful of oatmeal.

"Yeah, but it's just behavioral science. Not that bad, right, Y/N?" Wanda turned to you. "Besides, if you need help, you know you can ask Y/N for-"

"Unless she's going to ditch us to study with Peña again," Eleanor sneered. You turned bright pink. "Oh my god. You are studying with Peña!"

"Well, he asked, and-"

"Oh my god, you minx! You said you didn't like him!"

"No, I don't, but-"

"No but's! You totally have a thing for him! Look, Y/N, I am in total support of you sleeping with Peña, but just be aware that I will need-"

"Okay, that's enough Eleanor," Marie interjected, a finger pointing at her. "If Y/N says she's not into him, she's not. Besides, they're two very talented agents and they're always in competition with one another. Honestly, it makes sense." Despite the teasing earlier, Marie was always good at defending you when you needed it. Eleanor was always into her gossip and frankly, she needs to keep her cool more often when it comes down to academy rumors. "And Y/N should keep her enemies close, right, Y/N?"

You nodded and laughed. "Exactly. Think of it as like... a real life case- Peña is enemy number one, and I gotta keep my eye on him before he takes my number one spot."

"Speaking of which..." Wanda whispered. Her eyes were looking straight past you, and you didn't need to ask what- or rather who- she was looking at. You felt a familiar presence behind you before he slid to sit at the table.

"Well good morning, ladies!" Javier Peña flashed a smile and sipped some black coffee. "What are we talking about this morning?"

"Peña." Wanda responded, raising a brow. "What makes you think you're invited at our table? Don't you usually eat with your roommates?"

Javi frowned. "Aw, don't be like that, Wanda. Can't I visit my favorite ladies in the academy this fine morning?"

"You mean visit Y/N?" Eleanor smirked and nodded towards you. Javi put his hands in the air and chuckled. "You got me. Just here to check in with you for studying later. Still good at 17:30?"

"Yes, now go away and let me eat in peace, Javi," you respond before drinking your coffee.

"Ouch, alright, alright. Kind of cold this morning, Y/N. Maybe you and I could go for a run to heat things up?" You turned your head to Javi and rolled your eyes. Third eye roll of the morning. Javi laughed and stood, "See you ladies later." The other three ladies Eleanor was about to open her mouth, but you raised your hand to stop her.

"Don't, Eleanor. Stop fantasizing. Let's just get to the tracks before it gets crowded."

The rest of the morning and afternoon was calm. After breakfast you went straight to do physical training, then a short break before forensic science, another larger break, then communications, lunch with the girls, then the last two classes. You headed straight to your room to get out of your clothes, take a quick shower, then get into jeans and a clean shirt before heading to study with Javi. The shower room was quiet this evening, and you were grateful for that. You needed to think without everyone else making comments. This morning's exchange was curious. Javi never really came to check on you when you set up study time together. You always showed up, and he would always be there waiting. There was never a question whether you would be there or not, so why did he "check" with you?

"Whatever," you told yourself. You turned the knob off and quickly got ready before heading to the library. You grabbed your backpack and a stack of study materials, and started the short walk towards the library. Javi was already outside leaning against a pillar smoking a cigarette. You approached him and sighed as he put his cigarette out on the ground. "I know, I know, I should stop."

"It doesn't help your lungs, idiot."

"Yeah, I know. That's why you're so much smarter than me. Anyway, let's get going. I want to get to sleep earlier for once."

Studying with Javi wasn't as bad as you made it seem with the girls. He was a pleasant study partner and he did work hard on understanding the material. There were times when the two of you had opposing answers, and instead of getting frustrated, he went straight to the books to check. Most of the times you were right, and he would admit defeat. Honestly, he made you a better student despite the constant competition and snarky remarks with one another. As the two of you studied a particularly confusing case, you noticed Javi seemed to be on edge. You never really saw him this rigid or nervous before, and decided to take action.

"Want to take a break?" you asked, closing the folder.

"Hm? Why? We're almost done."

"Let's just take a break. Ten minutes."

Javi pursed his lips and admitted defeat. "Fine. Let's go take a walk."

The two of you headed back outside to take a couple laps around the campus. The moon was shining brightly already, and people were heading back to their dorms. A few of them waved or bid the two of you goodnight as they disappeared into the buildings. "So... Are you doing alright?" you asked after a few excruciating seconds of silence.

"Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"

"I don't know, Javi, you tell me. You came up to check on me this morning and you're body language right now doesn't exactly convince me that you're fine."

Javi reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and his zippo. "Alright, fine. I'm just nervous about what comes after the academy."

"Why?"

Javi stopped walking, unlit cigarette nearly falling out of his lips. "W-well, I..." He paused, placed the cigarette back into the pack, and stared down at his feet. "I don't know. I'm just attached, I guess."

"To the academy?"

"No."

"Then what?"

"You know for someone so fucking smart, you're clueless."

You raised a brow and placed your hands on your hips. "What is this about, Javi?" Without another word, his lips were on yours. You didn't do that right? He did? You were frozen, but you let yourself give in, arms falling down at your sides while his hands found your face. It felt like an eternity before he pulled away.

"I don't know if I'll see you again after this, and I just wanted a chance to do that before we go our separate ways."

"Javi, this is just going to-"

"Complicate things, I know, but I'd rather do it than not do it at all. Didn't you know how I felt this whole time?"

"I mean... people talked, but I wasn't entirely sure. You flirted with everyone," you responded, waving your arms around. "How was I supposed to know?! Besides don't you have a-"

"Fiancé? I did." You could hear the hint of sadness in his voice. You wanted to pry and ask more about it, but perhaps this wasn't the best time. "I had a fiancé. It didn't work out. Look-" He took your hand in his, and squeezed it gently. "I'm leaving the country after the exit exams. Whatever happens, I just wanted to at least have this before we lose contact."

"Alright, I get it... I wish you would have just told me sooner, Javi." He tucked your hair behind your ear and leaned in for another soft kiss. It was odd kissing someone you've been in constant competition with, but it felt... good, you suppose. It was not a great feeling. You weren't exactly happy, but you weren't angry or sad either. It just felt confusing and you didn't know this at the time, but this memory would haunt you in the future. For know you were going to savor the moment before it ended. Javi led you towards a more secluded area where the two of you devoured one another for a good twenty minutes before heading back to the library. The rest of the evening was more tense than before, but the two of you were professionals. After finishing your studies, he walked you to your dorm, kissed you goodnight, and went on his way. As soon as Javi disappeared, you opened the door to find the girls sitting around with mouths agape.

"Are you kidding me?!" Marie exclaimed, eyes wide with shock.

"WE SAW THAT!" Wanda squealed. "NO DENYING NOW, Y/N!!!"

Eleanor sat smugly, pretending to check her nails. "Told you!" You sighed and dropped your bag on the floor. They were right, you couldn't pretend and deny it anymore. They saw it from the peephole on the door, and there was no point in hiding when your face was as red as the apple Marie was holding. "Tell us everything!!" Marie said between the crunching of the apple in her mouth. "You have to!!! Roommate rules!"

Although you usually avoided discussions of romance and gossip, you couldn't help but retell everything to them. You never had a lot of encounters with men even before Quantico, and this one was a little more special than that of the few boys you have dated. The delight and squeals of joy from your friends made you laugh. It was a nice little jovial exchange that you desperately needed before heading to bed where you knew you were going to analyze everything that just happened. After an exciting discussion and the number of congratulatory hugs from them, you bid them goodnight. As you lay in bed that night, you couldn't help but caress your lips. He kissed you. Whatever happens after the academy, you at least had the chance to experience some sort of romance with Javier Peña.

Los Angeles, One year later

06:00

The aroma of coffee filled your apartment as your boyfriend busied himself with making breakfast as you showered and got ready. It has been a year since graduation, and you haven't heard from Javier Peña since then. There was no denying that it broke your heart a little, but you managed. Two months after graduating, you and Marie were immediately hired to be part of the FBI team in Los Angeles. It wasn't an easy transition, but you were grateful for the job that would distract you from the heartbreak, and even more grateful to be close to your family who lived in San Diego. After a few transitional months, you ended up meeting Adam, an LAPD officer. He was nice, but not as motivated as Javi. It was a little annoying at times... Adam preferred to do the desk work and slacked off a little often to your taste, and you would try to push him to get more motivated which only caused him to be irritable. After the few times you pushed, you decided to pick your battles better and here you are, six months later, living together in your apartment.

"Breakfast is ready!" Adam said, poking his head in the bathroom.

"Thanks, I'll be out there."

You stared at the mirror and inspected your image. After being around these LA folks, you began to learn how to do your hair and make up a tiny bit better, but still kept it minimal. Marie taught you techniques with your hair, and on your days off you would go over to Marie's apartment and the two of you would venture to the shopping malls to take a look at make up. It was nice to have a normal life for once- no studying, no Javi messing with your thoughts, and no shower time being shared. You headed into the kitchen and sat at the pub table where your breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast was already there waiting for you.

"I'll be late today, by the way," you said between bites. "I have a meeting with the director later."

"Oh. Okay... no problem," Adam responded. He sounded sad, but you were too busy to notice. Your attention was on the radio that was playing in the background. They were talking about Colombia and the cartels again. The war on drugs was becoming a prominent talk of the town, and the DEA agents were swamped with arrests and cases, particularly with the cocaine epidemic. Although it wasn't your branch, the FBI was becoming more and more involved with the cartel cases. Too many dead bodies were being reported, and not to mention the issues with communism. You seldom discussed these things with Adam, mostly because it was classified, but also he didn't seem to care too much about it. Often times he just wanted you to "relax" and "take it easy for once." It made you cringe the way he looked at the growing problems in the country- it was like he truly didn't care. You often found yourself devising a plan to break up with him, but never had the courage to pull the trigger. You needed an excuse- it'll be easier that way.

"What time do you think you'll be home?" he asked. "Don't you remember what today is?"

You looked up, a look of confusion and guilt on your face. Suddenly, it hit you- it was date night. The two of you had promised to do date nights once a week, and you've managed to skip out on it for the past three weeks. "Oh god, I'm so sorry, Adam. This is really-"

"Important. I understand. Don't worry, we have the weekend!" He always had an optimistic attitude despite the constant rainchecks you've been giving him. "I know you, Y/N. You're a hard working agent, and I know you can't really talk to me about what's going on in the FBI, but just please take some time off once in a while..."

You finished your cup of coffee, nodding to avoid any more conversations about taking the time off. This routine with Adam was beginning to get on your nerves. You stood from the table and planted a kiss on Adam's cheek before saying goodbye. On the way to the office, you picked up Marie who had a cup of coffee ready for the two of you.

"Jeez, what's with that face?" she asked as she handed you your cup. "Looks like you're off to a rough start already."

"Huh? Do I look that bad today?"

"No, make up looks great- it's your face. Did Adam do something?" You glanced at the side mirror and saw what she was talking about- you looked drained and annoyed. Perhaps this relationship was taking a much bigger toll than you expected. "No, he didn't. I'm just annoyed from the reports in the news this morning. They're not accurate, that's all." Marie shrugged and flipped the radio on to the FM radio. The commute to work with Marie always began with some music on the FM radio. This was a rule the two of you made- no news, no reports, no work talk in the morning. It was a great rule, really. It relaxed you guys before you entered the stressful lives as FBI agents. Marie worked mostly with missing persons, and you tend to get assigned to terrorism and surveillance. The past month you were teamed up with DEA. The Colombian cartels have wreaked havoc in California, and it was a blood bath. Your day consisted of lots of digging up files today. Reports, some interrogation (though thankfully you didn't need to do the interrogation yourself), and lots of calls. By the end of the day, you were looked absolutely exhausted. You sat behind your desk reading some files when the director appeared seemingly out of nowhere- or you were just not paying attention.

"Evening, Y/LN," he greeted. The director was a proper looking man in his mid fifties. Mr. Smith always wore a black suit, and his black and pepper hair was always slicked back with pomade and even his mustache was incredibly clean and trimmed. He never came to work with stubble, and he always seemed to smell like leather and aftershave.

"Evening, sir," you respond, closing the file and standing to shake his hand.

"This is urgent. We need to talk now." Smith led you to his office, letting you in first before closing the door. You took a seat and folded your hands on your lap, attempting to control your nervousness. He took his seat behind the large oak desk that was as neat as the way he looked.

"Let's cut to the chase, kid. You're getting transferred."

"I'm sorry? Did... Did I do something wrong?" Your mind always went straight to the worst case scenario- anxiety does that to you.

"No, christ, Y/N, absolutely not. You've been one of our best agents, but your intellect and skills have been requested elsewhere. We're taking a huge loss, but this is an opportunity of a lifetime." Smith paused and leaned back in his leather chair. He furrowed his thick brows and placed his hand on the side of his face. He was studying your body language- from what he could see, you were confused. You didn't show it physically, but your eyebrows made a small twitch. It was enough for him to know you were concerned.

"How would you like to go to Colombia?"

[draconica]

Oooo, for the writing prompt, a little 7+4+1? Or just one, I might be a little greedy 😖🤣

7: Engagement sex 4: Petnames 1: Spicing things up in the bedroom

I made it work, anon   ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I also headcanon Ellis can be a powerbottom so enjoy that

When Ellis returned home from the shop one warm evening, he was humming softly to himself. There was a sly smile to his features as he gently jostled the plastic bag he had brought home. There was no groceries or anything that mundane inside. No, there was something very special inside of this particular carrier.

“Niiick?” he crooned in the hope that his boyfriend was home, and in the mood. Now, he was home, but as Ellis turned the corner into the living room he was met with a sight he wasn't quite expecting to see.

Nick was stood in a black suit - a proper, swanky, three-piece number – and holding a red rose. A soft song was playing on their stereo system, and the lights were turned down low. He had definitely been stood here for some time, waiting for Ellis to return home, and Ellis dropped his smile briefly. The gambler was smooth as silk at the best of times, but this was unexpected.

“Welcome home, sweet peach,” Nick led with, making Ellis blush – that damn pet name of his. “You good?”

Ellis scratched the back of his neck. “Uh, I'm jus' fine,” he smiled, setting down his bag for now, and gesturing to Nick as he took a step towards him. “What's this for?”

In a second, Nick's smile slipped a little, arching his brow. “...You forgot, didn't you?” He rolled his eyes, but that smile soon came right back as he stepped forward also, closing the gap between them and offering him the rose. “July 12th? The day we got out of quarantine?” Nick chuckled, leaning in closer and making it more personal. “The day we moved in together, made the new place official?”

A million thoughts swarmed Ellis's head at that point, taking the rose and knowing he was absolutely overcome with blushes. “O-oh… damn, I guess I did forget,” he giggled, tilting his head a little as his boyfriend leered closer. Even now, Nick was still the most damn attractive man he'd ever met, let alone dated. “M'sorry, darlin', just had a lot on my mind, I guess?” he shrugged.

Nick seemed to understand, nodding once before pulling Ellis in for a kiss. “It's all good, sport. You can make it up to me later. But for now...” he turned and clicked a remote in love control, turning down the music a touch, before his hand returned to where it belonged – holding his lover's.

“Ellis,” he began, looking down at his thumb caressing the back of El's hand. “It's been a hell of a ride to get here, huh? Fighting for our lives every day in the apocalypse, a year of quarantine, and now three years of living together. Before the Green Flu, I was at my lowest point. I… well, wouldn't be alive if I hadn't met you. The zombies were a distraction, but you were a reason to live. You mean the Goddamn world to me, Fireball, and I want to spend every day by your side. So… I have one question for you.” Ellis watched on, mouth dropping, as his boyfriend got down on one knee and produced a velvet box containing a thick silver ring. In the center, there was set a dark blue gemstone. “Ellis, mi tesoro, will you marry me?”

Needless to say, Ellis had not been expecting this today, and that was obvious given the absolute astonishment on his face at that moment. It almost made Nick want to laugh, but he was slightly too nervous for that.

Thankfully, Ellis broke into his lop-sided, brilliant Southern smile. “You sly sumbitch,” he chuckled. “Hell yeah, I'll marry ya!”

The gambler got to his feet, immediately bringing his lover closer into his arms with an unbreakable smile. The ring was a perfect fit onto Ellis's fourth finger, something else that Nick had been worried about, but seeing how snugly it sat made the older man's heart swell. “I love you, Overalls.”

“Love you, too, darlin',” Ellis responded as he brought Nick's face in for a kiss... and then another... and then his arms were around Nick's neck. Any distance between them was suddenly gone.

It wasn't unusual for their kisses to get out of hand, certainly in their earlier days where it seemed like sex was on the table every day (not literally, except for a few times Ellis can remember where they'd gotten adventurous…). That's when Ellis remembered what was in the bag he had brought home. Well, now he had no choice but to surprise his lover with its contents.

By now, Nick's kisses had moved to the mechanic's neck, and Ellis couldn't suppress a shiver as he found his favorite spot just below his ear. Many a hickey had been placed there before, and it was near-enough a certainty that he'd be getting a new one tonight.

“Nick,” he whispered, shifting his hand through the hustler's hair and smiling when he caught sight of the shiny new engagement ring on his finger. “Take me to the bedroom.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Nick chuckled before tightening his grip around Ellis's waist and hoisting him up, causing the younger man to gasp against his lips. “You don't have to tell me twice.”

Of course, Nick couldn't possibly carry Ellis up a whole staircase and into said bedroom. He wasn't a young man anymore, after all. Not that Ellis minded – it actually gave him a chance to grab the bag he'd brought home. Nick gave him an odd look as he did so, but his young fiancé had simply smiled, told him not to worry about it with a pat to the cheek.

Once they both stepped into the bedroom together, Ellis set the bag down once more and brought Nick into more kisses, having missed them in the thirty seconds they had stopped.

“How long were ya plannin' that for?” asked Ellis curiously as he slipped the black tie from Nick's neck, smiling at him.

Nick shrugged a little. “Few months,” he admitted. “Knew I wanted to marry you someday, seemed like the anniversary of getting out of that Goddamn pandemic was a good time.”

Ellis was now working on those pesky shirt buttons, granting him access to that chest hair he loved so much on Nick. “Romantic as usual,” he mused. “Gotta be honest… I was plannin' a lil' somethin' for us tonight, too. Nothin' big like askin' ya to marry me, so kinda puts my gesture in the shade.”

“Don't be modest, sweet peach,” Nick chuckled, allowing Ellis to remove his suit jacket and leave it on the floor – something he usually gets very picky about.

“Well...” Ellis slipped Nick's belt from his pants, and was pleased at the choice his lover had made – a black leather strap. Yes, this'll do nicely. “I know you like bein' in control 'n all, but I wanna show ya how we ride in the South.”

That piqued the gambler's interest, not in the least because Ellis was looping the belt around his hand, pulling it taught for Nick to see, and something about the sight was enough to set his erection at full mast.

“Ace...” he paused, needing to wet his lips when he found his mouth suddenly dry. “Do I get a say in this?”

“You certainly get to pick the safe word,” mused the mechanic, shifting his weight slightly on his hips as he played with the leather strap some more.

Nick must've been mad, or at least deeply in love, as he decided to shift control over to his little fiancé for the night. “All right,” he conceded, stepping out of his pants which, with lack of support, had pooled onto the floor. “Where do you want me, sugar?”

The mechanic's grin spread further up his cheeks. He led Nick over to their king-sized bed and sat him down. “Now, you go ahead and make yourself comfortable, mister gamblin' man, and I'll go slip outta these here greasy clothes.” With a little canter to his steps, he grabbed the bag once more and headed to their en-suite bathroom, shooting a look over his shoulder. “Recommend losing those there briefs, too. Won't be needin' them at the rodeo.” And with that, he disappeared into the next room, door shutting slowly behind him.

Nick had always been good at following instructions, and Ellis's were about as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face. So, as he stripped himself down completely and got comfortable, he took the time while Ellis was gone to think about some of the more memorable trysts in their relationship.

There was the very first time which had been during the apocalypse. It had been rough and hurried, considering they had just escaped death by the skin of their teeth, and it was more a carnal desire of the most basic of human instincts. Ellis had almost alerted a horde with how loud he'd been.

There was another time, during quarantine, where love had for the first time been entered into the equation. Namely, the first time they had said 'I love you' to each other. Nick had topped then, too. And he wasn't a picky partner by any means – after all, Ellis was young and full of testosterone, and sometimes he needed to fuck just as much as anyone else. Nick had come to enjoy bottoming, absolutely, but he was more or less the one in charge on most nights. Ellis never complained; quite the opposite, in fact. Nick was still lost in thought when suddenly the bathroom door opened at last, revealing Ellis in his attire for the evening: Nothing but a cowboy hat (and one engagement ring).

“Howdy,” he drawled as he leant against the door frame, still playing with Nick's belt in his hands. “Heard there was a no-good city slicker that I needed to take good care of. Assumin' that's you, handsome?”

Nick couldn't' help but smirk up at him, raising an eyebrow. Ellis was unbelievably adorable, especially whenever he was making effort to please him. That included… this. “Goddamn it, Ace,” he shook his head. “Didn't think this was how my night was gonna go.”

Ellis shot him an amused look, then slipped right back into character. “I'm the best darn rodeo rider this side'a Georgia,” he boasted, sauntering closer to the bed. “Ain't no wild stallion I can't tame. So, reck'n you'll be my best ride yet.” The mechanic reached into the bedside drawer to fetch the lube, and took a moment to stand beside the bed, looking over his naked lover. “Safe word?” he asked.

Nick nodded up at him. “Witch.”

Ellis frowned. “Damn, Nick, really? All the words in the entire American language and you had to pick one that reminds me of the time you almost got yourself killed?”

“You almost got me killed,” retorted the hustler, squinting at him. “You're the one who spooked the bitch.” But he shook his head, letting a smile return to his red face. “Fine. Safe word is 'wedding'.”

With a roll of his eyes, Ellis blushed a little as he set the lube down on the table for now. “Good 'nough for me.” Slipping back into character once more, the Southerner crawled his way onto the bed and straddled his lover, halfway up his chest, at one point his erection bobbing near Nick's face. The gambler just watched on with hungry eyes. “Now then… one thing I know about tamin' the wilder beasts is that they need to be trained, sometimes with force.” Ellis looped the leather belt around Nick's neck gently, watching the older's green eyes for any signs of discomfort or fear. There was nothing but trust, and a lot of hunger.

Ellis cinched the belt, not tightly, but enough for Nick to feel the presence of his around his throat. With a twist of his hand, Ellis curled the leather around his wrist and tested the length. There was plenty to work with, and he grinned. “Damn, look at'chu, city boy.” Ellis backed up his hips, grinding himself backwards onto Nick's cock, and watching in triumph as Nick's eyelids fluttered slightly. “I think I'm gonna really enjoy ridin' you.”

The helpless gambler chuckled as he rested his hands on Ellis's thighs, watching those hips move back and forth and craning his neck back a little. A moan almost made it's way out of his mouth, but not quite. Ellis had to try harder. “You're getting more into the kinky sex, Overalls,” he smiled, throwing in a wink. “I'll take credit for that.”

With a tilt of his head, Ellis's hand pulled back, tightening the belt a little like pulling on the leash of a disobedient dog. Nick gasped beneath him, moaning in the afterthought, which made the cowboy grin. “You speak outta turn like that again and you'll be in the doghouse,” he threatened. Reaching over to the nightstand, he took the open tube of lubricant and squirted the thick liquid onto two fingers. The look in his baby blue eyes was so very kinky, and Nick could feel his cock give a twitch in appreciation as he pictured what Ellis was about to do with those fingers.

Picking up the belt once more with his clean hand, those fingers then went behind Ellis, slipped between his cheeks and found his pucker. The younger man was a dab hand at prepping himself, and knew his own body inside and out. While he worked his magic, he moaned aloud and reintroduced his bucking hips back into the mix. The sight was amazingly erotic, and Nick couldn't resist reaching over to play with Ellis's neglected dick. Ellis, for the most part, seemed to allow it, even bucking up again into the gambler's grasp.

“You're thinkin' about it now, aren't ya, city boy?” Ellis chuckled with an open-mouthed grin. “Thinkin' about me ridin' ya real good, getting' ya all hot 'n bothered...” He leant in slightly, pulling once more on Nick's restraint until the man was a little closer. “Thinkin' about how fuckin' good I'm gonna feel around your cock once I'm wet n' ready?”

That accent was so thick, deep with lust, and it was driving Nick crazy. The gambler gave a groan, just as the belt loosened again and allowed him is breath back. His head fell back to the pillow, already seeing a black fuzz around his vision. “God… sweet peach…”

“Yes, my darlin'?” Ellis crooned, by now with three fingers knuckle deep inside of himself.

“Ple…” Nick panted as he closed his eyes. “Please.”

That was all Ellis needed to hear. With another lop-sided smile, the mechanic shifted until he was kneeling and scooted back a little on Nick's body. He kept a keen eye on his fiancé's face, even as he reached behind, took Nick's cock in hand, and slipped himself down onto it like he'd done it a hundred times before.

The card shark grunted and turned his head a little, and Ellis could hear a shift behind him as Nick moved his legs. His feet was planting themselves onto the mattress and knees bending up, in order to provide him with the leverage he needed. Ellis leant back, slipping down further onto Nick's cock while at the same time resting against Nick's thighs like a back rest. He was grateful for that.

“How about that?” Ellis nearly sang as he shifted on Nicolas's lap. “You're bein' a good boy after all.”

Nick said nothing, just looked up at his Southern lover with a smile on his face, throwing in a wink for good measure. Ellis chuckled and wrapped the belt once more around his wrist for another harsh tug, at the same time, lifting his hips and slamming back down in a harsh bounce. The leather crackled in his grip, and Nick drew another breath. His face was getting redder. “El,” he managed, grinding out the noise, and Ellis was careful to make sure he had enough air to speak, should his next breath utter the safe word.

“Giddy up,” purred the cowboy, reaching up to hold his hat before beginning his ride. Putting all his power to his thighs, up and down Ellis's hips went as he bounced away. The sweetest moans left his throat – couldn't rightly help it, as Nick had always been the best lay of his life.

Nick's hands found their way to Ellis's hips, gripping him there and guiding him on and off his dick. In no time at all, Ellis was fully into the sex, letting go of his hat to reach back and steady himself on Nick's knee as he continued to ride him hard.

“Fuck yeah,” Nick murmured to himself as he gazed up at the scene Ellis was blessing him with. He groaned soon afterwards, craning his neck, and smiled up at his lover. “The belt… please… fuck...”

Ellis grinned and slowed his thrusts down a little in order to tug the belt once more, harsher and tighter than previously. Nick's knuckles went white around Ellis's hips.

“Look at ya… enjoyin' yourself so much,” Ellis praised and drove his hips down once more, grinding back on Nick's length. “C'mon, city boy, you know you wanna come inside'a me...”

Nick could hear the blood rushing around his head, fell the pleasure begin to whirlpool around his cock, and did the only thing he knew he could do. He moved a hand to Ellis's dancing erection and gave him a tight sleeve to fuck into, watching with watering eyes. The Southerner groaned and dropped the leather strap in favor of bracing both hands on Nick's legs, rocking himself like crazy. The gambler drew a gasp of air, Ellis threw his head back, and then it all went white.

“NICK!” Ellis broke character at the last minute to shout his fiancé's name in orgasm. He spilled semen all up Nick's chest and some managed to hit his chin. The sight was erotic enough to send the older man tumbling off the precipice himself, filling Ellis up until he was overflowing. Ellis moaned and lifted himself off for the last time, feeling warm liquid seep down the insides of his thighs.

With a sigh, Ellis leant forward and braced his hands on Nick's shoulders to prevent himself from falling atop him. The cowboy hat fell from his head and onto the floor beside the blunt end of the belt. The mechanic looked up at last, seeing Nick with his eyes closed and drawing in large breaths. He blushed as he reached up to carefully removed the leather from his neck, letting it clatter to the carpet.

“Darlin'?” Ellis whispered as he lifted himself off of Nick, in the process grabbing some tissues in order to clear them both up. “Nick.”

Nick opened his eyes at last, letting them fall onto his cute young lover as he grinned. “Even after all these years...” He reached out to cup El's cheek, rubbing his thumb there. “...you still surprise me, Overalls.”

Once the necessary clean-up had been finished, Ellis crawled back onto the bed and cuddled right up to his gambler, running his hand through his fine chest hair. “Glad you enjoyed the show, Nick.” He looked down, admired the ring still snugly on his finger. “Yeah, not quite how you pictured your night goin', huh?”

“No, sir,” agreed Nick and moved his hand up to lace their fingers together. “But if this is how the rest of my life is gonna go, I think I'm okay with that.”

With a short laugh, Ellis reached up to kiss him, rubbing his thumb along Nick's jaw. “Love you, city boy.”

[concussed-to-pieces]

To Tell You The Truth Part Ten

Fandom: Prospect [2018]

Pairing: Ezra/Prospector!Reader

Rating: Holy shit M.

AN: Thank you so much for reading and enjoying, my friends! Thank you for your kind support of my endeavors. I hope that this story has managed to bring you some peace, or at the very least function as an interesting distraction from the issues we currently slog through like so much Bakhroma Green dust. Stay safe out there, be well and be kind. Now here we are at the end of our tale! I've had a lot of fun writing this, and I'm so glad that you liked it enough to stick around. Enjoy!

Tag List: @huliabitch​ @wrestlingfae​ @renegademustelid​ @zombiexbody​ @sporadic-fics​ @rzrcrst​ @lackofhonor​ @the-feckless-wonder​ @arrowswithwifi​ @fioccodineveautunnale​ @absurdthirst​ @cryptkeepersoul​ @fleetwoodmactshirt​ @88dragon06​ @roxypeanut​ @walkerchick007​ @peggers-n-beggers​ @robbinholland​ @chrisbostonevans​ @cinewhore @sarcasmisakindofmagic​ @phenomenaaa @evidenceofzoe​ @sinnamon-bunn​

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

Part Nine

[!TRIGGER WARNING!: This installment discusses children/pregnancy/'family-planning'. Stay safe!]

You slipped from the bed, barely managing to untangle yourself from his embrace without waking him. Ezra seemed less man and more octopus when he slept. Wrapping your shirt around you as more of an afterthought than anything else, you crept out of his room and returned to your own. 

Through the tiny window in your bathroom you could see thick snowflakes falling, and you dimly heard the low rumble of the street plows. As you filled your tub, you caught sight of yourself in the mirror above the sink.

And you smiled.

Kevva, you were a mess! Your hair was mussed, your chest and collarbone littered with marks from Ezra's tender ministrations. You ran your fingers over your skin, laughing quietly. It had been so long, you'd almost forgotten what it felt like to enjoy sex. Almost forgotten how sticky it made you feel afterwards too, hence your bath.

Your body tingled and ached in the best ways, like you had just gotten done with a satisfying workout. In a way, you supposed you had. 

Once the tub had filled, you carefully sank into it with a sigh of contentment. The warmth of the water felt heavenly, soothing the admittedly-tender skin of your inner thighs. You knew you ought to get started washing up, but first you dipped a little lower in the water and blew a few bubbles. Perfect.

You were midway through scrubbing yourself down when you heard Ezra's voice, the man sounding slightly panicked as he called your name. "I'm in my bathroom!" You replied. 

Footsteps bolted up the hall and the former prospector all but lunged into your room, his hair even more of a mess than usual and his eyes wild. "Oh. Oh. Forgive me for invadin' your boudoir, gentle soul." He apologized after he spotted you through the open bathroom door, averting his eyes. "I may have had a bit of a terror, and when I awoke to find you missing, I...I'm out of sorts, is all." He rambled, his voice still gravelly with sleep. "Did you see that it has finally begun to snow?"

"I did! I'm surprised we can hear the plows all the way up here." You answered cautiously. He was working his jaw again. "I'm sorry I left, I just forgot how grungy I can get when...well uh, you know. During." 

Ezra waved off your apology, seeming to have calmed down. "No need for contrition, gentle soul. It was my mind playing cruel pranks on me. I'll leave you to your bath, and then rest." 

"Hey, wait." You implored as he turned to leave. "Go get showered and then come sleep in here with me instead? My sheets are clean. We probably did a number on yours." Ezra tilted his head, dark eyes studying you thoughtfully. "What?" You asked after a moment, a little disconcerted.

"You are so incredibly beautiful." He murmured simply, making you flush. "I merely wanted to drink it in. You have no equal even in my vast vocabulary, no match in my lexicon. And so I settle on the trite, the mundane, beautiful." He shook his head. "A tragedy, really, but should I resort to something so exotic as pulchritudinous every time I feel amorous, I fear you may want to strike me out of exasperation." 

"Oh no no, that one is for special occasions. Weddings and funerals only." You joked. He laughed, his pensive expression finally easing. "Now go, I'm going to get ready for bed. Meet me back here in ten."

Ezra saluted lazily, still chuckling.

…

"You recall what I mentioned earlier, gentle soul?" He asked softly once the two of you were safely ensconced in the warm cloud of your comforter. "About how this all seems like a dream?" You nodded against his chest, feeling the deep sigh he let out. "I am never the final stop on the proverbial slingback, you see. There is always a brighter horizon, a more affluent lover, another mountain to scale." He explained, sounding resigned.

"Not for me, there isn't." You said, raising your head so you could look at him. "I want to be here with you. As long as I can have you."

"You are hardly the first to offer up such a platitude." Ezra murmured, his nonchalance once again making your heart sink. "So I will be with you, and hold you, and love you until you are weary of me, and then…" he hesitated, "and then I will release you without debate, for you are not mine to cling to. You are your own woman, gentle soul, for all that it wounds me to say it."

"Excuse me?" You propped yourself up on your elbow. His eyes were firmly locked on the ceiling overhead, studiously avoiding your gaze. "Ezra, what the hell?"

His jaw worked and you saw him swallow hard. "I did not mean to cause you grief, gentle soul. I am not particularly skilled at pillow talk."

"Hey, no, look at me. Please?" You requested softly. Ezra blinked up at the ceiling. "Please, Ezra. Don't disappear on me just yet."

"I am not the master of my own emotions currently. I must insist we postpone this discus-"

"Ezra." You huffed, cupping his face with your hands. He struggled to dodge your eyes, his own filling with tears the longer he attempted. "Oh...no, no, don't cry Ezra. Talk to me." 

"Damn it, gentle soul, you have me all in a twist about this!" He cried in exasperation. "It is inevitable, invariable, inescapable, why does it abrade me so harshly this time?"

"How many other people have you written poetry for?" You inquired bluntly.

"Well...I mean, that is-"

"How many other people have you asked to share your living space?"

"Gentle soul, I don't-"

"How many people have you been patient with?"

"No one, damn it!" Ezra roared finally, "you're it! Are you satisfied now, now that you've dragged a dull, tepid answer out of me?! Are you thoroughly entertained by my piteous bawling, gentle soul?" His chest heaved with emotion and he rubbed roughly at his eyes. "I am not patient. Not by nature, not by habit or happenstance. I am not particularly generous, kind or honest, not without promise of recompense." He snapped, "I do not presume to be a good man, gentle soul. I've made this abundantly clear."

"So why would you be upset over me?" You pressed, not dissuaded in the slightest by his bluster, "why would you be good to me if it's so out of character for you?"

"Because you are all of those things, and I crave you more than any reward in this universe. Kevva above, your generous spirit has me reeling, your kind words leave me breathless, your honest love slaughters my deep-seated contempt for such juvenile emotions. Yet I cannot decipher whether I merely play at the better man, or if I have indeed metamorphosed due to you. Until I stumbled across you in the Green, I did not even believe someone like you existed." His eyes softened, going glassy once more. "Most of the time I still don't."

"But I do exist." You insisted. "I'm here, and I'm not leaving."

"Do not promise me such things." Ezra muttered, kissing your knuckles. "My morose poetry will be a poor replacement for the warmth of your touch when you do depart."

"I get the feeling that you like wallowing even more than you like me. You miserable-" You kissed him. "-broody-" Kiss. "-dour man." Bumping your forehead against his own, you continued, "I'm not leaving. The last thing I want to do is justify this mopery you're indulging in. What happened to the guy who dragged me halfway across the Pug for junk food?"

"I love you so much." Ezra whispered, his hands shakily carding through your hair. "I have warded off many a potential partner simply by the virtue of my verbose nature, but you have stayed throughout. While the thought of you leaving terrifies me, the thought of," he paused, grimacing, "the thought of becomin' something...becoming a man like him steals the very breath from my lungs. I shall not tear you from the sky, gentle soul. I will not clip your lovely wings."

You bit your lip. "I know you won't. That's why I'm still here." You assured him softly. "I'm yours for as long as you want me."

"Martyr's malfeasance, you cannot promise me eternity." Ezra protested. "I haven't even asked you yet, not officially, and we must think of the paperwork-"

"Asked me what?"

"Ah." Ezra cleared his throat, his face pinking up in a highly-endearing manner. "Well, that is to say...I had...I may have indulged in a bit of domestic daydreaming. Strictly speculative, you understand." He hemmed and hawed, wringing his hands nervously. "I am...I'm not a young man, gentle soul, I am approaching my mid-forties. My life has not been a particularly kind one, and I...my body is...worn." He stammered, "I-I bear the bold stamp of blue-collar occupation, as it were." 

You raised an eyebrow, confused at his discomfort. "Ezra, if you have something to say..."

"What do you want out of life, gentle soul?" Ezra asked suddenly. 

"Me? Uh..." You sat back on your haunches, propping your chin up with your hand as you thought. "I'd like to move somewhere a little quieter, eventually. More countryside. Somewhere that the flora won't kill me, of course, but you know." You shrugged, tapping at his ribs meditatively. "I liked working as an illustrator, though that may have more to do with the pleasant company than the actual work." You winked and he smiled weakly up at you, his own fingers drumming lightly on your knees. "I want a dog, and a nice house. Small one, with good lighting. Mostly though, I want to wake up next to you in the mornings. I want to draw you more."

You weren't sure if you would ever get used to how his gratitude struck you in your chest. It made his whole expression light up, blond patch bright like his own personal sunspot. For a man who was so brazenly cocksure, Ezra didn't seem to believe he was worth overmuch in anyone's eyes. 

"You have not yet been afforded the opportunity to grow weary of me, it appears," He remarked, "though we have endured each other's company for six stands and counting."

"Over half a year." You could barely believe it yourself. "So, I've told you what I'd like. And what would you ask of life, mister big shot author man?" You teased. 

Ezra's smile faded. "I would ask many things of life, though I have only one thing to ask of you." He rasped. "Accompany me in it." His hands folded over your own on his chest and you could feel him shaking. "I will not request you to stay any longer than you wish to, but I beg of you to...to be with me. For a moment, a stand...h-however long you can endure waking up beside me." He soldiered on admirably through his voice breaking, "I do not offer much, as you are aware. But I would like to believe that I could make you happy, at least for a time."

"Ezra, are you-" you swallowed hard. "Are you asking what I think you're asking?"

"I suppose that would depend on whether you are inclined to believe that I am asking you to...in less blatant terms, engage with myself in somethin' that may eventually, potentially, smack of the matrimonial persuasion." He was watching you closely, fragile hope shining through the serious, furrowed frown on his face. 

"You're serious." You stated weakly. He nodded once, a singular jerk of his head. "You...you're sure?"

"Abysmally certain." Ezra replied gruffly. "And I do not require an answer. Not now, not ever if you do not wish to reply, I merely-" 

Your mouth on his own put a stop to his amendments, and you felt his lips twitch into a smile when you breathed, "yes."

"Well!" He exclaimed gladly, sitting up and wrapping his arms around you. "I must say this--this particular outcome, while exceedingly welcome, was not anticipated!" 

"You've got to be kidding me." You groaned, shoving your hands into his hair to tug his face away from your own. "I'm gonna' do my level best to be patient with you, but fuck's sake Ezra." He grinned puckishly at you, his expression promising mischief. "I'll work on me if you work on you, okay? A little faith in yourself can go a long way, believe me." You lectured him sternly. 

"To think that you would be able to say such a thing to me." He commented dryly, making you snicker. "How the bastards have fallen, and now the gentle rule the earth as docile kings." Large hands combed carefully through your hair and he tilted your head for another kiss. "A dog, hmm?" You nodded wildly, making him chuckle into your mouth when your nose bumped his own. "I'll see what I can do, gentle soul."

…Three Years Later...

"Ezra!" You called, brow furrowing in confusion when there was no reply. "Ezra? Anglio? It's time for lunch!" You wiped your hands off on the flour sack towel that you had wound through your belt loop, trying to straighten your shirt out as an afterthought. "Ezra!" You called again, a little more concerned now as you moved from the kitchen to the screened-in porch, peering out through the jalousie window slats to survey the front yard. 

Turk, your massive Himalayan tomcat, wrapped himself around your ankles with a throaty, inquisitive burble. 

No sign of the dynamic duo. You sighed, petting Turk and resigning yourself to hunting them down after finishing your sixth well-meaning attempt at making bread. Maybe you were being too optimistic, expecting the dough to cooperate in this heat. 

The first loaf actually looked good, though! That had bolstered your confidence, which had in turn dug you into a glutinous hole. Any variation you tried on the original successful recipe resulted in nothing but failure. At least you had an overabundance of aggressively-crispy croutons and bread crumbs now? 

Oh well, sixth time's the charm. So much for my attempt at a subtle pun. 

After placing the tray in the oven, you headed outside to the front steps. Turk sauntered out alongside you, yawning and then sprawling on the steps. "Boys!" You shouted, smiling in relief when you heard a distant reply from the forest. "Lunch time!"

There was a crash and Anglio emerged from the trees, the small mutt baying excitedly to indicate that he was being pursued. You wondered (not for the first time) if Mr. Anglio knew about Dog Anglio. Ezra strode along behind the pup, laughing when the dog play-bowed and barked at him. "You wretched beast, leadin' me o’er hill and dale like a damn huntin' thoroughbred!" He growled good-naturedly, rubbing the dog's proffered belly. 

You smiled a little mistily at the scene, your heart skipping in your chest. 

Escaping the city had been the best choice that you and Ezra had made in your life together thus far. The house you had found, while small, sat on a sprawling, untamed estate that you had fallen in love with instantly. 

Anglio and Turk (formerly known as Foxy and Turducken) were acquired soon after from the shelter of the 'nearby' supply depot. You hadn't actually been looking for a cat, but the stately feline would not take no for an answer. Plus, Ezra had looked so torn as he buried his face in the stoic animal's side right before he had attempted to return him to his cage.

"You want a cat too? It's not like we can't take care of it." You had reasoned with a shrug, already fawning over the little orangey-brown mutt in your arms. Ezra had lit up, nodding firmly.

The cozy, domestic solitude stirred creativity in yourself and the man you shared your life with, culminating in a small collection of illustrated short stories that had, once again, done surprisingly well on the market. Ezra said he wanted to try writing children's books next, laughing when he announced it as if he was joking. His offhand remark had rekindled something in your belly: the warm, soft embers of a bonfire you had assumed long extinguished and buried. Children’s books...

The memories faded as Ezra traipsed up the steps, the last vestiges of spring mud coating his boots. "Ah, my beloved co-conspirator!" He announced dramatically, spreading his arms wide. "How I have missed you whilst engaging in a daring foray into the untamed wilderness!"

"Yes yes, Robinson Crusoe, we're so blessed by your survival skills and ability to create fire." You deadpanned, laughing when he caught you in his grasp and attempted to smother you with kisses. "Oh no, help me Anglio!" You cried in feigned distress, the dog prancing around your legs and yipping in reply. Turk meowed sleepily at all the commotion, putting his head back down after a moment.

"Such harsh barbs from my doting wife!" Ezra teased, rubbing his forehead against your own. "Have you been baking again, gentle soul?" He asked, sweeping a dusting of flour off of your cheek. 

You nodded, your heart hammering in your chest as you grabbed his hand and hauled him inside the porch, into the kitchen. "I h-have buns in the oven!" You choked out in a rush when he paused to kick off his boots by the door, unable to wait another second. 

"Wonderful! I am ravenous and…" Ezra trailed off as he straightened up and obviously caught sight of the expression on your face. You could only assume you looked a mixture of terrified and hopeful. It was certainly how you felt, at any rate. His brow furrowed suspiciously. "Wait."

"Well, uh, that is, there's multiple buns in the actual oven, b-but according to the doctor-" You held your hands out, the stance a strange echo of when he had been across from you in the pod all those years ago. "The doctor says j-just one. Healthy! One healthy, um, bun. In my oven." You squeaked. 

Ezra stared at you like he had never seen you before. He finally rasped, "how long?"

"How long what? How long have I known?" He nodded mutely. "Late last night. I had them scan during my routine checkup. I...I wanted to be sure." Your voice petered out as you spoke until you were essentially whispering. Uncertainty gripped your body; was he upset about this? Had you misread the situation? Oh Kevva, what if he didn’t want you now?

Ezra reached for one of the kitchen chairs, clumsily sinking into it. He didn't speak, he just sat there with his head in his hands.

You fidgeted with your towel, tears threatening to spill over as the silence lengthened. "Ezra, is...is this not okay?" You queried softly. 

His shoulders jerked when the timer for the oven went off, but other than that he gave no sign that he had heard anything. You turned your back to him and slipped on your oven mitts, moving almost mechanically to rescue the buns before they too were suited for nothing but croutons. You then shut off the oven and opened the drawer beside the sink, digging blindly for the spatula--

Ezra caught you up around the waist, crushing you to his chest so tightly it felt like all the breath left your body. "A baby!" He boomed, half-laughing as he spoke. "I am exuberant, over the fucking moon! How long do we have, when will they arrive?! I cannot believe this, I just--gentle soul, the serendipity that you have blessed my life with!" He exclaimed warmly, cupping your face and kissing you breathless.

"I take it you’re open to the idea, then?" You gasped out, feeling his thumbs wiping away the tears that had managed to escape. 

"Gentle soul, I...you are a miracle incarnate." Ezra's voice had taken on a tone of heated awe. "Your generous body, accepting my love in such a wondrous new way. I am truly a lucky man. A...I love you so very much." He murmured, his next hungry kiss chasing away all your lingering trepidation. "So, so very much, so much...an insurmountable amount." His hands grasped at your belt loops, tugging your hips in to slot against his own. "To think that when I laid with you during our anniversary, it would bear such precious fruit." He muttered. You felt his cock stirring through his jeans.

"E-Ezra, lunch…" you protested weakly. You still had your oven mitts on, your hands curled into loose fists resting on his chest.

"I will eat it later." He promised, his dark eyes wholly sincere even as his fingers worked at the buttons of your light blouse. "Once I have properly displayed the depth of my...appreciation." 

...

"You alone coax me into such promiscuity, I hope you are aware." Ezra grunted, burying his face in your hair. 

You whimpered down into the bedspread, the thumb that insistently dragged over your clit making your eyes roll back in your head. The blankets were still crisp and fresh from being hung out on the line, the sweet scent of summer sunlight and Ezra dominating your senses.

"You alone, and the notion that you are heavy with our child does not dull the edge in the slightest." He continued breathlessly from his position overhead, grinding his cock into you as deep as it could go and refusing to withdraw. "You feel incredible around me, gentle soul, fucking exquisite." 

His hips crushed to your rear and you rutted your body up onto your hands and knees, meeting him with the soft slap of heated, sweat-drenched skin. "Ezra, please-" you begged, making him hum. "Please, I want to come, please…" 

"Gentle soul, gentle soul," He gasped, "if you keep rocking back against me in that manner, I'll have no recourse but to give you what you ask for." The former prospector seized your arms, dragging you fully upright on your knees. He quickly released you, his wandering hands returning after a moment to rest on your stomach. "Your sensuous form stirs such lascivious thoughts in me." He breathed in your ear, smiling against your neck when you keened out. 

"Love you-" you gasped, and Ezra's fingers gripped your hips tightly. 

"I know you do." He assured, his words gone soft enough to ache, burrow their way into your ribcage and wrap around your heart. "Now come for me." He held himself still and you pushed yourself back against his cock, the methodical sway of your hips finally beckoning you over your edge. You cried out and Ezra caged in your throat with large fingers, the man feeling the vibrations of your enthusiastic climax with a low moan of his own. "How deliciously improbable," his voice grated, "that your sweet little cunt could manage to grip me even tighter than before-!"

"Fill me up, Ezra, come in me, come in me-" you pleaded, sagging back against him. The brilliant Mallen streak flickered into your field of view as the man behind you dropped his forehead onto your shoulder, his hips rolling and bucking furiously. You could feel him panting, hot breath washing over your back as your shaking fingers twined greedily into his hair. 

"What my Eve demands, what--what my gentle soul entreats, I have no choice but to oblige." He rasped out. "I am shattered, rendered insensate by the radiant splendor of this copulation in our private Eden." He mouthed shakily over your shoulder, finally biting down with a grunt as he came hard. You crooned quietly to him while he spent himself inside you and he groaned in reply, making you laugh. "You truly are a delight to behold, gentle soul." He sighed hoarsely, wrapping his arms around your midsection and cradling you close to his trembling body.

You dragged your fingers through his hair, a dopey smile rising on your face when his stomach loudly reiterated the fact that he had ignored lunch in favor of other, far more distracting activities. Ezra grimaced awkwardly. "Work up an appetite?" You teased, kissing the end of his nose and then the exaggerated scrunch of his brows.

"I may have gotten...sidetracked." He admitted with a self-conscious chuckle. "You can hardly judge me for that particular shortcoming, gentle soul." His warm palm splayed possessively on your stomach and he hummed low in his throat, the sound obviously one of contentment. "Our child."

"Ours." You echoed in agreement. 

"I hope that I...no, I left such trepidation behind long ago. I am a better man. For you, for us. And now, for them." Ezra said firmly, placing a kiss on your cheek. "Now, show me the result of your baking. I admit freely to bias, of course; I welcome any and all culinary attempts with open arms, as though they were gifts from the illustrious and powerful Waldorf-Astoria itself."

You squinted. "The what? Listen, I'm used to you being vaguely comprehensible at best, but even I have no idea what the words that just came out of your mouth were."

His reply was simply unrestrained, delighted laughter, his nose pressing into your cheek while he showered your face with even more playful kisses.

In my dreams you come to me, as timid and inexorable as the dawn...in my sleepless hours you find me, tremulous and waning like the starlight. For I am a lost man who wanders bright and dark, all for the fleeting glimpse of you...all for the touch of your mouth on mine. 

Bonus baby headcanon!

[witchxng]

I’ve had a bunch of new followers lately, so I wanted to do a get to know the blogger tag!

1. What have you eaten today?

I had eggs and fruit for breakfast, and I’m making a salad for lunch rn

2. Who was your last kiss with? Was it pleasant?

It was with my ex, and it was delightful, but thinking about it makes me sad

3. What color shoes did you last wear?

Black, big surprise there

4. Who has made you laugh the hardest in the last week?

My best friend, Kaelyn!

5. What is your favorite scent?

Pine needles

6. What is your favorite season? Why?

Autumn, it is so beautiful

7. Can you do a handstand or cartwheel?

Neither, nope!

8. What color are your nails?

They are currently baby blue

9. If you had to get a tattoo on your face to save your life, what would it be?

I would get a crescent moon, I kind of want that anyway ha

10. What is something you find romantic?

Long walks at dusk

11. Are you happy?

I think so

12. Is there anything in particular making you happy or sad?

Adding to my crystal collection always makes me extra happy!

13. Dogs or Cats?

Cats!!!

15. Which do you prefer:a museum, a night club, the forest or a library?

The forest, I identify as a green witch!

15. What is your style?

Witchy :)

16. If you could be doing anything you like right now, what would it be?

I would be in a cottage in the woods, working on an altar

17. Are you in a relationship or single?

Single

18. What makes you attracted to the person you like right now?

He’s nice to me at work, but that’s about it. Super high standards, ha.

19. If you could replace your partner/best friend with a celebrity of your choice, would you? Who with?

Hell no

20. Are you holding on to something you need to let go of? If so then what? 

I’m holding on to a lot of resentment and regret, I hope I can let it go soon

21. How did you celebrate last Halloween?

Did some tarot readings and handed out candy to the kids!

22. Have you recently made any big decisions? 

Not really, life has been pretty mundane

23. Were you ever in a school play?

No, I was always too shy in school

24. What movie would you use to describe your life?

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

25. Is there something you have dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

I’ve dreamed of owning my own flower shop, but you know, money

26. Complete this sentence, “I wish I had someone with whom I could share…”

I wish I had someone with whom I could share my passions with

27. What are two things that irritate you about the same sex?

Girls can be very catty, and superficial

28. What are two things that irritate you about the opposite sex?

Boys can be very rude, and aggressive

29. What is the best thing that has happened to you this week?

My aunt found out she is pregnant!

30. What is something that makes you sad when you think about it?

Oh, there are a lot of things.  Thinking about how I can barely afford rent is currently making me sad.

31. How long was your longest relationship?

A year and a half

32. Have you ever been in love?

Yes, I miss it

33. Are you currently in love?

I don’t think so

34. Why did your last relationship end?

A lot of reasons. He was mean to me, he found someone new, I didn’t make him happy.  The list goes on.  It was a mess.

35. What jewelry are you wearing right now, and where did you get it?

I’m wearing an amethyst pendant that I got off of etsy, and a couple rings I’ve gotten from different craft fairs!

36. When was the last time you cried and why?

Yesterday, because of Jacob ha

37. Name someone pretty.

I think Emma Watson is so pretty

38. What did you receive last Valentines Day?

Sunflowers and a very sweet note

39. Do you get jealous easily?

Unfortunately, yes

40. Have you ever been cheated on?

Again, unfortunately, yes 41. Do you trust your partner/best friend?

I don’t currently have a partner, but I trust my best friend with my life

42. Ever had detention?

I did fairly often in high school, I was a little shit

43. Would you rather live in the countryside or the city?

COUNTRYSIDE

44. What do people call you? 

Hannah, Han, Anna, Hannah Banana, Han Solo

45. What was the last book you read? 

The Book Thief! It was so good!

46. How big of a nerd/dork are you? 

The biggest nerd

47. What kind of music do you listen to?

I like indie/acoustic music!!!

48. How tall are you?

5′3″, I’m a shrimp ha

49. Do you like kids?

I like babies, but kids stress me out

50. Favorite fruits?

All of the above, ha. My top favorite though is pineapple.

51. Do you wear jeans or sweats more?

Black jeans :)

52. What’s your earliest memory?

Running around my grandma’s yard during the spring

53. Ever had a poem or song written about you or to you?

I wish! That would so romantic

54. Do you prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it?

Behind it, I am so shy

55. Do you have a collection of anything? 

I have too many collections!  Crystals, tarot cards, shells, postcards, and pressed flowers are my biggest collections

56. Do you save money or spend it? 

I try to save when I can, but I have so many expenses to keep up with

57. What would your dream house be like?

Tiny cottage in the woods, covered in ivy with a wildflower garden (I’m a basic witch, I know)

58. What top 5 things make you the angriest?

Animal abusers, people who litter, bigots, people with no respect, out of touch wealthy people

59. What top 5 things always brings a smile to your face? Witchcraft :), my best friend, cats, rainstorms, good movies

60. You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late one more time you get fired. What do you do?

Save the dog, every time

61. 72: You are at the doctor’s office and she has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. a) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? b) What do you do with your remaining days? c) Would you be afraid?

I would tell only those closest to me, I would spend my remaining days do whatever I really wanted to do that day, and I wouldn’t be afraid at all.

62. Give me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word; heart.

December 7th

63. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?

I’m going to Salem!!!

64. Do you like the beach?

I do!

65. Ever sleep on the couch or a bed with someone special?

I used to all of the time.  I miss it, I hate sleeping alone.

66. Do you have a middle name? If so what is it!

It is Amelia!

67. Do you talk to yourself?

All of the time, I probably look crazy

68. Describe your hair.

Shoulder length, fading from box dye blue to an ashy gray

69. What is the meaning of life.

The meaning of life is to live

70. What is your ideal partner like?

Kind, faithful, funny, passionate, and supportive.

71. Do you want to get married?

Maybe one day, if I can find the right person

72. Do you want to have kids?

I don’t think so

73. Like or dislike your family?

They try their best, but my family is dysfunctional and it can be hard to get along with them

74. Are you Chunky or Slim?

A lil chunky

75. Would you consider yourself smart? 

I would say yes

76. What would you change about your life? 

My financial situation, ha

77. Religious or Not?

I’m a practicing wiccan!

78. You’re drunk and yelling at hot guys/girls out of your car window, you’re with?

My best friend, Kaelyn!  She’s the outgoing/outspoken one between the two of us

79. You’re locked in a room with the last person you kissed, is that a problem?

It would be a HUGE problem, I don’t think Jacob and I can be in the same room anymore

80. Does anyone regularly (other than family) tell you they love you?

Kaelyn does :)

81. If the person you wish to be with were with you, what would you be doing right now?

We would be in his car, parked somewhere late at night, and just talking and laughing

82. So, the last person you kissed just happens to arrive at your door at 3AM; do you let them in?

My better judgement would say no, but I know I would always let him in

83. Do you like when people play with your hair? 

YES

84. Do you like bubble baths?

I do, but I like oil baths better!

85. Have you ever been pulled over by a cop?

Yes, I drive way too fast :X

86. Have you ever danced in the rain?

I try to whenever I can

87. Do you trust anyone with your life?

I trust Kaelyn with anything and everything

88. What was your first thought when you woke up this morning?

“I want to go back to bed”

89. If money wasn’t an issue, what top 10 places would you travel to? (You get to stay at each place for a week) 

Salem, Paris, Dublin, Yosemite, Amsterdam, Brussels, Montreal, Sicily, Switzerland, London

90. How was your day today?

It’s been alright, just kind of boring to be honest

91. Play an instrument? 

I used to play clarinet in school

92. Describe the what you think of the ocean.

It is breathtaking

93. Do you believe in aliens or ghosts?

Both!!!

94. Honestly, are things how you wanted them to be? 

NOPE

95. Do you have a mean bitchy scary side?

No, I’m a big softie

96. When are you vulnerable?

Um all of the time ha

97. How much free time do you have?

I work two jobs, so not much

98. Do you like to go hiking?

Absolutely!

99. Odd or Even Numbers?

Odd 100. Would you ever go sky diving, bungee jumping , cliff diving, wing suit gliding, parasailing, snorkeling, or other extreme activities?

Yes to all of the above!

TAG 15 FOLLOWERS TO DO THE GET TO KNOW THE BLOGGER TAG:

@woodland-lullaby @mysticnymphmagic @lookingforsummerland @floofypeach @forest-elf @shethinksoutsidethebox @pop-punk-dre @sugarmoonwitch @forgetmehots @meishallaneous @grimlilli @paganomicon @basil-witch @throwinstonesnc @starlightorchestra 

[musingsfrommayhem]

Beyond worst fears

Last night I went to the ER, and it felt so casual and routine. I had been semi-conscious for over an hour, the usual things weren’t helping. We had no choice but to go, and yet we knew nothing would come of it. I almost felt sorry for the doctor; I could tell he wasn’t used to saying “There’s nothing we can do”. But that’s the truth of it. They couldn’t really help, nor could they explain what was happening, and that’s just how things are right now.

It made me realize that I need to stop putting off making this post. Because for the last few weeks I’ve been radio silent, unwilling to put down the words that need to be said.

This post is about worst case scenarios.

As a child, I did not fear death. I knew I would die someday. I accepted that. I did fear spiders, and tsunamis, and losing the people I loved. And one more thing. One more thing that I didn’t dare say for fear of jinxing it.

That one thing was getting brain cancer. Because before it kills you, it ruins you. It can change your personality, your ability to speak, to think. It breaks apart who you are.

That’s how I saw it anyways.

And because I feared it so profoundly, I was certain it would never come true. Because this life is small and mundane and mine. Because the Big Bad Things happened in stories. Or to people far away. But not to me.

I can’t help but laugh in retrospect. Because, dear god, the dramatic irony is spectacular. When I was 13, my eye doctor said that my optic nerves looked funny. So he referred me to another doctor, who referred me to another, and eventually I wound up in Eye Doctor Grand Central at the children’s hospital of the biggest city nearby. They dilated my eyes, put me in a dark room, and took a flash picture of my optic nerves, so big and HD on the computer screen afterwards that I deemed it as beautiful as an optic nerve could be. They said it looked like a textbook case of Optic Nerve Head Drusen, nothing to worry about! Basically harmless! Except…

Except of course they couldn’t 100% guarantee that. Legally. Because it could also be a sign of a brain tumor. They could do an MRI to make sure, if we wanted! But I did not want. I walked out of the hospital and reassured my mom. Because I knew. I knew it couldn’t be brain cancer. Because worst nightmares stay in your dreams, so long as you wish them there hard enough.

I’ll never know if that was an early sign of the brain tumor I have now. If the tumor was already growing in my head. Or if it’s just another one of those wacky coincidences. I’ll have to live with not knowing that. Because I wasn’t ready to face my nightmare then.

We’re never ready.

We’re never really ready to watch our worst fears become reality. To live out the worst case scenario.

And before I proceed, I have to acknowledge that in many ways life has been very merciful to me, just as it has in many ways been cruel. This is not an “oh-woe-is-me” story, or a “my-life-is-worse-than-yours” story. This is just one little piece of surviving.

When I was first told I had an unknown lesion in my brain, everything went cold. In an instant the blood in my veins turned to ice water, trickling through my body and freezing me with dread. I was filled with fight-or-flight adrenaline, when I had the power to do neither. So instead I froze. A part of my mind schismed off into wordless emotion, shrieking unspoken fears. Another part asked calculating, reasonable questions of the doctor with the bad news, probably scaring the poor woman, because I know my eyes were as cold as the frost that gripped the rest of me. The rest of my being watched, and listened, and withheld judgement.

At that point there were three options: brain infection (virtually impossible as I lacked those symptoms), demyelination (e.g. multiple sclerosis), or a “low grade glioma”. At that point the doctors never used the word tumor. They didn’t say cancer. And when I asked point blank, they dodged my questions.

Three months after, I still had no answers, and I believed it was a demyelination. It fit some of the symptoms I had. It was terrible, but in all likelihood, life would go on.

Four months after, demyelination was ruled out, those symptoms assigned to other disorders and illnesses.

Six months after, they wanted to do surgery. Nothing big. A biopsy, just to make sure. They still didn’t say cancer. There was still a chance, however infinitesimal, that it was some strange infection or scarring.

Then the results. Stage 2 Astrocytoma. Brain tumor.

The doctors parsed their words: “it’s slow growing” “probably been there for years” “should be no problem” “practically benign”.

And then the problems arose. The area was too risky for surgery; they wouldn’t be able to get it all out without breaking me or killing me. And of course this particular type of mutated cell is resistant to chemotherapy.

That leaves one option: Radiation.

And the radiation doctor by no means parsed her words.

Radiation units are the dungeons of the hospital, multiple levels below ground, to keep the radiation from seeping into the rest of the building and poisoning other patients. The air itself is heavy down there,  compressed by so many feet of rock and concrete.

The woman at the check-in desk was too cheerful. The decorations of the room domineeringly bright and happy. That’s never a good sign.

The radiation doctor told me that radiation would wreak havoc on my system, even more so because of my other chronic illnesses. So we would need to wait for my other symptoms to be managed. Wait, knowing the tumor is there, before all hell breaks loose.

She told me that it may cause more brain tumors to form, in years to come. That it may cause brain damage to my memory center, maybe other things too.

She told me that, once it’s been administered, radiation can never be taken back.

She told me that my brain tumor is likely to kill me. But not this year, or next. With treatment, I could have ten years.

My mother sat next to me. I am her youngest daughter. In many ways she has hurt and betrayed me, but still our souls are mirrors of each other, and her life is inexorably tied to mine

Those words fell and I could hear all the breath leave my mother’s lungs as she spoke a single word

-What-

I listened to her fear, her horror, her sorrow. A thousand emotions I couldn’t name, all in a single word. I listened to one of her worst case scenarios, just as I was living one of mine.

Because once again I had gone cold, down to my marrow. This time, my mind broke in many directions, all at once.

I am twenty years old and full of ambition, listening to a death sentence.

I am a young woman, deeply in love, imagining my death with fear for the first time, like a premonition of my partner’s grief.

I am a passionate believer in a better world, seeing my life snuffed out before I can help create such a place.

I am 13 years old again, my world shattering as my worst case scenario crawls its way out of my nightmares and latches itself firmly into the sub cortical white matter of my left frontal lobe.

If I were to tell that situation to a younger version of myself, her image of life would have cut off right then. Right there. The moments beyond the worst case scenario don’t exist. Those are uncharted waters.

But life didn’t end right there. It didn’t end when the doctor left the room and my mother turned to me, words overwrought with emotions unimaginable on the tip of her tongue. Life didn’t end when I cut her off before she could even begin, dashing away the stray tears that had leaked from my eyes. I told her that all I needed was for her to keep her emotions to herself. It didn’t end when we left the office, and I waited outside the bathroom and listened to my mother sob.

It didn’t end.

I keep going with school. I adopted a rabbit, and am in the process of earning my new emotional support bunny’s trust. I make new friends, and sing in my a cappella group, and keep living my normal-not-normal life. I’ve cried a lot alone, and a little with other people. I keep breathing.

I started a blog, because if my days on this earth are more severely numbered than so many other people, then I should probably share what insight I have now, rather than leave the world with no record of my small successes and failures when I do die.

I don’t believe the radiation doctor’s expiration date on my life.

I’ve pulled off miracles before, and I am going to keep pulling off miracles. I’m going to make everything out of my life that I possibly can. I’m going to do my best to live forward with courage, because I must make the most of my precious moments on earth, no matter how much I may be hurt or damaged or betrayed.

I believe that I’m going to live and beat the odds. And in the moments when I don’t believe it, I still tell myself that I do. I tell myself that I believe it with all my heart and soul.

That belief is part of what carries me through nights spent in the ER, when everything hurts and the doctors can’t help. Because if I’ve managed to survive some of my worst case scenarios, then I can keep surviving today.

And tomorrow.

And the day after that.

And the day after that.

[jesscopeland]

MYSTERY INC FILES... catherine & jess.

Jumping down the hallway stairs two at a time, Jess was on an adventure to the kitchen for something to eat. Pausing when she heard a feminine voice floating from her father's office, however, curiosity got the better of her. Pressing her spine to the wall and craning her ears to listen, she gave out a frustrated sigh when she couldn't make out everything being said behind closed doors. A second later however, and the door opened, kick-starting Jess into shock and action. Before her, Catherine Vernon stood, as suspiciously gothic as ever and apparently leaving. "Hey!" The word fell out of Jess with uncontrollable force, making her thrust away from the wall quickly to follow the woman towards the foyer, desperate to get in a word before Catherine slipped away into the night.

Catherine had finished her usual round of intimidating the Mayor, giving him her usual list of demands. HIM had left him, and the rest of West Hollow frankly, shaken from what he had done but while the devil worked hard, Catherine Vernon worked harder. Peter had really come around to simply accepting her, instead of arguing. In the middle of the meeting she had heard the sound of someone else, her enhanced hearing and smell picking up on another prescence. As she went to leave, she wasn't surprised to find Jessica Copeland there, and she turned to address her with an unimpressed raise of her eyebrow. "Miss Copeland, can I help you?"  

There was something intimidating about Catherine's stare, and Jess couldn't imagine anyone ever saying no to her and getting away with it. A slight quiver moved through her stomach for her father, glancing back to the door which he was left behind. What was it that Catherine always dropped by for? What could the two possibly have in common aside from the election? Quickly, Jess remembered the list of push points Nolan had given her, should this type of situation ever arise. Looking back at Catherine, Jess decided to take a leap of faith. "Yeah um. So, strange question... and I totally won't be weirded out if you are but - you and my dad....?" This was a buffer statement, something to misguide Catherine hopefully into making her think Jess was simply concerned with mundane gossip over any actual intentional detective work. "Are you two... like, seeing each other?" She sagged against the doorway, folding her arms.

Catherine looked over the girl. Frail, pale, skinny, naive -- human. She remembered this all quite well, forcing herself to never forget a second from her time before the blood rushed over her memories. From Josie's notes, Jessica was ditzy and distracted, and it showed. Catherine could never see her as a threat, and at her beginning of the question, Catherine tilted her head in bored curiousity. What could she possibly have to say? However, when she asked if they were seeing each other, Catherine had to laugh, and she did. "Oh, no. Your father and I have important business with each other. I lost the election but he enjoys my input, and Vermillion always needs updated permits and whatnot."  She sighed with impatience, beginning to turn towards the door, "Is that all? I'm a busy woman, as you may have seen."

The second that Catherine began talking about the election, a question flashed in Jess's mind, highlighted. "Right... Sure, but you can't blame me for being kind of curious? I mean, from what I heard you worked really hard to try and win that election. And for a while, right? It must have been kind of sucky to lose after being in West Hollow for so long....?"

Catherine turned back, eyes squinting as she tried to understand the girl's intentions. Her questioning...it was not normal. Catherine had been alive for a very long time, and so reading body language and social ques had become something of a hobby. She was trying to lead into something, and if she wanted to talk, they would talk. A sickly fake smile came over Catherine's face, "Why don't we sit and talk? You seem to be very interested in my work." she said, gesturing to their dining room and beginning to walk that way.

Although she kept a calm demeanor, Jess couldn't help the surprise she felt at Catherine's 180 personality flip. Oh shit, had she stood on a booby trap not three minutes into the conversation? She'd have to be more careful if she planned to keep up with the wits of someone who was rumoured to only be about 300 times her age. "Well. You know," Jess gave a noncommittal shrug as she sauntered towards the dining room, feeling weird to be ushered around her own home but complying all the same. "Dad's all boring meetings here, lame schedules there. He doesn't really tell me about the cool stuff he does whenever I ask... You guys seemed to work together a lot so I just thought, if he liked spending so much time with you then maybe I should extend the branch and get to know you too... since you're here pretty often." Then, like a true actress, Jess pulled out the sympathy card, "I mean, it's kind of hard not having my mom around and being the only girl in this patriarchal man cave." She gestured to the house around them.

Catherine had to give it to her, she was convincing enough for a human. If she was a younger vampire, perhaps she would have fallen for it, but she knew better. There were always suspicious humans, and others too, but Catherine had built this town. They knew better than to trifle with her. Catherine walked with the girl, nodding as she listened to her talk. She pulled out the chair for her, humming with faux sympathy at her words about her father. Catherine sat adjacent to her, folding her hands on the table with a calm smile. "Your mother, yes," she began, sighing as she thought back to her own husband. "I was married once as well, to a man who I loved dearly. Like your father and mother, we had our disagreements and parted ways. I truthfully would have wanted to stay with him, but he decided otherwise." she explained, her voice grating a bit at the end, giving away a bit of her frustration with how it had turned out. "Divorce can be hard, but it is a necessary evil of life. I would have thought by now a young woman like yourself would have learnt to dealt with it, but perhaps I have been too presumptious. I cannot offer you a mother figure and have adoptive children of my own, Jessica. Your father is a hardworking and caring man, and it should give you great pride despite his gender. I have met your mother on occasion and she is a strong woman who you should look to for female guidance. The reason why he doesn't tell you about the "cool things" with his job is because the only cool things are the things you already see."Catherine's face was stoic, calm, as she stared straight into Jessica. After a moment, she softened, though, knowing that she would inevitably get more questions if she scolded her. "I understand wanting to get to know me. If you need advice, I can give you advice. if you want to see how running a business and public relations works, I can show you. As far as emotional support, kindship -- I have enough on my plate. You are free to stop by my office is at Vermillion, though." It was as if she was giving a stern talking to to a child, something she only really did with Josie.

There was something about being sat down by Catherine and informed by her that made Jess feel oddly juvenile. As she began talking about a partner she'd had, Jess scrambled to grab her phone, eager not to miss anything. Pretending to quickly barely read a text, she placed the phone back in her lap, recording app running for later listening. "That sucks." Jess replied dryly about her husband, lacking all of Catherine's grace and decorum. Pretending to listen to the spiel about her parents and maternal figures, Jess lowered her gaze a little, as if disappointed. Honestly, it was relief. Being this close to Catherine was starting to give Jess the same creeps walking alone at night by the woods did. Exciting. Thrilling. But still terrifying. "I get it. You're a busy woman." She echoed Catherine's stern words but with feeling. Perking up at the invitation however, Jess smiled. "I've never been to Vermillion but heaps of people talk about it. I went to the website, it looks awesome. How long have you been in charge of it?"

Catherine made a quick mental note of her phone. Modern technology had a way of evading her true capabilities, and so she often just had the younger vampires deal with that, but she had basic knowledge of it. Whatever she had looked at was suspicious, and so she was going to try to be as noncomittal in her answers. "Indeed." she answered flatly at Jess's comment about her husband, not enthused with her choice of words, but it was nothing. It seemed, though, the invitation had caught her fancy, and upon her asking about Vermillion's history, she tried to think of a reasonable number. She was 34, was ten years reasonable? "Ten years. I inherited from my grandmother." No one ever questioned anything about Vermillion, unless it was about the food & prices.

Lifting her arms to fold them in front of her on the table, shoulders hunched as if she was completely infatuated (which she was now), Jess looked impressed. "So it's kind of like a family legacy thing, then? I didn't know your family had been around West Hollow that long. Or that you had." On the contrary, people didn't think she was an ancient vampire for no reason. "See," Jess sighed and sat back. "Dad never tells me anything..."

Catherine for a moment imagined her as one of them, a vampire, the blood staining her noisy lips as she begged for the hunger to go away. A move that would surely upset Peter, but she would be beautiful forever and perhaps even mature at some point. It was a fantasy though, as she didn't wish to take in yet another. "Yes, a family legacy. My family has been around since the founding." she answered point blank, her expression never changing. She hummed in response to her pouting, "For good reason. There are things in this town you don't need to concern yourself with. The boring, mundane," she paused for a moment, and then, the edge of her lip curved upwards. "Although I've heard that you have quite a few friends who think there's more to little West Hollow than meets the eye?" A curve ball to be sure, one she wanted to see the girl defend.

It was likely that Catherine thought she was the biggest fool around, and Jess would definitely need someone to patch her ego back together later after all this Playing Dumb was over. "Right, I forget how ancient this town is sometimes. It's so weird to think how different it might have been back in the 19th century. More petticoats, I assume." Jess mused with a light frown, then turned her expression back to Catherine, smiling fondly as if the woman didn't still creep her the hell out. Hearing her refer directly to Mystery Inc however, made the phone in her lap suddenly feel very heavy. "Well. Can't blame a bunch of geeks for getting creative, right? The summers get kind of long." She attempted to make a joke out of the one thing that Jess cared the most about, feeling her throat threaten to close mid-insult. Instead, she trained her expression into a comical smirk. "After all, every place has its history and secrets. But my spidersenses give me the impression that you're a non believer. Am I right?"

Ancient. Catherine hummed into a smile at the words, stopping herself from laughing. If West Hollow was ancient, then what was she? Prehistoric? She enjoyed the humans more than she cared to admit, with their small ideas and naivety. It amused her to watch them squirm under the uncomfortabilty of their existence, one Catherine had easily slid into. "Something like that. Have you ever studied American art history in school, darling?" It was more out of curiousity of how far Jess could really seep up when it came to actually studying. She discredited the conspiracy kids, except for perhaps one or two, simply because no human would ever uncover the monstrosities that plagued West Hollow. However, the look on her face was pleasing when Jessica realized what her question was -- she knew and Catherine knew what this was really about. "Nonbeliever." she nodded as she considered the word before continuing, "When I was a child, I lived in a shanty house in England. I begged for scraps on the streets of London and fell asleep cold and hungry. I brought myself to America and made my way. My belief was in money, a warm home, and food in my stomach. There is no need to entertain fantasies when this world has provided enough cruelty and fear in it's reality."

"Of course." Jess nodded, a comic frown gracing her features. "The greats, the Renaissance, the deaf and the mentally unhinged." She replied, wondering what Catherine wanted to know from her with that question. Listening to her brief description of her chilhood (or just earlier life, perhaps, who knew with someone who was rumored to be so old)  Jess's expression ranged from interested to outwardly disappointed. "That's one way to think about it." She admitted with a stubborn clip to her voice, Jess now squaring her shoulders and looking directly at Cattherine. Slowly, she was begining to wonder how that Josie girl did it... put up with this kind of attitude for a maternal figure. Jess would go crazy. "I don't know... I like the idea of West Hollow having it's secrets. I think every place needs something to make it different than the rest and everybody likes a good Ghost Story. I'm sure you've heard some of the rumored ones going around since you seem to know the ins and outs of everyone around here." Jess raised her eyebrows, subtly hinting back to the fact that even though Catherine didn't bother herself with such... juvinile stories... she sure did seem to somehow know of Mystery Inc.

Catherine noticed every little detail about the girl, from the way she moved in the chair to how the pitch of her voice changed as she thought of new things to assert to the vampire. At her mention of ghost stories, Catherine let out a small chuckle-- oh, yes, if only it were just ghost stories, perhaps there would be a headstone somewhere in London with her name on it, the death date actually in the 1500's. "I have heard a tad of these, ghost stories, you seem so enthralled with. Honestly," she sat back in her chair, her expression bored with the topic as she looked down at her nails, "they do nothing for me, besides bring more tourism into the restaurant. Your father knows it too, which is why I am always visiting to check up on tourist iniatives." Then, her eyes peered back up at the girl, leaning in close as her ruby red lips grew into a smug grin. "Why don't you tell me a few of these stories, hmm? I would find it so very interesting to see what a young woman and her peers are interested in these days. Tell me, child-- have you heard any ghost stories about me, Ms. Copeland?"

The way Catherine seemed so quickly disinterested, quickly made Jess feel less inclined to play the cat and mouse. She knew that she was supposed to be getting information out of the woman with little to no collateral, but this was getting uncomfortable and soon, Jess was going to wedge her foot in her mouth whether she tried to or not. However, Catherine's behavior was flawed. One moment, she seemed less than bothered with mystic stories that weren't deemed to be all real and the next, she was prodding a very spesific topic. Jess squared her shoulders. "Maybe you should ask that adopted daughter of yours then, what with her keeping your hands so full and all." She couldn't help the acid, not liking the way that Catherine had her dancing to her every tune whether Jess wanted to her not. Sure, she didn't want to end up dead in a ditch without a trace but this was getting weird. She couldn't help but imagine that Nolan would be asking these questions so much better than her. "Anyway, you just said you didn't care about them. So I wouldn't want to waste any more of your time." With that, Jess put her phone into her pocket and pressed her palms into the table, pushing herself to stand up. "But thanks. For listening, I mean. My dad's kind of lost his touch these days so... it was good to talk to someone who actually gives me a straight answer." Even if it wasn't the full truth.

At the girl's insolence, her change in attitude from the more sulken and behaved to daring, was a sharp contrast that Catherine both loathed and loved. It showed she had spirit, a side to her that could be exploited by her fiery instincts. It reminded her, honestly, a bit of Josie before she had been turned (although, unbeknownst to Josie, she had been much more unhinged before her transformation than she remembers). At the same time, she hated that tone, the rebellious attitude she was smacked with at her questioning. She showed none of this though, just letting her eyebrows raise as the smirk stayed on her lips. "I'm afraid that while Josephine also has quite an active imagination, she isn't as reliable as you, dear." Catherine's head tilted in faux curiosity as she leaned back once more at her thankfulness for listening. "Oh, Jessica, your father is more in touch on the pulse of this town than you think." She extended a sharp red nail out though, flicking away a stray piece of hand on Jessica's face. Jessica would make an excellent recruit, but, she no longer did that...unless of course, she became a real threat. "It has been such a pleasure to meet such a vivacious young lady like yourself. I do hope that soon you use your talents in the real world where they'd suit you better than as a...what is again? Ghostbuster?" Catherine let a deep chuckle come from the back of her throat as she stood up, just to watch Peter come out of his office, the shock clear on his face at witnessing the two together. Catherine could not contain the wildly satisfied smile that appeared on her face. "Mayor Copeland, I was just talking with your daughter. What a bright young woman you've fostered here." As she walked by him, she stopped him, her hand resting on his shoulder to whisper something wicked before she continued out, red bottom pradas clicking with viciousness as she went.

[scurvgirl]

A Life Worth Living

More Dad!Marassal, when Marassal arrives that morning after Dirthamen and Selene meet.

Dirthamen belongs to @feynites

Selene belongs to @selenelavellan

The plan had always been to find Selene after Dirthamen came of age to have a relationship like that. So Marassal took him traveling when he turned 21 and every little lead that Marassal scrounged up came up empty.

He couldn’t find her or her son. They had vanished. Which, all things considered, was understandable, They were still reeling from the Templar involvement all those years ago. But it made surprising Selene with this very good man he’s raised difficult.

When they return home, he has an episode. His skin crawls and shivers, expanding and retracting in painful contortions. Desire has been denied and she regrettably does not deal with that and it’s been getting worse over the years. Dirthamen tries to help, comforting touches, making food - but there is only so much he can do while Marassal keeps his desire, the thing he wants, secret. His back shivers and his wings spring from his back from the magical pressure. They’re not pretty bird wings, he is not pretty when he is...like this.

He had never wanted to be pretty like this, the goal wasn’t to be seductive but to be terrifying. To be left alone. The desire for freedom beating so hot inside of him.

But it doesn’t phase Dirthamen, if anything it...helps cue him. Marassal has gotten those whole self-care for his abomination self down to an art. He keeps himself happy, he’s learned how to take care of himself by not fighting his desires, by accepting them and acting. It’s...resulted in a few issues, but he is alive and not dying. Self-care is important. But there are times where this self-care only goes so far.

Marassal’s lingers on the couch, heaving as his body tries to find an equilibrium in form. Dirthamen makes dinner - chicken and dumplings soup, and he helps Marassal slowly sip on it.

By the morning, Marassal is back to normal. Desire is riding a bit higher than normal, tinting his normally brown eyes purple, but he’s contained in his body. Dirthamen has questions, so many questions, and Marassal does his best to answer them.

“How did you become an abomination?”

Marassal blinks and when he smiles, his teeth are ragged and sharp, “That is not a story for my son to hear.” Dirthamen’s eyes widen slightly but he nods and moves onto more mundane questions.

Years pass but Marassal doesn’t give up. Dammit, he’ll find Selene. He’ll find her. It’s more than setting her and Dirthmen up, now he’s genuinely concerned for her. Desire aboms do not hide like this, it’s unnatural for them. The more they hide, the more they isolate themselves from society...it’s like a sickness, not being able to feed and sustain the Desire, slowly and surely corrupting the spirit to desperate levels.

It’s how aboms become the abominations of old.

He goes through all of his contacts and begins to infiltrate police databases. Looking for any clues.

Nothing.

Dirthamen is twenty-seven when one of the leads dings. Sort of. There has been a recent submission of a set of equations to a publication of Mathematics Today. The contributor of these equations is listed under a blatant pseudonym. He gets in contact with the publisher who have nothing to contact the contributor with other than an email.

Hm. Sending a “Hey! Your true love isn’t dead and he can be found at these marvelous coordinates!” won’t work. If anything, it’ll send her deeper underground.

Instead, Marassal contacts Dirthamen and poses the idea that perhaps emailing coupons to the bookstore will generate more revenue. It’s not a hard sell, and Marassal offers to take up the emailing.

He puts in the email he got from Mathematics Today and attaches the coupon.

Buy One $10 Book and Get one Free!

It lists the store’s name, the online store, the telephone number, and most importantly the store owner’s name. It’s...a bit of a longshot.

But then...then he gets that wonderful text. A strange woman by the name of Selene asking Dirthamen to come home with her.

Finally.

He drives all night to make it into the city where Dirthamen and Selene are set up. He picks up muffins and doughnuts before heading to the apartment. He quickly assesses the environment and finds it lacking - there are few places for indulgences, mostly laundromats, pawn shops, and small family owned restaurants. Not that there is anything wrong with these fine establishments, but they’re not particularly nourishing for Selene and that is concerning.

The apartment complex is even worse. Drab and depressing, colorless, filled with people who are unable to fulfill their desires. And what desire is filled is not the sort to keep Desire healthy. There is despair and longing but no actual desire beyond hopes and dreams. Nothing concrete, nothing sustaining.

The tendrils of her passenger eek out past the door to her apartment, flaring irregularly as he tries to gain a hold of what is going on. Marassal can only catch a few stray thoughts.

Is this real?

How is he not dead?

What’s going on?

Dirthamen.

Oh dear, ooooh dear. Perhaps...he should have reached out to Selene after rescuing Dirthamen. Assured her that her love wasn’t dead like the reports….

One of them would have taken him from us, his own Desire laments.

No matter, what’s done is done.

He knocks on the door and Des flares in severe annoyance.

Now, now, Des, is that any way to treat an old friend? Desire coos. A moment passes before the deadbolt and locks click open and Selene cracks the door open, eyes bright purple.

“What are you doing here?!”

He holds up the boxes of muffins and doughnuts and smiles, “Dirthamen! Dirthamen, darling, I’m here,” he turns to Selene with a smile, “my son asked me to come, he believes you need help.”

Des wriggles possessively in front of the door, clearly not wanting to share the only source of desire fulfilled in an...undetermined amount of time. Desire unfurls inside of Marassal and reaches out to Des, letting some of her power roll out and onto him. An olive branch,of a sort. Selene’s eyes flash and she shivers.

“Selene, I am not here to take him away - but he does need to keep his blood sugar up, otherwise he gets a little moody. In fact, here,” he takes out a doughnut and hands it to Selene as he walks by, “get your blood sugar up, it helps.”

He walks into the apartment and Dirthamen emerges from the small bathroom, smiling.

“Papae! Oh good you brought food, I forgot to ask. I was looking in the fridge and I didn’t really see anything, so thank you. Sorry Selene, I should have told you. This is my father, Marassal and he’s like you? I think, I mean you have some of the signs that Papae has when he’s not feeling good so I just thought that he could maybe help?” Dirthamen fidgets and Marassal sets the boxes down before walking over to Selene. Desire inside of him unfurls and presses into Des, asking for communication.

What is going on?!

We rescued Dirthamen as a baby - we made Mythal and Elgar’nan believe he was dead and we rescued him. Raised him, loved him, supported him.

A barrage of emotion swirls in Selene’s aura, half Des half her as the tenuous equilibrium they had suddenly comes into flux. Des is awake and starving. Desire pushes them to eat the doughnut, and she begins to nibble on it, slowly gaining more momentum as she goes. Desire gives Des a bit more sustenance, he drove by a plastic surgeon’s office earlier and his tank fill to burst thanks to that. Des practically latches onto Desire, demanding more.

Desire gives as much as she can before it gets a little tenuous for them. By then, Marassal has guided Selene to the couch and she’s digging into her second doughnut. Dirthamen eats his blueberry muffin and doesn’t interfere in the clearly magical and very demonic activities going on.

“I’ve been thinking about becoming a house flipper slash restorer. There are all these houses in the area I live in that are roughly one hundred years old but they’re practically decaying away, it’s just not right. I lived through that era, I know what houses looked like, how they should feel. I just need to get my contractor’s license...that should take what? A year or two? Making people’s dreams come true with homes...that sounds like a good profession, you know, I could use a business partner with it. You could handle all the financials of it, help good deserving families get good homes? Just until you’re on your feet again, if you want, just an idea. Still, I’ve been in the mood for a career change. Sex line operator is just not doing it anymore.”

“Papae!” Dirthamen sputters and Marassal rolls his eyes.

“Don’t worry, I’ve only done it for the past five years.” Marassal rubs Selene’s back as she finishes eating her doughnut, rambling on about his future prospects. Her breathing deepens, her eyes become clearer, sharper. Des settles a bit more inside of her, not completely and not without agitation, but it’s better. Much better.

Her eyes dart over to Dirthamen and Marassal waves Dirthamen over.

“I need to use the restroom, how about you hold onto Selene for a bit?” Marassal stands and Dirthamen takes his place. Selene presses herself against him almost immediately, needing that contact.

This is real, Des. Desire reassures. This is real, he is alive, he’s here, he’s healthy and good.

[tastydregs]

How bots augment human productivity

Not many people have an assistant anymore. That’s why I’m so pumped to have a new helper — her name is Amy, and she is awesome. Amy only has a couple of years of work experience, but she is super friendly and responsive.

The main thing that Amy helps me with is scheduling meetings. Conference call ping-pong drives me crazy, so I just copy Amy when I need to set up a meeting, and she takes care of the rest. She knows my scheduling preferences better than anyone, and now that she has learned how I like to work, I trust her to communicate directly with both coworkers and clients. Amy is a valued coworker, just like the rest of my other 1,300 ISG colleagues.

Oh, and by the way, Amy is not human. She’s a bot from a company called X.ai. And I can’t imagine my day without her. I mention Amy here because she is a great example of how intelligent automation is working in companies today. An increasing number of people depend on bots to augment their tasks and help them make decisions.

“Augmentation” is the key word. Amy doesn’t replace the executive assistant role — she simply augments and, in some cases, replaces the tasks that executive assistants perform. By taking over the mundane work of setting up meetings, Amy frees up time for an administrative assistant (or me, in this case) to focus on more value-added work, which makes me more productive.

Our research reinforces this concept. Earlier this year, when ISG surveyed business and IT leaders, 68 percent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “Our automation and AI initiatives are focused on automating tasks, not roles.” And nearly three-quarters agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: “Automation and AI will free up staff to do more value-added work.”

Task-based automation is happening across all enterprise support functions. In IT, virtual engineers are restarting web servers for systems engineers. In finance, RPA bots are setting up customer contracts for AP clerks, and in customer care centers, chatbots are partnering with agents to reduce social engineering.

Enterprises are focusing on task automation over role automation for two reasons:

First, it’s about the technology. True artificial general intelligence does not yet exist — and is not likely to for a long time. This means the intelligent automation technology we are applying today is narrow in its focus; it’s not (yet) a human. It’s really hard for intelligent automation tech to apply knowledge learned from one process to another process. This means each bot, virtual engineer, or algorithm focuses on accomplishing a set of narrow, specific tasks.

Second, it’s about specialization. Inside most companies, people perform several formal and informal roles. And those roles are made up of a lot of tasks. Large IT and BPO (business process outsourcing) providers do, however, have scale that allows them to specialize at the task level. This is one of the main reasons we’re starting to see layoff announcements. These layoffs are usually being positioned as performance-related, but in reality a lot of them are triggered by the introduction of intelligent automation. As intelligent automation takes over new tasks, people who are highly specialized need to elevate their skills. If they can’t, then they are let go for “performance” reasons.

So if you’re headed down a do-it-yourself path for your intelligent automation initiatives, my recommendation is to not create your business case around immediate cost savings because they likely won’t materialize in the near future (unlike savings from, say, outsourcing). Instead, focus on using your new digital workforce to increase productivity (by doing more with the same number of people), avoid costs (by not filling open job requisitions), improve speed (by having bots operate when humans typically don’t), and increase compliance (by logging everything the bots do).

If near-term cost savings is what you’re really looking for, a service provider can use their intelligent automation infrastructure to help you reduce cost, which, by the way, can be really significant, even for generation-three outsourcing buyers.

Stanton Jones is a Director and Principal Analyst at ISG, a global technology research and advisory firm.

[vidmrkting75038]

Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People

Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People

Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

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John Jantsch: Leading or managing people in an organization is a tough job. It gets just that much tougher when the folks that you are choosing to lead are highly creative. In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Todd Henry. He’s the author of Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. If you or your organization has creative people, and let’s face it, that’s what drives a lot of business today, you need to check it out.

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Todd Henry. He is a speaker, consultant, advisor, and author of a number of books including the book we’re gonna talk about today, called Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. So, Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Henry: John, it’s so great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I can’t believe it’s taken me this long. I’m a big fan of your previous work, Die Empty, in fact you were awesome enough that you just happened to be passing through town and we flagged you down to come speak at one of my events and it was very, very motivating for everybody.

Todd Henry: It was so much fun, and I just have to say as encouragement to you, you’re the most humble person in the world so I know that you would never toot your own horn, but just seeing your community there and seeing how people responded to you and responded to what you have built there, it just really showed me the kind of integrity that you bring to your business, because you were able to attract people from all over the place to come to Louisville to spend some time with you, learning about the things that you wanted to teach them.

Just as encouragement to you, it was really, really amazing to see your community in action there as well. You didn’t ask me to do that, but I wanted to do it anyway.

John Jantsch: Well, I appreciate that, but longtime listeners know I’m not really that humble.

Todd Henry: Okay.

John Jantsch: So let me ask you the big question that came to my mind as I was reading Herding Tigers. How does leading creative people differ from being a creative leader?

Todd Henry: Oh, that’s a great question. No one has ever asked me that, actually. Listen, we’re all creative. We all have to solve problems every day as a function of our job. That’s just the nature of the modern workplace. So, if you have to go to work, solve problems, figure things out, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, you are creative to a certain extent. What I wanted to do in this book was talk about the dynamics of leading highly creative people.

Leading highly creative people is different from being a creative leader, because you can be a creative leader and lead a team of engineers or a team … which, by the way, engineers are incredibly creative and incredibly bright in that way. But, you can be a highly creative leader and be leading a more mundane, process oriented business and still be highly creative, because you still have to solve problems, figure out systems, et. cetera.

This book really is about leading highly creative people. People who maybe think a little bit differently from the norm, maybe people who might be a little more difficult to wrangle. What I wanted to do is really address some of those common dynamics among teams that are highly creative. What is it that makes them especially difficult to lead, and how can leaders, especially leaders maybe that are stepping into a role of leading highly creative people for the first time, how can they better position themselves to set their team up for success?

That’s the goal of the leader is to help their team succeed, not necessarily for them to succeed because if their team succeeds, then they will succeed.

John Jantsch: I guess it kind of begs two questions. Maybe you’re defining creative person in a very strict sense like the graphic designer or the writer or the video editor. Is that fair?

Todd Henry: I think it is fair, but I think that this applies to really leading any group of people that has to figure it out and make it up as they go, so if you’re a sales organization, you’re having to come up with creative solutions all the time to reach potential clients, having to re-strategize all the time. Like I said, if you’re leading a group of engineers, that is a project based business, a project based function, but it’s highly creative because you are doing nothing but problem solving all day. You’re looking out, exploring what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, looking for potentially useful fodder for your creative process.

All of those industries have some of the same dynamics I describe in the book. Now, that said, yes, my background, my experience is in leading the ‘traditional creative’ which is the designer, the writer, the videographer, those kinds of people. Yes, I was writing specifically from those kinds of experiences, but I think that the advice in the book applies more broadly to any group of people who have to solve problems and make it up as they go.

John Jantsch: So fundamentally then, what does this group, what do these creative people need that is fundamentally different?

Todd Henry: There really are two primary things that creative people need from their manager in order to thrive. The first one is stability, and stability is about ensuring that you have clarity of process, clarity of expectations, that they know that the rules of the game aren’t gonna change midstream. In a lot of industries that don’t require a tremendous amount of overhead in order to accomplish the work, it’s not that big of a deal if the objectives change midstream, because okay, now we’ve got a new strategy, that means my job is gonna be different tomorrow.

But, when you’re doing highly creative work that requires a tremendous amount of ramp up and forethought and then iteration, when the rules of the game change midstream it can be extremely frustrating. If somebody isn’t bought in to a strategic direction, and let’s say you get two weeks into the project and suddenly your boss’s boss swoops in and says, “You know what? This isn’t really working for me.” Well, your team has spent two weeks iterating on that idea, and now they have to go all the way back to the beginning, re strategize and start all over again, simply because someone wasn’t bought in.

That’s tremendously expensive to the organization. It’s very frustrating to a team of people, and so over time, the team of people just basically says, “Alright, I’m just gonna wait until you tell me what to do. I’m not gonna bring my best thought to the table or my best effort until I know it’s not gonna be wasted effort if the rules are constantly changing.” They need some degree of stability.

There’s a myth, John, that highly creative people just want complete freedom. Just don’t fence me in, give me no boundaries, I just wanna do what I wanna do, but that is a myth, because the reality is that healthy creative process has boundaries. It has rails in order to focus the creative energy. Without that, that energy is just gonna wither up and die. So, stability is the first thing that we need. Clear boundaries, clarity of expectations, clarity of process.

The second thing that highly creative people need is they need to be challenged. They need to be pushed. They want to know that their leader has faith in them. That their leader sees things in them maybe they don’t even see in themselves yet. They want to be pushed to be the best that they can be and to try new things, to tackle new kinds of projects, to venture out into those risky territories, and to know that if they fail, that somebody has their back.

This is also very important, people won’t take risks unless they know that the leader is there to have their back. If it’s a strategic risk, not if it’s a stupid risk, but if it’s a strategic risk then the leader needs to have their back and they need to know that they’re not just walking on thin ice. Hey, you could die and lose your job at any moment, or else people will begin to hold back just a bit.

The problem with stability and challenge is that they exist in tension with one another. As we increase the amount of challenge, we tend to destabilize the organization. This is where a lot of startups and entrepreneurial organizations live. We’re building the bicycle as we’re trying to ride it and we’re going a hundred miles an hour down the highway and we’re trying to avoid traffic and, oh isn’t this just wonderful?

Yeah, it’s wonderful for a little bit, but then over time, people begin to fry. They begin to burn out because we’re not wired for that kind of challenge without the supporting infrastructure to support that challenge. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations that settle in and they’re so processized that there’s no challenge any longer for the people on the team. People get bored, they get stuck, they start looking for broader horizons, and this is often where you hear people say things like, “I’m just not really challenged around here. I just don’t feel like I can really do my best work here. I feel like I’m not growing.”

Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel challenged. They don’t feel like they’re getting what they need from you as a leader in terms of challenge. As a manager, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, somebody who runs a business full of talented people, you are in the unique position to be able to identify that right mix of stability and challenge for those people on your team. If you notice somebody seems to be burning out pretty frequently, well, you need to ask, is it because there aren’t processes in place? There’s no stability there to support what I’m asking from them in terms of challenge, or if somebody’s constantly complaining they feel bored, they feel stuck, is it because I’m not giving them an opportunity to grow themselves, to challenge themselves, and to venture into those uncomfortable places?

John Jantsch: One of the places that you spend a lot of time, and I was glad to see this because I see this actually in lots of organizations with lots of small business owners even, whether they’re managing creatives or not, if they’re managing people, so often they get in this weird cycle of giving work, assigning work, creating process and structure, and then the minute something gets a little hard, they take it all back. There’s no way to grow for anybody, including the organization if you keep taking the work back. I think you called it stop doing the work.

Todd Henry: Right.

John Jantsch: You need to learn this. First off, what do you feel leads to that, and I guess, secondly, how do you solve that?

Todd Henry: I think that especially for entrepreneurs, think about somebody who started a business, I know a big chunk of the people who follow your work are small business owners, entrepreneurs. There’s a tremendous amount of identity wrapped up in starting a business, in the business itself. So, you identify yourself by the output of that business. Sometimes in healthy ways, and maybe sometimes in not so healthy ways. As you start to grow your business and you start to hand off more and more responsibility to other people, it becomes difficult sometimes to separate yourself a bit from the business from an identity standpoint, so that you’re allowing other people to take ownership of certain aspects of the business so that you’re not the one constantly there over their shoulder.

If you are the person constantly over their shoulder, then again, they’re just gonna say, “You know what? Just tell me what you want me to do.” You’ve hired great people and then you’re gonna look over their shoulder and micromanage every decision they make, that’s not the way to scale a business. It’s easy for that to happen, because so much of your identity is wrapped up in the work that gets done, in the business.

What we have to do is we have to transition from a maker mindset to a manager mindset. We have to transition from a mindset of presence to a mindset of principle, or from a mindset of control, which is what really all this is about, it’s about us wanting to control the work of the organization, to a mindset of influence.

We need to establish rails. We need to have a clear leadership philosophy. We need to help people on our team learn how we think about the work and how we think about decisions that we make, not just which decision in a specific scenario is the right decision to make according to us, and so I think it’s difficult to make that transition, to move from control to influence. I think a big part of that is just extricating yourself.

I think about the world that I come from, somebody maybe was a great designer or a great writer and they get promoted. What happens typically in organizations is somebody is really good at something and so somebody comes along and says, “You know what? You’re a really good designer. You know what you should do? You should lead other designers.” That’s a fundamentally different skill set, that’s a totally different thing, and yet that’s exactly what we do. This person, basically they’ve built their entire career upon the fact that they’re really good at a thing. That thing may be is design, or maybe that thing is financials or whatever it is. But, they’ve been really good at that thing and now, all of a sudden, they’re transitioning to not doing that thing, but leading other people who are doing that thing.

How do they identify themselves? Who are they anymore? What is the value they contribute? Before, they could point to a thing and say, “I did this.” Now that you’re leading other people, what is it exactly that you do? I think that’s where the identity crisis often resides in this. Our job is to shift our mindset from a maker mindset, from control, to influence, which means I’m going to teach my team a series of principles to help them make better decisions on their own. I’m gonna teach them how I think about what a good idea is. How I think about a good risk versus a bad risk. I’m gonna teach them how to determine the quality of a product and say, “Okay, is this good? Is this a good output, or is it not quite there yet?”

How do we define excellence as an organization? I’m gonna teach them how conflict should be handled so they can handle conflict between themselves instead of having to come to me every time there’s a conflict on the team. Once we begin to teach these principles, then we can step back and do the job that we’re actually accountable for, which is either growing the business, or leading the team to grow the business, depending on the type of business that we’re running.

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, over the years, the lessons I’ve really learned is that this has to be very intentional, of course. But, there are times when I’m doing my thing. Like you, I’ve go out and I speak and I write and I’m doing the work really, in the business. But, I have a team of people too, and it’s almost like I have to switch on that hat and remember that now I’m leading, so I’m not supposed to have all the answers. That to me is the hardest part because people come to you as the leader, and they say, “Todd, should I do this?” And your response, or at least my response is usually, they ask me a question, I’m gonna give ’em the answer and what I’ve learned over the years is you’ve gotta establish this practice of giving it back to them, saying, “What would you do in that situation?” Or something of that nature.

Todd Henry: Yes.

John Jantsch: Then, of course, the other challenge is you’ve gotta stay so consistent, I think, with it, because how many companies have read a book like yours and the person goes back and says, “It’s gonna be different now!”

Todd Henry: Yes, that’s exactly right. The challenge in all of that is either that we, as a leader, our area of greatest insecurity is the place where we have the potential to do the most damage. As a leader, if we’re not aware of that, the fact that it’s really hard for us to let stuff go, the fact that it’s really difficult for us to let our team run with things, those areas of insecurity become the places we have to turn into watch points personally, because your area of greatest insecurity is the place where you have the potential to do the most damage to your team, and ultimately to your business if you’re not careful.

John Jantsch: How much of the job of the leader, because I think creative people seek inspiration. They tend to be maybe a little more curious about how things work and why they work and don’t work. How much of the job of the leader in this case is to keep those folks inspired?

Todd Henry: I think it’s a huge percentage of the job is keeping them inspired and keeping them focused on the right things. Setting good rails, making sure that they’re looking in the right places. “Hey look over here! Hey, have you seen this? Hey, let’s not focus on that right now, let’s look at this thing over here, because this seems to be the thing that has the most potential.” That’s not the same thing as doing the work for them, that’s basically doing traffic flow for them. It’s making sure that they’re windowing out the stuff that you can see is really not essential and focusing them then on the things that are actually most important.

The thing is, if we wanna be an inspirational leader, then we have to be inspired ourselves. This is something I find often in the lives of leaders; they want to inspire their team but they’re not building practices into their own life to keep themselves inspired. They’re not dedicating time for study, for going out, for exploring, for tilling the soil and looking for potentially useful things in the environment that they can funnel to their team. They’re not doing any kind of personal and professional development themselves and yet they expect their team to be doing that, but they’re not developing themselves.

I think the first thing we have to recognize is that if we wanna be an inspiring leader, if we wanna be the kind of leader that’s bringing ideas to the table and pushing our team in the right place and is able to think systemically in a way that’s actually valuable and useful to our team because we’re seeing the patterns that are emerging in the work and in the team dynamics, then we have to be dedicating time and energy to developing ourselves, to studying, to looking for patterns out there in the marketplace and patterns out there in the environment.

That’s really one of the things we’re uniquely positioned to do as leaders because of our perch, and yet often we don’t do that. If you are not inspired, then you cannot inspire your team.

John Jantsch: One of the things that’s gotta be part of any leader is we’ve got objectives, we have key results that we’re trying to do, we have deadlines, there are things that have to be measured and tracked. I would suggest that some people would say that that’s harder to do with creatives? Maybe a deadline works, maybe it doesn’t, but how do you define and track what might be different with a creative team?

Todd Henry: That is a really great question, because you’re right. If we’re doing accounting, it’s pretty easy to tell whether we got it right or not. You could sorta say, “Numbers aren’t adding up. Okay, let’s figure this out. This isn’t working right.” It’s a different kind of problem. With creative work, it is highly qualitative often. In the end, somebody is either gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down based upon, in some cases, their subjective opinion. No matter how research based your work is, no matter how tight your rationale is, they’re gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, and it’s basically based on what they perceive to be right or not right with regard to the work.

So, one of the tools that I like to teach people to help them determine, in a little bit more of a not quantitative way, but a little bit more of an objective way, which idea is the right idea? It spells the word EPIC, which, I don’t like doing things like that where, hey it spells this, but it does, it spells EPIC, is, if you have a handful of ideas you’re trying to evaluate, you’re trying to decide between, I encourage you to use this framework to do it. It works really, really well.

The first thing is, you’re gonna ask, is it effective? Is this idea effective? Does it solve the problem we set out to solve, or does it not? You can even rate this on a scale of one to ten, so you can put these ideas up next to each other and say, “Okay, which of these is most effective? On a scale of one to ten, how well does it actually solve the problem that we’re trying to solve?”

The P is practical. How practical is it for us to execute this idea, given our resource constraints, given our time constraints, given the fact that we only have a couple of team members who can work on this. How practical are each of these ideas, again, on a scale of one to ten?

Then, is it interesting and cool is the final metric here. On a scale of one to ten, how excited are we about this idea? Because sometimes maybe there’s an idea that doesn’t seem as effective, but it’s really cool and so somebody is really arguing for it. Okay, well, that’s fine, give it a 10, but it’s only a four on effectiveness, or a five on effectiveness, which means maybe it’s not the best idea even though it’s got a lot of energy in the room, because it is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem we’re trying to solve.

Once you’ve ranked all of your ideas using this framework, effectiveness, practicality, and then is it interesting and cool, then you can actually have a meaningful conversation. You can say, well, idea two isn’t quite as practical as idea one, but I think we can make it more practical if we dot dot dot. So, it’s a great jumping off point for iteration. It also, as a leader, it gives you an opportunity to do some teaching with your team about how you think about ideas, or how you think about practicality, or how you think about resource allocation, or how you think about what is cool and what actually is interesting from a creative standpoint.

This is, in a world of highly subjective measurements, I find this tool to be really..

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John Jantsch: Leading or managing people in an organization is a tough job. It gets just that much tougher when the folks that you are choosing to lead are highly creative. In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Todd Henry. He’s the author of Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. If you or your organization has creative people, and let’s face it, that’s what drives a lot of business today, you need to check it out.

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Todd Henry. He is a speaker, consultant, advisor, and author of a number of books including the book we’re gonna talk about today, called Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. So, Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Henry: John, it’s so great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I can’t believe it’s taken me this long. I’m a big fan of your previous work, Die Empty, in fact you were awesome enough that you just happened to be passing through town and we flagged you down to come speak at one of my events and it was very, very motivating for everybody.

Todd Henry: It was so much fun, and I just have to say as encouragement to you, you’re the most humble person in the world so I know that you would never toot your own horn, but just seeing your community there and seeing how people responded to you and responded to what you have built there, it just really showed me the kind of integrity that you bring to your business, because you were able to attract people from all over the place to come to Louisville to spend some time with you, learning about the things that you wanted to teach them.

Just as encouragement to you, it was really, really amazing to see your community in action there as well. You didn’t ask me to do that, but I wanted to do it anyway.

John Jantsch: Well, I appreciate that, but longtime listeners know I’m not really that humble.

Todd Henry: Okay.

John Jantsch: So let me ask you the big question that came to my mind as I was reading Herding Tigers. How does leading creative people differ from being a creative leader?

Todd Henry: Oh, that’s a great question. No one has ever asked me that, actually. Listen, we’re all creative. We all have to solve problems every day as a function of our job. That’s just the nature of the modern workplace. So, if you have to go to work, solve problems, figure things out, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, you are creative to a certain extent. What I wanted to do in this book was talk about the dynamics of leading highly creative people.

Leading highly creative people is different from being a creative leader, because you can be a creative leader and lead a team of engineers or a team … which, by the way, engineers are incredibly creative and incredibly bright in that way. But, you can be a highly creative leader and be leading a more mundane, process oriented business and still be highly creative, because you still have to solve problems, figure out systems, et. cetera.

This book really is about leading highly creative people. People who maybe think a little bit differently from the norm, maybe people who might be a little more difficult to wrangle. What I wanted to do is really address some of those common dynamics among teams that are highly creative. What is it that makes them especially difficult to lead, and how can leaders, especially leaders maybe that are stepping into a role of leading highly creative people for the first time, how can they better position themselves to set their team up for success?

That’s the goal of the leader is to help their team succeed, not necessarily for them to succeed because if their team succeeds, then they will succeed.

John Jantsch: I guess it kind of begs two questions. Maybe you’re defining creative person in a very strict sense like the graphic designer or the writer or the video editor. Is that fair?

Todd Henry: I think it is fair, but I think that this applies to really leading any group of people that has to figure it out and make it up as they go, so if you’re a sales organization, you’re having to come up with creative solutions all the time to reach potential clients, having to re-strategize all the time. Like I said, if you’re leading a group of engineers, that is a project based business, a project based function, but it’s highly creative because you are doing nothing but problem solving all day. You’re looking out, exploring what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, looking for potentially useful fodder for your creative process.

All of those industries have some of the same dynamics I describe in the book. Now, that said, yes, my background, my experience is in leading the ‘traditional creative’ which is the designer, the writer, the videographer, those kinds of people. Yes, I was writing specifically from those kinds of experiences, but I think that the advice in the book applies more broadly to any group of people who have to solve problems and make it up as they go.

John Jantsch: So fundamentally then, what does this group, what do these creative people need that is fundamentally different?

Todd Henry: There really are two primary things that creative people need from their manager in order to thrive. The first one is stability, and stability is about ensuring that you have clarity of process, clarity of expectations, that they know that the rules of the game aren’t gonna change midstream. In a lot of industries that don’t require a tremendous amount of overhead in order to accomplish the work, it’s not that big of a deal if the objectives change midstream, because okay, now we’ve got a new strategy, that means my job is gonna be different tomorrow.

But, when you’re doing highly creative work that requires a tremendous amount of ramp up and forethought and then iteration, when the rules of the game change midstream it can be extremely frustrating. If somebody isn’t bought in to a strategic direction, and let’s say you get two weeks into the project and suddenly your boss’s boss swoops in and says, “You know what? This isn’t really working for me.” Well, your team has spent two weeks iterating on that idea, and now they have to go all the way back to the beginning, re strategize and start all over again, simply because someone wasn’t bought in.

That’s tremendously expensive to the organization. It’s very frustrating to a team of people, and so over time, the team of people just basically says, “Alright, I’m just gonna wait until you tell me what to do. I’m not gonna bring my best thought to the table or my best effort until I know it’s not gonna be wasted effort if the rules are constantly changing.” They need some degree of stability.

There’s a myth, John, that highly creative people just want complete freedom. Just don’t fence me in, give me no boundaries, I just wanna do what I wanna do, but that is a myth, because the reality is that healthy creative process has boundaries. It has rails in order to focus the creative energy. Without that, that energy is just gonna wither up and die. So, stability is the first thing that we need. Clear boundaries, clarity of expectations, clarity of process.

The second thing that highly creative people need is they need to be challenged. They need to be pushed. They want to know that their leader has faith in them. That their leader sees things in them maybe they don’t even see in themselves yet. They want to be pushed to be the best that they can be and to try new things, to tackle new kinds of projects, to venture out into those risky territories, and to know that if they fail, that somebody has their back.

This is also very important, people won’t take risks unless they know that the leader is there to have their back. If it’s a strategic risk, not if it’s a stupid risk, but if it’s a strategic risk then the leader needs to have their back and they need to know that they’re not just walking on thin ice. Hey, you could die and lose your job at any moment, or else people will begin to hold back just a bit.

The problem with stability and challenge is that they exist in tension with one another. As we increase the amount of challenge, we tend to destabilize the organization. This is where a lot of startups and entrepreneurial organizations live. We’re building the bicycle as we’re trying to ride it and we’re going a hundred miles an hour down the highway and we’re trying to avoid traffic and, oh isn’t this just wonderful?

Yeah, it’s wonderful for a little bit, but then over time, people begin to fry. They begin to burn out because we’re not wired for that kind of challenge without the supporting infrastructure to support that challenge. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations that settle in and they’re so processized that there’s no challenge any longer for the people on the team. People get bored, they get stuck, they start looking for broader horizons, and this is often where you hear people say things like, “I’m just not really challenged around here. I just don’t feel like I can really do my best work here. I feel like I’m not growing.”

Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel challenged. They don’t feel like they’re getting what they need from you as a leader in terms of challenge. As a manager, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, somebody who runs a business full of talented people, you are in the unique position to be able to identify that right mix of stability and challenge for those people on your team. If you notice somebody seems to be burning out pretty frequently, well, you need to ask, is it because there aren’t processes in place? There’s no stability there to support what I’m asking from them in terms of challenge, or if somebody’s constantly complaining they feel bored, they feel stuck, is it because I’m not giving them an opportunity to grow themselves, to challenge themselves, and to venture into those uncomfortable places?

John Jantsch: One of the places that you spend a lot of time, and I was glad to see this because I see this actually in lots of organizations with lots of small business owners even, whether they’re managing creatives or not, if they’re managing people, so often they get in this weird cycle of giving work, assigning work, creating process and structure, and then the minute something gets a little hard, they take it all back. There’s no way to grow for anybody, including the organization if you keep taking the work back. I think you called it stop doing the work.

Todd Henry: Right.

John Jantsch: You need to learn this. First off, what do you feel leads to that, and I guess, secondly, how do you solve that?

Todd Henry: I think that especially for entrepreneurs, think about somebody who started a business, I know a big chunk of the people who follow your work are small business owners, entrepreneurs. There’s a tremendous amount of identity wrapped up in starting a business, in the business itself. So, you identify yourself by the output of that business. Sometimes in healthy ways, and maybe sometimes in not so healthy ways. As you start to grow your business and you start to hand off more and more responsibility to other people, it becomes difficult sometimes to separate yourself a bit from the business from an identity standpoint, so that you’re allowing other people to take ownership of certain aspects of the business so that you’re not the one constantly there over their shoulder.

If you are the person constantly over their shoulder, then again, they’re just gonna say, “You know what? Just tell me what you want me to do.” You’ve hired great people and then you’re gonna look over their shoulder and micromanage every decision they make, that’s not the way to scale a business. It’s easy for that to happen, because so much of your identity is wrapped up in the work that gets done, in the business.

What we have to do is we have to transition from a maker mindset to a manager mindset. We have to transition from a mindset of presence to a mindset of principle, or from a mindset of control, which is what really all this is about, it’s about us wanting to control the work of the organization, to a mindset of influence.

We need to establish rails. We need to have a clear leadership philosophy. We need to help people on our team learn how we think about the work and how we think about decisions that we make, not just which decision in a specific scenario is the right decision to make according to us, and so I think it’s difficult to make that transition, to move from control to influence. I think a big part of that is just extricating yourself.

I think about the world that I come from, somebody maybe was a great designer or a great writer and they get promoted. What happens typically in organizations is somebody is really good at something and so somebody comes along and says, “You know what? You’re a really good designer. You know what you should do? You should lead other designers.” That’s a fundamentally different skill set, that’s a totally different thing, and yet that’s exactly what we do. This person, basically they’ve built their entire career upon the fact that they’re really good at a thing. That thing may be is design, or maybe that thing is financials or whatever it is. But, they’ve been really good at that thing and now, all of a sudden, they’re transitioning to not doing that thing, but leading other people who are doing that thing.

How do they identify themselves? Who are they anymore? What is the value they contribute? Before, they could point to a thing and say, “I did this.” Now that you’re leading other people, what is it exactly that you do? I think that’s where the identity crisis often resides in this. Our job is to shift our mindset from a maker mindset, from control, to influence, which means I’m going to teach my team a series of principles to help them make better decisions on their own. I’m gonna teach them how I think about what a good idea is. How I think about a good risk versus a bad risk. I’m gonna teach them how to determine the quality of a product and say, “Okay, is this good? Is this a good output, or is it not quite there yet?”

How do we define excellence as an organization? I’m gonna teach them how conflict should be handled so they can handle conflict between themselves instead of having to come to me every time there’s a conflict on the team. Once we begin to teach these principles, then we can step back and do the job that we’re actually accountable for, which is either growing the business, or leading the team to grow the business, depending on the type of business that we’re running.

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, over the years, the lessons I’ve really learned is that this has to be very intentional, of course. But, there are times when I’m doing my thing. Like you, I’ve go out and I speak and I write and I’m doing the work really, in the business. But, I have a team of people too, and it’s almost like I have to switch on that hat and remember that now I’m leading, so I’m not supposed to have all the answers. That to me is the hardest part because people come to you as the leader, and they say, “Todd, should I do this?” And your response, or at least my response is usually, they ask me a question, I’m gonna give ’em the answer and what I’ve learned over the years is you’ve gotta establish this practice of giving it back to them, saying, “What would you do in that situation?” Or something of that nature.

Todd Henry: Yes.

John Jantsch: Then, of course, the other challenge is you’ve gotta stay so consistent, I think, with it, because how many companies have read a book like yours and the person goes back and says, “It’s gonna be different now!”

Todd Henry: Yes, that’s exactly right. The challenge in all of that is either that we, as a leader, our area of greatest insecurity is the place where we have the potential to do the most damage. As a leader, if we’re not aware of that, the fact that it’s really hard for us to let stuff go, the fact that it’s really difficult for us to let our team run with things, those areas of insecurity become the places we have to turn into watch points personally, because your area of greatest insecurity is the place where you have the potential to do the most damage to your team, and ultimately to your business if you’re not careful.

John Jantsch: How much of the job of the leader, because I think creative people seek inspiration. They tend to be maybe a little more curious about how things work and why they work and don’t work. How much of the job of the leader in this case is to keep those folks inspired?

Todd Henry: I think it’s a huge percentage of the job is keeping them inspired and keeping them focused on the right things. Setting good rails, making sure that they’re looking in the right places. “Hey look over here! Hey, have you seen this? Hey, let’s not focus on that right now, let’s look at this thing over here, because this seems to be the thing that has the most potential.” That’s not the same thing as doing the work for them, that’s basically doing traffic flow for them. It’s making sure that they’re windowing out the stuff that you can see is really not essential and focusing them then on the things that are actually most important.

The thing is, if we wanna be an inspirational leader, then we have to be inspired ourselves. This is something I find often in the lives of leaders; they want to inspire their team but they’re not building practices into their own life to keep themselves inspired. They’re not dedicating time for study, for going out, for exploring, for tilling the soil and looking for potentially useful things in the environment that they can funnel to their team. They’re not doing any kind of personal and professional development themselves and yet they expect their team to be doing that, but they’re not developing themselves.

I think the first thing we have to recognize is that if we wanna be an inspiring leader, if we wanna be the kind of leader that’s bringing ideas to the table and pushing our team in the right place and is able to think systemically in a way that’s actually valuable and useful to our team because we’re seeing the patterns that are emerging in the work and in the team dynamics, then we have to be dedicating time and energy to developing ourselves, to studying, to looking for patterns out there in the marketplace and patterns out there in the environment.

That’s really one of the things we’re uniquely positioned to do as leaders because of our perch, and yet often we don’t do that. If you are not inspired, then you cannot inspire your team.

John Jantsch: One of the things that’s gotta be part of any leader is we’ve got objectives, we have key results that we’re trying to do, we have deadlines, there are things that have to be measured and tracked. I would suggest that some people would say that that’s harder to do with creatives? Maybe a deadline works, maybe it doesn’t, but how do you define and track what might be different with a creative team?

Todd Henry: That is a really great question, because you’re right. If we’re doing accounting, it’s pretty easy to tell whether we got it right or not. You could sorta say, “Numbers aren’t adding up. Okay, let’s figure this out. This isn’t working right.” It’s a different kind of problem. With creative work, it is highly qualitative often. In the end, somebody is either gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down based upon, in some cases, their subjective opinion. No matter how research based your work is, no matter how tight your rationale is, they’re gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, and it’s basically based on what they perceive to be right or not right with regard to the work.

So, one of the tools that I like to teach people to help them determine, in a little bit more of a not quantitative way, but a little bit more of an objective way, which idea is the right idea? It spells the word EPIC, which, I don’t like doing things like that where, hey it spells this, but it does, it spells EPIC, is, if you have a handful of ideas you’re trying to evaluate, you’re trying to decide between, I encourage you to use this framework to do it. It works really, really well.

The first thing is, you’re gonna ask, is it effective? Is this idea effective? Does it solve the problem we set out to solve, or does it not? You can even rate this on a scale of one to ten, so you can put these ideas up next to each other and say, “Okay, which of these is most effective? On a scale of one to ten, how well does it actually solve the problem that we’re trying to solve?”

The P is practical. How practical is it for us to execute this idea, given our resource constraints, given our time constraints, given the fact that we only have a couple of team members who can work on this. How practical are each of these ideas, again, on a scale of one to ten?

Then, is it interesting and cool is the final metric here. On a scale of one to ten, how excited are we about this idea? Because sometimes maybe there’s an idea that doesn’t seem as effective, but it’s really cool and so somebody is really arguing for it. Okay, well, that’s fine, give it a 10, but it’s only a four on effectiveness, or a five on effectiveness, which means maybe it’s not the best idea even though it’s got a lot of energy in the room, because it is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem we’re trying to solve.

Once you’ve ranked all of your ideas using this framework, effectiveness, practicality, and then is it interesting and cool, then you can actually have a meaningful conversation. You can say, well, idea two isn’t quite as practical as idea one, but I think we can make it more practical if we dot dot dot. So, it’s a great jumping off point for iteration. It also, as a leader, it gives you an opportunity to do some teaching with your team about how you think about ideas, or how you think about practicality, or how you think about resource allocation, or how you think about what is cool and what actually is interesting from a creative standpoint.

This is, in a world of highly subjective measurements, I find this tool to be really..

http://bit.ly/2SvPbpn

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John Jantsch: Leading or managing people in an organization is a tough job. It gets just that much tougher when the folks that you are choosing to lead are highly creative. In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Todd Henry. He’s the author of Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. If you or your organization has creative people, and let’s face it, that’s what drives a lot of business today, you need to check it out.

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Todd Henry. He is a speaker, consultant, advisor, and author of a number of books including the book we’re gonna talk about today, called Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. So, Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Henry: John, it’s so great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I can’t believe it’s taken me this long. I’m a big fan of your previous work, Die Empty, in fact you were awesome enough that you just happened to be passing through town and we flagged you down to come speak at one of my events and it was very, very motivating for everybody.

Todd Henry: It was so much fun, and I just have to say as encouragement to you, you’re the most humble person in the world so I know that you would never toot your own horn, but just seeing your community there and seeing how people responded to you and responded to what you have built there, it just really showed me the kind of integrity that you bring to your business, because you were able to attract people from all over the place to come to Louisville to spend some time with you, learning about the things that you wanted to teach them.

Just as encouragement to you, it was really, really amazing to see your community in action there as well. You didn’t ask me to do that, but I wanted to do it anyway.

John Jantsch: Well, I appreciate that, but longtime listeners know I’m not really that humble.

Todd Henry: Okay.

John Jantsch: So let me ask you the big question that came to my mind as I was reading Herding Tigers. How does leading creative people differ from being a creative leader?

Todd Henry: Oh, that’s a great question. No one has ever asked me that, actually. Listen, we’re all creative. We all have to solve problems every day as a function of our job. That’s just the nature of the modern workplace. So, if you have to go to work, solve problems, figure things out, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, you are creative to a certain extent. What I wanted to do in this book was talk about the dynamics of leading highly creative people.

Leading highly creative people is different from being a creative leader, because you can be a creative leader and lead a team of engineers or a team … which, by the way, engineers are incredibly creative and incredibly bright in that way. But, you can be a highly creative leader and be leading a more mundane, process oriented business and still be highly creative, because you still have to solve problems, figure out systems, et. cetera.

This book really is about leading highly creative people. People who maybe think a little bit differently from the norm, maybe people who might be a little more difficult to wrangle. What I wanted to do is really address some of those common dynamics among teams that are highly creative. What is it that makes them especially difficult to lead, and how can leaders, especially leaders maybe that are stepping into a role of leading highly creative people for the first time, how can they better position themselves to set their team up for success?

That’s the goal of the leader is to help their team succeed, not necessarily for them to succeed because if their team succeeds, then they will succeed.

John Jantsch: I guess it kind of begs two questions. Maybe you’re defining creative person in a very strict sense like the graphic designer or the writer or the video editor. Is that fair?

Todd Henry: I think it is fair, but I think that this applies to really leading any group of people that has to figure it out and make it up as they go, so if you’re a sales organization, you’re having to come up with creative solutions all the time to reach potential clients, having to re-strategize all the time. Like I said, if you’re leading a group of engineers, that is a project based business, a project based function, but it’s highly creative because you are doing nothing but problem solving all day. You’re looking out, exploring what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, looking for potentially useful fodder for your creative process.

All of those industries have some of the same dynamics I describe in the book. Now, that said, yes, my background, my experience is in leading the ‘traditional creative’ which is the designer, the writer, the videographer, those kinds of people. Yes, I was writing specifically from those kinds of experiences, but I think that the advice in the book applies more broadly to any group of people who have to solve problems and make it up as they go.

John Jantsch: So fundamentally then, what does this group, what do these creative people need that is fundamentally different?

Todd Henry: There really are two primary things that creative people need from their manager in order to thrive. The first one is stability, and stability is about ensuring that you have clarity of process, clarity of expectations, that they know that the rules of the game aren’t gonna change midstream. In a lot of industries that don’t require a tremendous amount of overhead in order to accomplish the work, it’s not that big of a deal if the objectives change midstream, because okay, now we’ve got a new strategy, that means my job is gonna be different tomorrow.

But, when you’re doing highly creative work that requires a tremendous amount of ramp up and forethought and then iteration, when the rules of the game change midstream it can be extremely frustrating. If somebody isn’t bought in to a strategic direction, and let’s say you get two weeks into the project and suddenly your boss’s boss swoops in and says, “You know what? This isn’t really working for me.” Well, your team has spent two weeks iterating on that idea, and now they have to go all the way back to the beginning, re strategize and start all over again, simply because someone wasn’t bought in.

That’s tremendously expensive to the organization. It’s very frustrating to a team of people, and so over time, the team of people just basically says, “Alright, I’m just gonna wait until you tell me what to do. I’m not gonna bring my best thought to the table or my best effort until I know it’s not gonna be wasted effort if the rules are constantly changing.” They need some degree of stability.

There’s a myth, John, that highly creative people just want complete freedom. Just don’t fence me in, give me no boundaries, I just wanna do what I wanna do, but that is a myth, because the reality is that healthy creative process has boundaries. It has rails in order to focus the creative energy. Without that, that energy is just gonna wither up and die. So, stability is the first thing that we need. Clear boundaries, clarity of expectations, clarity of process.

The second thing that highly creative people need is they need to be challenged. They need to be pushed. They want to know that their leader has faith in them. That their leader sees things in them maybe they don’t even see in themselves yet. They want to be pushed to be the best that they can be and to try new things, to tackle new kinds of projects, to venture out into those risky territories, and to know that if they fail, that somebody has their back.

This is also very important, people won’t take risks unless they know that the leader is there to have their back. If it’s a strategic risk, not if it’s a stupid risk, but if it’s a strategic risk then the leader needs to have their back and they need to know that they’re not just walking on thin ice. Hey, you could die and lose your job at any moment, or else people will begin to hold back just a bit.

The problem with stability and challenge is that they exist in tension with one another. As we increase the amount of challenge, we tend to destabilize the organization. This is where a lot of startups and entrepreneurial organizations live. We’re building the bicycle as we’re trying to ride it and we’re going a hundred miles an hour down the highway and we’re trying to avoid traffic and, oh isn’t this just wonderful?

Yeah, it’s wonderful for a little bit, but then over time, people begin to fry. They begin to burn out because we’re not wired for that kind of challenge without the supporting infrastructure to support that challenge. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations that settle in and they’re so processized that there’s no challenge any longer for the people on the team. People get bored, they get stuck, they start looking for broader horizons, and this is often where you hear people say things like, “I’m just not really challenged around here. I just don’t feel like I can really do my best work here. I feel like I’m not growing.”

Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel challenged. They don’t feel like they’re getting what they need from you as a leader in terms of challenge. As a manager, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, somebody who runs a business full of talented people, you are in the unique position to be able to identify that right mix of stability and challenge for those people on your team. If you notice somebody seems to be burning out pretty frequently, well, you need to ask, is it because there aren’t processes in place? There’s no stability there to support what I’m asking from them in terms of challenge, or if somebody’s constantly complaining they feel bored, they feel stuck, is it because I’m not giving them an opportunity to grow themselves, to challenge themselves, and to venture into those uncomfortable places?

John Jantsch: One of the places that you spend a lot of time, and I was glad to see this because I see this actually in lots of organizations with lots of small business owners even, whether they’re managing creatives or not, if they’re managing people, so often they get in this weird cycle of giving work, assigning work, creating process and structure, and then the minute something gets a little hard, they take it all back. There’s no way to grow for anybody, including the organization if you keep taking the work back. I think you called it stop doing the work.

Todd Henry: Right.

John Jantsch: You need to learn this. First off, what do you feel leads to that, and I guess, secondly, how do you solve that?

Todd Henry: I think that especially for entrepreneurs, think about somebody who started a business, I know a big chunk of the people who follow your work are small business owners, entrepreneurs. There’s a tremendous amount of identity wrapped up in starting a business, in the business itself. So, you identify yourself by the output of that business. Sometimes in healthy ways, and maybe sometimes in not so healthy ways. As you start to grow your business and you start to hand off more and more responsibility to other people, it becomes difficult sometimes to separate yourself a bit from the business from an identity standpoint, so that you’re allowing other people to take ownership of certain aspects of the business so that you’re not the one constantly there over their shoulder.

If you are the person constantly over their shoulder, then again, they’re just gonna say, “You know what? Just tell me what you want me to do.” You’ve hired great people and then you’re gonna look over their shoulder and micromanage every decision they make, that’s not the way to scale a business. It’s easy for that to happen, because so much of your identity is wrapped up in the work that gets done, in the business.

What we have to do is we have to transition from a maker mindset to a manager mindset. We have to transition from a mindset of presence to a mindset of principle, or from a mindset of control, which is what really all this is about, it’s about us wanting to control the work of the organization, to a mindset of influence.

We need to establish rails. We need to have a clear leadership philosophy. We need to help people on our team learn how we think about the work and how we think about decisions that we make, not just which decision in a specific scenario is the right decision to make according to us, and so I think it’s difficult to make that transition, to move from control to influence. I think a big part of that is just extricating yourself.

I think about the world that I come from, somebody maybe was a great designer or a great writer and they get promoted. What happens typically in organizations is somebody is really good at something and so somebody comes along and says, “You know what? You’re a really good designer. You know what you should do? You should lead other designers.” That’s a fundamentally different skill set, that’s a totally different thing, and yet that’s exactly what we do. This person, basically they’ve built their entire career upon the fact that they’re really good at a thing. That thing may be is design, or maybe that thing is financials or whatever it is. But, they’ve been really good at that thing and now, all of a sudden, they’re transitioning to not doing that thing, but leading other people who are doing that thing.

How do they identify themselves? Who are they anymore? What is the value they contribute? Before, they could point to a thing and say, “I did this.” Now that you’re leading other people, what is it exactly that you do? I think that’s where the identity crisis often resides in this. Our job is to shift our mindset from a maker mindset, from control, to influence, which means I’m going to teach my team a series of principles to help them make better decisions on their own. I’m gonna teach them how I think about what a good idea is. How I think about a good risk versus a bad risk. I’m gonna teach them how to determine the quality of a product and say, “Okay, is this good? Is this a good output, or is it not quite there yet?”

How do we define excellence as an organization? I’m gonna teach them how conflict should be handled so they can handle conflict between themselves instead of having to come to me every time there’s a conflict on the team. Once we begin to teach these principles, then we can step back and do the job that we’re actually accountable for, which is either growing the business, or leading the team to grow the business, depending on the type of business that we’re running.

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, over the years, the lessons I’ve really learned is that this has to be very intentional, of course. But, there are times when I’m doing my thing. Like you, I’ve go out and I speak and I write and I’m doing the work really, in the business. But, I have a team of people too, and it’s almost like I have to switch on that hat and remember that now I’m leading, so I’m not supposed to have all the answers. That to me is the hardest part because people come to you as the leader, and they say, “Todd, should I do this?” And your response, or at least my response is usually, they ask me a question, I’m gonna give ’em the answer and what I’ve learned over the years is you’ve gotta establish this practice of giving it back to them, saying, “What would you do in that situation?” Or something of that nature.

Todd Henry: Yes.

John Jantsch: Then, of course, the other challenge is you’ve gotta stay so consistent, I think, with it, because how many companies have read a book like yours and the person goes back and says, “It’s gonna be different now!”

Todd Henry: Yes, that’s exactly right. The challenge in all of that is either that we, as a leader, our area of greatest insecurity is the place where we have the potential to do the most damage. As a leader, if we’re not aware of that, the fact that it’s really hard for us to let stuff go, the fact that it’s really difficult for us to let our team run with things, those areas of insecurity become the places we have to turn into watch points personally, because your area of greatest insecurity is the place where you have the potential to do the most damage to your team, and ultimately to your business if you’re not careful.

John Jantsch: How much of the job of the leader, because I think creative people seek inspiration. They tend to be maybe a little more curious about how things work and why they work and don’t work. How much of the job of the leader in this case is to keep those folks inspired?

Todd Henry: I think it’s a huge percentage of the job is keeping them inspired and keeping them focused on the right things. Setting good rails, making sure that they’re looking in the right places. “Hey look over here! Hey, have you seen this? Hey, let’s not focus on that right now, let’s look at this thing over here, because this seems to be the thing that has the most potential.” That’s not the same thing as doing the work for them, that’s basically doing traffic flow for them. It’s making sure that they’re windowing out the stuff that you can see is really not essential and focusing them then on the things that are actually most important.

The thing is, if we wanna be an inspirational leader, then we have to be inspired ourselves. This is something I find often in the lives of leaders; they want to inspire their team but they’re not building practices into their own life to keep themselves inspired. They’re not dedicating time for study, for going out, for exploring, for tilling the soil and looking for potentially useful things in the environment that they can funnel to their team. They’re not doing any kind of personal and professional development themselves and yet they expect their team to be doing that, but they’re not developing themselves.

I think the first thing we have to recognize is that if we wanna be an inspiring leader, if we wanna be the kind of leader that’s bringing ideas to the table and pushing our team in the right place and is able to think systemically in a way that’s actually valuable and useful to our team because we’re seeing the patterns that are emerging in the work and in the team dynamics, then we have to be dedicating time and energy to developing ourselves, to studying, to looking for patterns out there in the marketplace and patterns out there in the environment.

That’s really one of the things we’re uniquely positioned to do as leaders because of our perch, and yet often we don’t do that. If you are not inspired, then you cannot inspire your team.

John Jantsch: One of the things that’s gotta be part of any leader is we’ve got objectives, we have key results that we’re trying to do, we have deadlines, there are things that have to be measured and tracked. I would suggest that some people would say that that’s harder to do with creatives? Maybe a deadline works, maybe it doesn’t, but how do you define and track what might be different with a creative team?

Todd Henry: That is a really great question, because you’re right. If we’re doing accounting, it’s pretty easy to tell whether we got it right or not. You could sorta say, “Numbers aren’t adding up. Okay, let’s figure this out. This isn’t working right.” It’s a different kind of problem. With creative work, it is highly qualitative often. In the end, somebody is either gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down based upon, in some cases, their subjective opinion. No matter how research based your work is, no matter how tight your rationale is, they’re gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, and it’s basically based on what they perceive to be right or not right with regard to the work.

So, one of the tools that I like to teach people to help them determine, in a little bit more of a not quantitative way, but a little bit more of an objective way, which idea is the right idea? It spells the word EPIC, which, I don’t like doing things like that where, hey it spells this, but it does, it spells EPIC, is, if you have a handful of ideas you’re trying to evaluate, you’re trying to decide between, I encourage you to use this framework to do it. It works really, really well.

The first thing is, you’re gonna ask, is it effective? Is this idea effective? Does it solve the problem we set out to solve, or does it not? You can even rate this on a scale of one to ten, so you can put these ideas up next to each other and say, “Okay, which of these is most effective? On a scale of one to ten, how well does it actually solve the problem that we’re trying to solve?”

The P is practical. How practical is it for us to execute this idea, given our resource constraints, given our time constraints, given the fact that we only have a couple of team members who can work on this. How practical are each of these ideas, again, on a scale of one to ten?

Then, is it interesting and cool is the final metric here. On a scale of one to ten, how excited are we about this idea? Because sometimes maybe there’s an idea that doesn’t seem as effective, but it’s really cool and so somebody is really arguing for it. Okay, well, that’s fine, give it a 10, but it’s only a four on effectiveness, or a five on effectiveness, which means maybe it’s not the best idea even though it’s got a lot of energy in the room, because it is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem we’re trying to solve.

Once you’ve ranked all of your ideas using this framework, effectiveness, practicality, and then is it interesting and cool, then you can actually have a meaningful conversation. You can say, well, idea two isn’t quite as practical as idea one, but I think we can make it more practical if we dot dot dot. So, it’s a great jumping off point for iteration. It also, as a leader, it gives you an opportunity to do some teaching with your team about how you think about ideas, or how you think about practicality, or how you think about resource allocation, or how you think about what is cool and what actually is interesting from a creative standpoint.

This is, in a world of highly subjective measurements, I find this tool to be really..

http://bit.ly/2SvPbpn

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Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People

Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People

Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Leading or managing people in an organization is a tough job. It gets just that much tougher when the folks that you are choosing to lead are highly creative. In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Todd Henry. He’s the author of Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. If you or your organization has creative people, and let’s face it, that’s what drives a lot of business today, you need to check it out.

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Todd Henry. He is a speaker, consultant, advisor, and author of a number of books including the book we’re gonna talk about today, called Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. So, Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Henry: John, it’s so great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I can’t believe it’s taken me this long. I’m a big fan of your previous work, Die Empty, in fact you were awesome enough that you just happened to be passing through town and we flagged you down to come speak at one of my events and it was very, very motivating for everybody.

Todd Henry: It was so much fun, and I just have to say as encouragement to you, you’re the most humble person in the world so I know that you would never toot your own horn, but just seeing your community there and seeing how people responded to you and responded to what you have built there, it just really showed me the kind of integrity that you bring to your business, because you were able to attract people from all over the place to come to Louisville to spend some time with you, learning about the things that you wanted to teach them.

Just as encouragement to you, it was really, really amazing to see your community in action there as well. You didn’t ask me to do that, but I wanted to do it anyway.

John Jantsch: Well, I appreciate that, but longtime listeners know I’m not really that humble.

Todd Henry: Okay.

John Jantsch: So let me ask you the big question that came to my mind as I was reading Herding Tigers. How does leading creative people differ from being a creative leader?

Todd Henry: Oh, that’s a great question. No one has ever asked me that, actually. Listen, we’re all creative. We all have to solve problems every day as a function of our job. That’s just the nature of the modern workplace. So, if you have to go to work, solve problems, figure things out, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, you are creative to a certain extent. What I wanted to do in this book was talk about the dynamics of leading highly creative people.

Leading highly creative people is different from being a creative leader, because you can be a creative leader and lead a team of engineers or a team … which, by the way, engineers are incredibly creative and incredibly bright in that way. But, you can be a highly creative leader and be leading a more mundane, process oriented business and still be highly creative, because you still have to solve problems, figure out systems, et. cetera.

This book really is about leading highly creative people. People who maybe think a little bit differently from the norm, maybe people who might be a little more difficult to wrangle. What I wanted to do is really address some of those common dynamics among teams that are highly creative. What is it that makes them especially difficult to lead, and how can leaders, especially leaders maybe that are stepping into a role of leading highly creative people for the first time, how can they better position themselves to set their team up for success?

That’s the goal of the leader is to help their team succeed, not necessarily for them to succeed because if their team succeeds, then they will succeed.

John Jantsch: I guess it kind of begs two questions. Maybe you’re defining creative person in a very strict sense like the graphic designer or the writer or the video editor. Is that fair?

Todd Henry: I think it is fair, but I think that this applies to really leading any group of people that has to figure it out and make it up as they go, so if you’re a sales organization, you’re having to come up with creative solutions all the time to reach potential clients, having to re-strategize all the time. Like I said, if you’re leading a group of engineers, that is a project based business, a project based function, but it’s highly creative because you are doing nothing but problem solving all day. You’re looking out, exploring what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, looking for potentially useful fodder for your creative process.

All of those industries have some of the same dynamics I describe in the book. Now, that said, yes, my background, my experience is in leading the ‘traditional creative’ which is the designer, the writer, the videographer, those kinds of people. Yes, I was writing specifically from those kinds of experiences, but I think that the advice in the book applies more broadly to any group of people who have to solve problems and make it up as they go.

John Jantsch: So fundamentally then, what does this group, what do these creative people need that is fundamentally different?

Todd Henry: There really are two primary things that creative people need from their manager in order to thrive. The first one is stability, and stability is about ensuring that you have clarity of process, clarity of expectations, that they know that the rules of the game aren’t gonna change midstream. In a lot of industries that don’t require a tremendous amount of overhead in order to accomplish the work, it’s not that big of a deal if the objectives change midstream, because okay, now we’ve got a new strategy, that means my job is gonna be different tomorrow.

But, when you’re doing highly creative work that requires a tremendous amount of ramp up and forethought and then iteration, when the rules of the game change midstream it can be extremely frustrating. If somebody isn’t bought in to a strategic direction, and let’s say you get two weeks into the project and suddenly your boss’s boss swoops in and says, “You know what? This isn’t really working for me.” Well, your team has spent two weeks iterating on that idea, and now they have to go all the way back to the beginning, re strategize and start all over again, simply because someone wasn’t bought in.

That’s tremendously expensive to the organization. It’s very frustrating to a team of people, and so over time, the team of people just basically says, “Alright, I’m just gonna wait until you tell me what to do. I’m not gonna bring my best thought to the table or my best effort until I know it’s not gonna be wasted effort if the rules are constantly changing.” They need some degree of stability.

There’s a myth, John, that highly creative people just want complete freedom. Just don’t fence me in, give me no boundaries, I just wanna do what I wanna do, but that is a myth, because the reality is that healthy creative process has boundaries. It has rails in order to focus the creative energy. Without that, that energy is just gonna wither up and die. So, stability is the first thing that we need. Clear boundaries, clarity of expectations, clarity of process.

The second thing that highly creative people need is they need to be challenged. They need to be pushed. They want to know that their leader has faith in them. That their leader sees things in them maybe they don’t even see in themselves yet. They want to be pushed to be the best that they can be and to try new things, to tackle new kinds of projects, to venture out into those risky territories, and to know that if they fail, that somebody has their back.

This is also very important, people won’t take risks unless they know that the leader is there to have their back. If it’s a strategic risk, not if it’s a stupid risk, but if it’s a strategic risk then the leader needs to have their back and they need to know that they’re not just walking on thin ice. Hey, you could die and lose your job at any moment, or else people will begin to hold back just a bit.

The problem with stability and challenge is that they exist in tension with one another. As we increase the amount of challenge, we tend to destabilize the organization. This is where a lot of startups and entrepreneurial organizations live. We’re building the bicycle as we’re trying to ride it and we’re going a hundred miles an hour down the highway and we’re trying to avoid traffic and, oh isn’t this just wonderful?

Yeah, it’s wonderful for a little bit, but then over time, people begin to fry. They begin to burn out because we’re not wired for that kind of challenge without the supporting infrastructure to support that challenge. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations that settle in and they’re so processized that there’s no challenge any longer for the people on the team. People get bored, they get stuck, they start looking for broader horizons, and this is often where you hear people say things like, “I’m just not really challenged around here. I just don’t feel like I can really do my best work here. I feel like I’m not growing.”

Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel challenged. They don’t feel like they’re getting what they need from you as a leader in terms of challenge. As a manager, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, somebody who runs a business full of talented people, you are in the unique position to be able to identify that right mix of stability and challenge for those people on your team. If you notice somebody seems to be burning out pretty frequently, well, you need to ask, is it because there aren’t processes in place? There’s no stability there to support what I’m asking from them in terms of challenge, or if somebody’s constantly complaining they feel bored, they feel stuck, is it because I’m not giving them an opportunity to grow themselves, to challenge themselves, and to venture into those uncomfortable places?

John Jantsch: One of the places that you spend a lot of time, and I was glad to see this because I see this actually in lots of organizations with lots of small business owners even, whether they’re managing creatives or not, if they’re managing people, so often they get in this weird cycle of giving work, assigning work, creating process and structure, and then the minute something gets a little hard, they take it all back. There’s no way to grow for anybody, including the organization if you keep taking the work back. I think you called it stop doing the work.

Todd Henry: Right.

John Jantsch: You need to learn this. First off, what do you feel leads to that, and I guess, secondly, how do you solve that?

Todd Henry: I think that especially for entrepreneurs, think about somebody who started a business, I know a big chunk of the people who follow your work are small business owners, entrepreneurs. There’s a tremendous amount of identity wrapped up in starting a business, in the business itself. So, you identify yourself by the output of that business. Sometimes in healthy ways, and maybe sometimes in not so healthy ways. As you start to grow your business and you start to hand off more and more responsibility to other people, it becomes difficult sometimes to separate yourself a bit from the business from an identity standpoint, so that you’re allowing other people to take ownership of certain aspects of the business so that you’re not the one constantly there over their shoulder.

If you are the person constantly over their shoulder, then again, they’re just gonna say, “You know what? Just tell me what you want me to do.” You’ve hired great people and then you’re gonna look over their shoulder and micromanage every decision they make, that’s not the way to scale a business. It’s easy for that to happen, because so much of your identity is wrapped up in the work that gets done, in the business.

What we have to do is we have to transition from a maker mindset to a manager mindset. We have to transition from a mindset of presence to a mindset of principle, or from a mindset of control, which is what really all this is about, it’s about us wanting to control the work of the organization, to a mindset of influence.

We need to establish rails. We need to have a clear leadership philosophy. We need to help people on our team learn how we think about the work and how we think about decisions that we make, not just which decision in a specific scenario is the right decision to make according to us, and so I think it’s difficult to make that transition, to move from control to influence. I think a big part of that is just extricating yourself.

I think about the world that I come from, somebody maybe was a great designer or a great writer and they get promoted. What happens typically in organizations is somebody is really good at something and so somebody comes along and says, “You know what? You’re a really good designer. You know what you should do? You should lead other designers.” That’s a fundamentally different skill set, that’s a totally different thing, and yet that’s exactly what we do. This person, basically they’ve built their entire career upon the fact that they’re really good at a thing. That thing may be is design, or maybe that thing is financials or whatever it is. But, they’ve been really good at that thing and now, all of a sudden, they’re transitioning to not doing that thing, but leading other people who are doing that thing.

How do they identify themselves? Who are they anymore? What is the value they contribute? Before, they could point to a thing and say, “I did this.” Now that you’re leading other people, what is it exactly that you do? I think that’s where the identity crisis often resides in this. Our job is to shift our mindset from a maker mindset, from control, to influence, which means I’m going to teach my team a series of principles to help them make better decisions on their own. I’m gonna teach them how I think about what a good idea is. How I think about a good risk versus a bad risk. I’m gonna teach them how to determine the quality of a product and say, “Okay, is this good? Is this a good output, or is it not quite there yet?”

How do we define excellence as an organization? I’m gonna teach them how conflict should be handled so they can handle conflict between themselves instead of having to come to me every time there’s a conflict on the team. Once we begin to teach these principles, then we can step back and do the job that we’re actually accountable for, which is either growing the business, or leading the team to grow the business, depending on the type of business that we’re running.

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, over the years, the lessons I’ve really learned is that this has to be very intentional, of course. But, there are times when I’m doing my thing. Like you, I’ve go out and I speak and I write and I’m doing the work really, in the business. But, I have a team of people too, and it’s almost like I have to switch on that hat and remember that now I’m leading, so I’m not supposed to have all the answers. That to me is the hardest part because people come to you as the leader, and they say, “Todd, should I do this?” And your response, or at least my response is usually, they ask me a question, I’m gonna give ’em the answer and what I’ve learned over the years is you’ve gotta establish this practice of giving it back to them, saying, “What would you do in that situation?” Or something of that nature.

Todd Henry: Yes.

John Jantsch: Then, of course, the other challenge is you’ve gotta stay so consistent, I think, with it, because how many companies have read a book like yours and the person goes back and says, “It’s gonna be different now!”

Todd Henry: Yes, that’s exactly right. The challenge in all of that is either that we, as a leader, our area of greatest insecurity is the place where we have the potential to do the most damage. As a leader, if we’re not aware of that, the fact that it’s really hard for us to let stuff go, the fact that it’s really difficult for us to let our team run with things, those areas of insecurity become the places we have to turn into watch points personally, because your area of greatest insecurity is the place where you have the potential to do the most damage to your team, and ultimately to your business if you’re not careful.

John Jantsch: How much of the job of the leader, because I think creative people seek inspiration. They tend to be maybe a little more curious about how things work and why they work and don’t work. How much of the job of the leader in this case is to keep those folks inspired?

Todd Henry: I think it’s a huge percentage of the job is keeping them inspired and keeping them focused on the right things. Setting good rails, making sure that they’re looking in the right places. “Hey look over here! Hey, have you seen this? Hey, let’s not focus on that right now, let’s look at this thing over here, because this seems to be the thing that has the most potential.” That’s not the same thing as doing the work for them, that’s basically doing traffic flow for them. It’s making sure that they’re windowing out the stuff that you can see is really not essential and focusing them then on the things that are actually most important.

The thing is, if we wanna be an inspirational leader, then we have to be inspired ourselves. This is something I find often in the lives of leaders; they want to inspire their team but they’re not building practices into their own life to keep themselves inspired. They’re not dedicating time for study, for going out, for exploring, for tilling the soil and looking for potentially useful things in the environment that they can funnel to their team. They’re not doing any kind of personal and professional development themselves and yet they expect their team to be doing that, but they’re not developing themselves.

I think the first thing we have to recognize is that if we wanna be an inspiring leader, if we wanna be the kind of leader that’s bringing ideas to the table and pushing our team in the right place and is able to think systemically in a way that’s actually valuable and useful to our team because we’re seeing the patterns that are emerging in the work and in the team dynamics, then we have to be dedicating time and energy to developing ourselves, to studying, to looking for patterns out there in the marketplace and patterns out there in the environment.

That’s really one of the things we’re uniquely positioned to do as leaders because of our perch, and yet often we don’t do that. If you are not inspired, then you cannot inspire your team.

John Jantsch: One of the things that’s gotta be part of any leader is we’ve got objectives, we have key results that we’re trying to do, we have deadlines, there are things that have to be measured and tracked. I would suggest that some people would say that that’s harder to do with creatives? Maybe a deadline works, maybe it doesn’t, but how do you define and track what might be different with a creative team?

Todd Henry: That is a really great question, because you’re right. If we’re doing accounting, it’s pretty easy to tell whether we got it right or not. You could sorta say, “Numbers aren’t adding up. Okay, let’s figure this out. This isn’t working right.” It’s a different kind of problem. With creative work, it is highly qualitative often. In the end, somebody is either gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down based upon, in some cases, their subjective opinion. No matter how research based your work is, no matter how tight your rationale is, they’re gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, and it’s basically based on what they perceive to be right or not right with regard to the work.

So, one of the tools that I like to teach people to help them determine, in a little bit more of a not quantitative way, but a little bit more of an objective way, which idea is the right idea? It spells the word EPIC, which, I don’t like doing things like that where, hey it spells this, but it does, it spells EPIC, is, if you have a handful of ideas you’re trying to evaluate, you’re trying to decide between, I encourage you to use this framework to do it. It works really, really well.

The first thing is, you’re gonna ask, is it effective? Is this idea effective? Does it solve the problem we set out to solve, or does it not? You can even rate this on a scale of one to ten, so you can put these ideas up next to each other and say, “Okay, which of these is most effective? On a scale of one to ten, how well does it actually solve the problem that we’re trying to solve?”

The P is practical. How practical is it for us to execute this idea, given our resource constraints, given our time constraints, given the fact that we only have a couple of team members who can work on this. How practical are each of these ideas, again, on a scale of one to ten?

Then, is it interesting and cool is the final metric here. On a scale of one to ten, how excited are we about this idea? Because sometimes maybe there’s an idea that doesn’t seem as effective, but it’s really cool and so somebody is really arguing for it. Okay, well, that’s fine, give it a 10, but it’s only a four on effectiveness, or a five on effectiveness, which means maybe it’s not the best idea even though it’s got a lot of energy in the room, because it is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem we’re trying to solve.

Once you’ve ranked all of your ideas using this framework, effectiveness, practicality, and then is it interesting and cool, then you can actually have a meaningful conversation. You can say, well, idea two isn’t quite as practical as idea one, but I think we can make it more practical if we dot dot dot. So, it’s a great jumping off point for iteration. It also, as a leader, it gives you an opportunity to do some teaching with your team about how you think about ideas, or how you think about practicality, or how you think about resource allocation, or how you think about what is cool and what actually is interesting from a creative standpoint.

This is, in a world of highly subjective measurements, I find this tool to be really..

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John Jantsch: Leading or managing people in an organization is a tough job. It gets just that much tougher when the folks that you are choosing to lead are highly creative. In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Todd Henry. He’s the author of Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. If you or your organization has creative people, and let’s face it, that’s what drives a lot of business today, you need to check it out.

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Todd Henry. He is a speaker, consultant, advisor, and author of a number of books including the book we’re gonna talk about today, called Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. So, Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Henry: John, it’s so great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I can’t believe it’s taken me this long. I’m a big fan of your previous work, Die Empty, in fact you were awesome enough that you just happened to be passing through town and we flagged you down to come speak at one of my events and it was very, very motivating for everybody.

Todd Henry: It was so much fun, and I just have to say as encouragement to you, you’re the most humble person in the world so I know that you would never toot your own horn, but just seeing your community there and seeing how people responded to you and responded to what you have built there, it just really showed me the kind of integrity that you bring to your business, because you were able to attract people from all over the place to come to Louisville to spend some time with you, learning about the things that you wanted to teach them.

Just as encouragement to you, it was really, really amazing to see your community in action there as well. You didn’t ask me to do that, but I wanted to do it anyway.

John Jantsch: Well, I appreciate that, but longtime listeners know I’m not really that humble.

Todd Henry: Okay.

John Jantsch: So let me ask you the big question that came to my mind as I was reading Herding Tigers. How does leading creative people differ from being a creative leader?

Todd Henry: Oh, that’s a great question. No one has ever asked me that, actually. Listen, we’re all creative. We all have to solve problems every day as a function of our job. That’s just the nature of the modern workplace. So, if you have to go to work, solve problems, figure things out, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, you are creative to a certain extent. What I wanted to do in this book was talk about the dynamics of leading highly creative people.

Leading highly creative people is different from being a creative leader, because you can be a creative leader and lead a team of engineers or a team … which, by the way, engineers are incredibly creative and incredibly bright in that way. But, you can be a highly creative leader and be leading a more mundane, process oriented business and still be highly creative, because you still have to solve problems, figure out systems, et. cetera.

This book really is about leading highly creative people. People who maybe think a little bit differently from the norm, maybe people who might be a little more difficult to wrangle. What I wanted to do is really address some of those common dynamics among teams that are highly creative. What is it that makes them especially difficult to lead, and how can leaders, especially leaders maybe that are stepping into a role of leading highly creative people for the first time, how can they better position themselves to set their team up for success?

That’s the goal of the leader is to help their team succeed, not necessarily for them to succeed because if their team succeeds, then they will succeed.

John Jantsch: I guess it kind of begs two questions. Maybe you’re defining creative person in a very strict sense like the graphic designer or the writer or the video editor. Is that fair?

Todd Henry: I think it is fair, but I think that this applies to really leading any group of people that has to figure it out and make it up as they go, so if you’re a sales organization, you’re having to come up with creative solutions all the time to reach potential clients, having to re-strategize all the time. Like I said, if you’re leading a group of engineers, that is a project based business, a project based function, but it’s highly creative because you are doing nothing but problem solving all day. You’re looking out, exploring what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, looking for potentially useful fodder for your creative process.

All of those industries have some of the same dynamics I describe in the book. Now, that said, yes, my background, my experience is in leading the ‘traditional creative’ which is the designer, the writer, the videographer, those kinds of people. Yes, I was writing specifically from those kinds of experiences, but I think that the advice in the book applies more broadly to any group of people who have to solve problems and make it up as they go.

John Jantsch: So fundamentally then, what does this group, what do these creative people need that is fundamentally different?

Todd Henry: There really are two primary things that creative people need from their manager in order to thrive. The first one is stability, and stability is about ensuring that you have clarity of process, clarity of expectations, that they know that the rules of the game aren’t gonna change midstream. In a lot of industries that don’t require a tremendous amount of overhead in order to accomplish the work, it’s not that big of a deal if the objectives change midstream, because okay, now we’ve got a new strategy, that means my job is gonna be different tomorrow.

But, when you’re doing highly creative work that requires a tremendous amount of ramp up and forethought and then iteration, when the rules of the game change midstream it can be extremely frustrating. If somebody isn’t bought in to a strategic direction, and let’s say you get two weeks into the project and suddenly your boss’s boss swoops in and says, “You know what? This isn’t really working for me.” Well, your team has spent two weeks iterating on that idea, and now they have to go all the way back to the beginning, re strategize and start all over again, simply because someone wasn’t bought in.

That’s tremendously expensive to the organization. It’s very frustrating to a team of people, and so over time, the team of people just basically says, “Alright, I’m just gonna wait until you tell me what to do. I’m not gonna bring my best thought to the table or my best effort until I know it’s not gonna be wasted effort if the rules are constantly changing.” They need some degree of stability.

There’s a myth, John, that highly creative people just want complete freedom. Just don’t fence me in, give me no boundaries, I just wanna do what I wanna do, but that is a myth, because the reality is that healthy creative process has boundaries. It has rails in order to focus the creative energy. Without that, that energy is just gonna wither up and die. So, stability is the first thing that we need. Clear boundaries, clarity of expectations, clarity of process.

The second thing that highly creative people need is they need to be challenged. They need to be pushed. They want to know that their leader has faith in them. That their leader sees things in them maybe they don’t even see in themselves yet. They want to be pushed to be the best that they can be and to try new things, to tackle new kinds of projects, to venture out into those risky territories, and to know that if they fail, that somebody has their back.

This is also very important, people won’t take risks unless they know that the leader is there to have their back. If it’s a strategic risk, not if it’s a stupid risk, but if it’s a strategic risk then the leader needs to have their back and they need to know that they’re not just walking on thin ice. Hey, you could die and lose your job at any moment, or else people will begin to hold back just a bit.

The problem with stability and challenge is that they exist in tension with one another. As we increase the amount of challenge, we tend to destabilize the organization. This is where a lot of startups and entrepreneurial organizations live. We’re building the bicycle as we’re trying to ride it and we’re going a hundred miles an hour down the highway and we’re trying to avoid traffic and, oh isn’t this just wonderful?

Yeah, it’s wonderful for a little bit, but then over time, people begin to fry. They begin to burn out because we’re not wired for that kind of challenge without the supporting infrastructure to support that challenge. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations that settle in and they’re so processized that there’s no challenge any longer for the people on the team. People get bored, they get stuck, they start looking for broader horizons, and this is often where you hear people say things like, “I’m just not really challenged around here. I just don’t feel like I can really do my best work here. I feel like I’m not growing.”

Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel challenged. They don’t feel like they’re getting what they need from you as a leader in terms of challenge. As a manager, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, somebody who runs a business full of talented people, you are in the unique position to be able to identify that right mix of stability and challenge for those people on your team. If you notice somebody seems to be burning out pretty frequently, well, you need to ask, is it because there aren’t processes in place? There’s no stability there to support what I’m asking from them in terms of challenge, or if somebody’s constantly complaining they feel bored, they feel stuck, is it because I’m not giving them an opportunity to grow themselves, to challenge themselves, and to venture into those uncomfortable places?

John Jantsch: One of the places that you spend a lot of time, and I was glad to see this because I see this actually in lots of organizations with lots of small business owners even, whether they’re managing creatives or not, if they’re managing people, so often they get in this weird cycle of giving work, assigning work, creating process and structure, and then the minute something gets a little hard, they take it all back. There’s no way to grow for anybody, including the organization if you keep taking the work back. I think you called it stop doing the work.

Todd Henry: Right.

John Jantsch: You need to learn this. First off, what do you feel leads to that, and I guess, secondly, how do you solve that?

Todd Henry: I think that especially for entrepreneurs, think about somebody who started a business, I know a big chunk of the people who follow your work are small business owners, entrepreneurs. There’s a tremendous amount of identity wrapped up in starting a business, in the business itself. So, you identify yourself by the output of that business. Sometimes in healthy ways, and maybe sometimes in not so healthy ways. As you start to grow your business and you start to hand off more and more responsibility to other people, it becomes difficult sometimes to separate yourself a bit from the business from an identity standpoint, so that you’re allowing other people to take ownership of certain aspects of the business so that you’re not the one constantly there over their shoulder.

If you are the person constantly over their shoulder, then again, they’re just gonna say, “You know what? Just tell me what you want me to do.” You’ve hired great people and then you’re gonna look over their shoulder and micromanage every decision they make, that’s not the way to scale a business. It’s easy for that to happen, because so much of your identity is wrapped up in the work that gets done, in the business.

What we have to do is we have to transition from a maker mindset to a manager mindset. We have to transition from a mindset of presence to a mindset of principle, or from a mindset of control, which is what really all this is about, it’s about us wanting to control the work of the organization, to a mindset of influence.

We need to establish rails. We need to have a clear leadership philosophy. We need to help people on our team learn how we think about the work and how we think about decisions that we make, not just which decision in a specific scenario is the right decision to make according to us, and so I think it’s difficult to make that transition, to move from control to influence. I think a big part of that is just extricating yourself.

I think about the world that I come from, somebody maybe was a great designer or a great writer and they get promoted. What happens typically in organizations is somebody is really good at something and so somebody comes along and says, “You know what? You’re a really good designer. You know what you should do? You should lead other designers.” That’s a fundamentally different skill set, that’s a totally different thing, and yet that’s exactly what we do. This person, basically they’ve built their entire career upon the fact that they’re really good at a thing. That thing may be is design, or maybe that thing is financials or whatever it is. But, they’ve been really good at that thing and now, all of a sudden, they’re transitioning to not doing that thing, but leading other people who are doing that thing.

How do they identify themselves? Who are they anymore? What is the value they contribute? Before, they could point to a thing and say, “I did this.” Now that you’re leading other people, what is it exactly that you do? I think that’s where the identity crisis often resides in this. Our job is to shift our mindset from a maker mindset, from control, to influence, which means I’m going to teach my team a series of principles to help them make better decisions on their own. I’m gonna teach them how I think about what a good idea is. How I think about a good risk versus a bad risk. I’m gonna teach them how to determine the quality of a product and say, “Okay, is this good? Is this a good output, or is it not quite there yet?”

How do we define excellence as an organization? I’m gonna teach them how conflict should be handled so they can handle conflict between themselves instead of having to come to me every time there’s a conflict on the team. Once we begin to teach these principles, then we can step back and do the job that we’re actually accountable for, which is either growing the business, or leading the team to grow the business, depending on the type of business that we’re running.

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, over the years, the lessons I’ve really learned is that this has to be very intentional, of course. But, there are times when I’m doing my thing. Like you, I’ve go out and I speak and I write and I’m doing the work really, in the business. But, I have a team of people too, and it’s almost like I have to switch on that hat and remember that now I’m leading, so I’m not supposed to have all the answers. That to me is the hardest part because people come to you as the leader, and they say, “Todd, should I do this?” And your response, or at least my response is usually, they ask me a question, I’m gonna give ’em the answer and what I’ve learned over the years is you’ve gotta establish this practice of giving it back to them, saying, “What would you do in that situation?” Or something of that nature.

Todd Henry: Yes.

John Jantsch: Then, of course, the other challenge is you’ve gotta stay so consistent, I think, with it, because how many companies have read a book like yours and the person goes back and says, “It’s gonna be different now!”

Todd Henry: Yes, that’s exactly right. The challenge in all of that is either that we, as a leader, our area of greatest insecurity is the place where we have the potential to do the most damage. As a leader, if we’re not aware of that, the fact that it’s really hard for us to let stuff go, the fact that it’s really difficult for us to let our team run with things, those areas of insecurity become the places we have to turn into watch points personally, because your area of greatest insecurity is the place where you have the potential to do the most damage to your team, and ultimately to your business if you’re not careful.

John Jantsch: How much of the job of the leader, because I think creative people seek inspiration. They tend to be maybe a little more curious about how things work and why they work and don’t work. How much of the job of the leader in this case is to keep those folks inspired?

Todd Henry: I think it’s a huge percentage of the job is keeping them inspired and keeping them focused on the right things. Setting good rails, making sure that they’re looking in the right places. “Hey look over here! Hey, have you seen this? Hey, let’s not focus on that right now, let’s look at this thing over here, because this seems to be the thing that has the most potential.” That’s not the same thing as doing the work for them, that’s basically doing traffic flow for them. It’s making sure that they’re windowing out the stuff that you can see is really not essential and focusing them then on the things that are actually most important.

The thing is, if we wanna be an inspirational leader, then we have to be inspired ourselves. This is something I find often in the lives of leaders; they want to inspire their team but they’re not building practices into their own life to keep themselves inspired. They’re not dedicating time for study, for going out, for exploring, for tilling the soil and looking for potentially useful things in the environment that they can funnel to their team. They’re not doing any kind of personal and professional development themselves and yet they expect their team to be doing that, but they’re not developing themselves.

I think the first thing we have to recognize is that if we wanna be an inspiring leader, if we wanna be the kind of leader that’s bringing ideas to the table and pushing our team in the right place and is able to think systemically in a way that’s actually valuable and useful to our team because we’re seeing the patterns that are emerging in the work and in the team dynamics, then we have to be dedicating time and energy to developing ourselves, to studying, to looking for patterns out there in the marketplace and patterns out there in the environment.

That’s really one of the things we’re uniquely positioned to do as leaders because of our perch, and yet often we don’t do that. If you are not inspired, then you cannot inspire your team.

John Jantsch: One of the things that’s gotta be part of any leader is we’ve got objectives, we have key results that we’re trying to do, we have deadlines, there are things that have to be measured and tracked. I would suggest that some people would say that that’s harder to do with creatives? Maybe a deadline works, maybe it doesn’t, but how do you define and track what might be different with a creative team?

Todd Henry: That is a really great question, because you’re right. If we’re doing accounting, it’s pretty easy to tell whether we got it right or not. You could sorta say, “Numbers aren’t adding up. Okay, let’s figure this out. This isn’t working right.” It’s a different kind of problem. With creative work, it is highly qualitative often. In the end, somebody is either gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down based upon, in some cases, their subjective opinion. No matter how research based your work is, no matter how tight your rationale is, they’re gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, and it’s basically based on what they perceive to be right or not right with regard to the work.

So, one of the tools that I like to teach people to help them determine, in a little bit more of a not quantitative way, but a little bit more of an objective way, which idea is the right idea? It spells the word EPIC, which, I don’t like doing things like that where, hey it spells this, but it does, it spells EPIC, is, if you have a handful of ideas you’re trying to evaluate, you’re trying to decide between, I encourage you to use this framework to do it. It works really, really well.

The first thing is, you’re gonna ask, is it effective? Is this idea effective? Does it solve the problem we set out to solve, or does it not? You can even rate this on a scale of one to ten, so you can put these ideas up next to each other and say, “Okay, which of these is most effective? On a scale of one to ten, how well does it actually solve the problem that we’re trying to solve?”

The P is practical. How practical is it for us to execute this idea, given our resource constraints, given our time constraints, given the fact that we only have a couple of team members who can work on this. How practical are each of these ideas, again, on a scale of one to ten?

Then, is it interesting and cool is the final metric here. On a scale of one to ten, how excited are we about this idea? Because sometimes maybe there’s an idea that doesn’t seem as effective, but it’s really cool and so somebody is really arguing for it. Okay, well, that’s fine, give it a 10, but it’s only a four on effectiveness, or a five on effectiveness, which means maybe it’s not the best idea even though it’s got a lot of energy in the room, because it is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem we’re trying to solve.

Once you’ve ranked all of your ideas using this framework, effectiveness, practicality, and then is it interesting and cool, then you can actually have a meaningful conversation. You can say, well, idea two isn’t quite as practical as idea one, but I think we can make it more practical if we dot dot dot. So, it’s a great jumping off point for iteration. It also, as a leader, it gives you an opportunity to do some teaching with your team about how you think about ideas, or how you think about practicality, or how you think about resource allocation, or how you think about what is cool and what actually is interesting from a creative standpoint.

This is, in a world of highly subjective measurements, I find this tool to be really..

http://bit.ly/2SvPbpn

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Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People

Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People

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John Jantsch: Leading or managing people in an organization is a tough job. It gets just that much tougher when the folks that you are choosing to lead are highly creative. In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Todd Henry. He’s the author of Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. If you or your organization has creative people, and let’s face it, that’s what drives a lot of business today, you need to check it out.

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Todd Henry. He is a speaker, consultant, advisor, and author of a number of books including the book we’re gonna talk about today, called Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. So, Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Henry: John, it’s so great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I can’t believe it’s taken me this long. I’m a big fan of your previous work, Die Empty, in fact you were awesome enough that you just happened to be passing through town and we flagged you down to come speak at one of my events and it was very, very motivating for everybody.

Todd Henry: It was so much fun, and I just have to say as encouragement to you, you’re the most humble person in the world so I know that you would never toot your own horn, but just seeing your community there and seeing how people responded to you and responded to what you have built there, it just really showed me the kind of integrity that you bring to your business, because you were able to attract people from all over the place to come to Louisville to spend some time with you, learning about the things that you wanted to teach them.

Just as encouragement to you, it was really, really amazing to see your community in action there as well. You didn’t ask me to do that, but I wanted to do it anyway.

John Jantsch: Well, I appreciate that, but longtime listeners know I’m not really that humble.

Todd Henry: Okay.

John Jantsch: So let me ask you the big question that came to my mind as I was reading Herding Tigers. How does leading creative people differ from being a creative leader?

Todd Henry: Oh, that’s a great question. No one has ever asked me that, actually. Listen, we’re all creative. We all have to solve problems every day as a function of our job. That’s just the nature of the modern workplace. So, if you have to go to work, solve problems, figure things out, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, you are creative to a certain extent. What I wanted to do in this book was talk about the dynamics of leading highly creative people.

Leading highly creative people is different from being a creative leader, because you can be a creative leader and lead a team of engineers or a team … which, by the way, engineers are incredibly creative and incredibly bright in that way. But, you can be a highly creative leader and be leading a more mundane, process oriented business and still be highly creative, because you still have to solve problems, figure out systems, et. cetera.

This book really is about leading highly creative people. People who maybe think a little bit differently from the norm, maybe people who might be a little more difficult to wrangle. What I wanted to do is really address some of those common dynamics among teams that are highly creative. What is it that makes them especially difficult to lead, and how can leaders, especially leaders maybe that are stepping into a role of leading highly creative people for the first time, how can they better position themselves to set their team up for success?

That’s the goal of the leader is to help their team succeed, not necessarily for them to succeed because if their team succeeds, then they will succeed.

John Jantsch: I guess it kind of begs two questions. Maybe you’re defining creative person in a very strict sense like the graphic designer or the writer or the video editor. Is that fair?

Todd Henry: I think it is fair, but I think that this applies to really leading any group of people that has to figure it out and make it up as they go, so if you’re a sales organization, you’re having to come up with creative solutions all the time to reach potential clients, having to re-strategize all the time. Like I said, if you’re leading a group of engineers, that is a project based business, a project based function, but it’s highly creative because you are doing nothing but problem solving all day. You’re looking out, exploring what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, looking for potentially useful fodder for your creative process.

All of those industries have some of the same dynamics I describe in the book. Now, that said, yes, my background, my experience is in leading the ‘traditional creative’ which is the designer, the writer, the videographer, those kinds of people. Yes, I was writing specifically from those kinds of experiences, but I think that the advice in the book applies more broadly to any group of people who have to solve problems and make it up as they go.

John Jantsch: So fundamentally then, what does this group, what do these creative people need that is fundamentally different?

Todd Henry: There really are two primary things that creative people need from their manager in order to thrive. The first one is stability, and stability is about ensuring that you have clarity of process, clarity of expectations, that they know that the rules of the game aren’t gonna change midstream. In a lot of industries that don’t require a tremendous amount of overhead in order to accomplish the work, it’s not that big of a deal if the objectives change midstream, because okay, now we’ve got a new strategy, that means my job is gonna be different tomorrow.

But, when you’re doing highly creative work that requires a tremendous amount of ramp up and forethought and then iteration, when the rules of the game change midstream it can be extremely frustrating. If somebody isn’t bought in to a strategic direction, and let’s say you get two weeks into the project and suddenly your boss’s boss swoops in and says, “You know what? This isn’t really working for me.” Well, your team has spent two weeks iterating on that idea, and now they have to go all the way back to the beginning, re strategize and start all over again, simply because someone wasn’t bought in.

That’s tremendously expensive to the organization. It’s very frustrating to a team of people, and so over time, the team of people just basically says, “Alright, I’m just gonna wait until you tell me what to do. I’m not gonna bring my best thought to the table or my best effort until I know it’s not gonna be wasted effort if the rules are constantly changing.” They need some degree of stability.

There’s a myth, John, that highly creative people just want complete freedom. Just don’t fence me in, give me no boundaries, I just wanna do what I wanna do, but that is a myth, because the reality is that healthy creative process has boundaries. It has rails in order to focus the creative energy. Without that, that energy is just gonna wither up and die. So, stability is the first thing that we need. Clear boundaries, clarity of expectations, clarity of process.

The second thing that highly creative people need is they need to be challenged. They need to be pushed. They want to know that their leader has faith in them. That their leader sees things in them maybe they don’t even see in themselves yet. They want to be pushed to be the best that they can be and to try new things, to tackle new kinds of projects, to venture out into those risky territories, and to know that if they fail, that somebody has their back.

This is also very important, people won’t take risks unless they know that the leader is there to have their back. If it’s a strategic risk, not if it’s a stupid risk, but if it’s a strategic risk then the leader needs to have their back and they need to know that they’re not just walking on thin ice. Hey, you could die and lose your job at any moment, or else people will begin to hold back just a bit.

The problem with stability and challenge is that they exist in tension with one another. As we increase the amount of challenge, we tend to destabilize the organization. This is where a lot of startups and entrepreneurial organizations live. We’re building the bicycle as we’re trying to ride it and we’re going a hundred miles an hour down the highway and we’re trying to avoid traffic and, oh isn’t this just wonderful?

Yeah, it’s wonderful for a little bit, but then over time, people begin to fry. They begin to burn out because we’re not wired for that kind of challenge without the supporting infrastructure to support that challenge. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations that settle in and they’re so processized that there’s no challenge any longer for the people on the team. People get bored, they get stuck, they start looking for broader horizons, and this is often where you hear people say things like, “I’m just not really challenged around here. I just don’t feel like I can really do my best work here. I feel like I’m not growing.”

Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel challenged. They don’t feel like they’re getting what they need from you as a leader in terms of challenge. As a manager, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, somebody who runs a business full of talented people, you are in the unique position to be able to identify that right mix of stability and challenge for those people on your team. If you notice somebody seems to be burning out pretty frequently, well, you need to ask, is it because there aren’t processes in place? There’s no stability there to support what I’m asking from them in terms of challenge, or if somebody’s constantly complaining they feel bored, they feel stuck, is it because I’m not giving them an opportunity to grow themselves, to challenge themselves, and to venture into those uncomfortable places?

John Jantsch: One of the places that you spend a lot of time, and I was glad to see this because I see this actually in lots of organizations with lots of small business owners even, whether they’re managing creatives or not, if they’re managing people, so often they get in this weird cycle of giving work, assigning work, creating process and structure, and then the minute something gets a little hard, they take it all back. There’s no way to grow for anybody, including the organization if you keep taking the work back. I think you called it stop doing the work.

Todd Henry: Right.

John Jantsch: You need to learn this. First off, what do you feel leads to that, and I guess, secondly, how do you solve that?

Todd Henry: I think that especially for entrepreneurs, think about somebody who started a business, I know a big chunk of the people who follow your work are small business owners, entrepreneurs. There’s a tremendous amount of identity wrapped up in starting a business, in the business itself. So, you identify yourself by the output of that business. Sometimes in healthy ways, and maybe sometimes in not so healthy ways. As you start to grow your business and you start to hand off more and more responsibility to other people, it becomes difficult sometimes to separate yourself a bit from the business from an identity standpoint, so that you’re allowing other people to take ownership of certain aspects of the business so that you’re not the one constantly there over their shoulder.

If you are the person constantly over their shoulder, then again, they’re just gonna say, “You know what? Just tell me what you want me to do.” You’ve hired great people and then you’re gonna look over their shoulder and micromanage every decision they make, that’s not the way to scale a business. It’s easy for that to happen, because so much of your identity is wrapped up in the work that gets done, in the business.

What we have to do is we have to transition from a maker mindset to a manager mindset. We have to transition from a mindset of presence to a mindset of principle, or from a mindset of control, which is what really all this is about, it’s about us wanting to control the work of the organization, to a mindset of influence.

We need to establish rails. We need to have a clear leadership philosophy. We need to help people on our team learn how we think about the work and how we think about decisions that we make, not just which decision in a specific scenario is the right decision to make according to us, and so I think it’s difficult to make that transition, to move from control to influence. I think a big part of that is just extricating yourself.

I think about the world that I come from, somebody maybe was a great designer or a great writer and they get promoted. What happens typically in organizations is somebody is really good at something and so somebody comes along and says, “You know what? You’re a really good designer. You know what you should do? You should lead other designers.” That’s a fundamentally different skill set, that’s a totally different thing, and yet that’s exactly what we do. This person, basically they’ve built their entire career upon the fact that they’re really good at a thing. That thing may be is design, or maybe that thing is financials or whatever it is. But, they’ve been really good at that thing and now, all of a sudden, they’re transitioning to not doing that thing, but leading other people who are doing that thing.

How do they identify themselves? Who are they anymore? What is the value they contribute? Before, they could point to a thing and say, “I did this.” Now that you’re leading other people, what is it exactly that you do? I think that’s where the identity crisis often resides in this. Our job is to shift our mindset from a maker mindset, from control, to influence, which means I’m going to teach my team a series of principles to help them make better decisions on their own. I’m gonna teach them how I think about what a good idea is. How I think about a good risk versus a bad risk. I’m gonna teach them how to determine the quality of a product and say, “Okay, is this good? Is this a good output, or is it not quite there yet?”

How do we define excellence as an organization? I’m gonna teach them how conflict should be handled so they can handle conflict between themselves instead of having to come to me every time there’s a conflict on the team. Once we begin to teach these principles, then we can step back and do the job that we’re actually accountable for, which is either growing the business, or leading the team to grow the business, depending on the type of business that we’re running.

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, over the years, the lessons I’ve really learned is that this has to be very intentional, of course. But, there are times when I’m doing my thing. Like you, I’ve go out and I speak and I write and I’m doing the work really, in the business. But, I have a team of people too, and it’s almost like I have to switch on that hat and remember that now I’m leading, so I’m not supposed to have all the answers. That to me is the hardest part because people come to you as the leader, and they say, “Todd, should I do this?” And your response, or at least my response is usually, they ask me a question, I’m gonna give ’em the answer and what I’ve learned over the years is you’ve gotta establish this practice of giving it back to them, saying, “What would you do in that situation?” Or something of that nature.

Todd Henry: Yes.

John Jantsch: Then, of course, the other challenge is you’ve gotta stay so consistent, I think, with it, because how many companies have read a book like yours and the person goes back and says, “It’s gonna be different now!”

Todd Henry: Yes, that’s exactly right. The challenge in all of that is either that we, as a leader, our area of greatest insecurity is the place where we have the potential to do the most damage. As a leader, if we’re not aware of that, the fact that it’s really hard for us to let stuff go, the fact that it’s really difficult for us to let our team run with things, those areas of insecurity become the places we have to turn into watch points personally, because your area of greatest insecurity is the place where you have the potential to do the most damage to your team, and ultimately to your business if you’re not careful.

John Jantsch: How much of the job of the leader, because I think creative people seek inspiration. They tend to be maybe a little more curious about how things work and why they work and don’t work. How much of the job of the leader in this case is to keep those folks inspired?

Todd Henry: I think it’s a huge percentage of the job is keeping them inspired and keeping them focused on the right things. Setting good rails, making sure that they’re looking in the right places. “Hey look over here! Hey, have you seen this? Hey, let’s not focus on that right now, let’s look at this thing over here, because this seems to be the thing that has the most potential.” That’s not the same thing as doing the work for them, that’s basically doing traffic flow for them. It’s making sure that they’re windowing out the stuff that you can see is really not essential and focusing them then on the things that are actually most important.

The thing is, if we wanna be an inspirational leader, then we have to be inspired ourselves. This is something I find often in the lives of leaders; they want to inspire their team but they’re not building practices into their own life to keep themselves inspired. They’re not dedicating time for study, for going out, for exploring, for tilling the soil and looking for potentially useful things in the environment that they can funnel to their team. They’re not doing any kind of personal and professional development themselves and yet they expect their team to be doing that, but they’re not developing themselves.

I think the first thing we have to recognize is that if we wanna be an inspiring leader, if we wanna be the kind of leader that’s bringing ideas to the table and pushing our team in the right place and is able to think systemically in a way that’s actually valuable and useful to our team because we’re seeing the patterns that are emerging in the work and in the team dynamics, then we have to be dedicating time and energy to developing ourselves, to studying, to looking for patterns out there in the marketplace and patterns out there in the environment.

That’s really one of the things we’re uniquely positioned to do as leaders because of our perch, and yet often we don’t do that. If you are not inspired, then you cannot inspire your team.

John Jantsch: One of the things that’s gotta be part of any leader is we’ve got objectives, we have key results that we’re trying to do, we have deadlines, there are things that have to be measured and tracked. I would suggest that some people would say that that’s harder to do with creatives? Maybe a deadline works, maybe it doesn’t, but how do you define and track what might be different with a creative team?

Todd Henry: That is a really great question, because you’re right. If we’re doing accounting, it’s pretty easy to tell whether we got it right or not. You could sorta say, “Numbers aren’t adding up. Okay, let’s figure this out. This isn’t working right.” It’s a different kind of problem. With creative work, it is highly qualitative often. In the end, somebody is either gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down based upon, in some cases, their subjective opinion. No matter how research based your work is, no matter how tight your rationale is, they’re gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, and it’s basically based on what they perceive to be right or not right with regard to the work.

So, one of the tools that I like to teach people to help them determine, in a little bit more of a not quantitative way, but a little bit more of an objective way, which idea is the right idea? It spells the word EPIC, which, I don’t like doing things like that where, hey it spells this, but it does, it spells EPIC, is, if you have a handful of ideas you’re trying to evaluate, you’re trying to decide between, I encourage you to use this framework to do it. It works really, really well.

The first thing is, you’re gonna ask, is it effective? Is this idea effective? Does it solve the problem we set out to solve, or does it not? You can even rate this on a scale of one to ten, so you can put these ideas up next to each other and say, “Okay, which of these is most effective? On a scale of one to ten, how well does it actually solve the problem that we’re trying to solve?”

The P is practical. How practical is it for us to execute this idea, given our resource constraints, given our time constraints, given the fact that we only have a couple of team members who can work on this. How practical are each of these ideas, again, on a scale of one to ten?

Then, is it interesting and cool is the final metric here. On a scale of one to ten, how excited are we about this idea? Because sometimes maybe there’s an idea that doesn’t seem as effective, but it’s really cool and so somebody is really arguing for it. Okay, well, that’s fine, give it a 10, but it’s only a four on effectiveness, or a five on effectiveness, which means maybe it’s not the best idea even though it’s got a lot of energy in the room, because it is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem we’re trying to solve.

Once you’ve ranked all of your ideas using this framework, effectiveness, practicality, and then is it interesting and cool, then you can actually have a meaningful conversation. You can say, well, idea two isn’t quite as practical as idea one, but I think we can make it more practical if we dot dot dot. So, it’s a great jumping off point for iteration. It also, as a leader, it gives you an opportunity to do some teaching with your team about how you think about ideas, or how you think about practicality, or how you think about resource allocation, or how you think about what is cool and what actually is interesting from a creative standpoint.

This is, in a world of highly subjective measurements, I find this tool to be really..

http://bit.ly/2SvPbpn

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Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People

Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People

Transcript of The Secrets to Leading Creative People written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

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John Jantsch: Leading or managing people in an organization is a tough job. It gets just that much tougher when the folks that you are choosing to lead are highly creative. In this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Todd Henry. He’s the author of Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. If you or your organization has creative people, and let’s face it, that’s what drives a lot of business today, you need to check it out.

Hello, welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Todd Henry. He is a speaker, consultant, advisor, and author of a number of books including the book we’re gonna talk about today, called Herding Tigers: Be The Leader That Creative People Need. So, Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Henry: John, it’s so great to be with you. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: I can’t believe it’s taken me this long. I’m a big fan of your previous work, Die Empty, in fact you were awesome enough that you just happened to be passing through town and we flagged you down to come speak at one of my events and it was very, very motivating for everybody.

Todd Henry: It was so much fun, and I just have to say as encouragement to you, you’re the most humble person in the world so I know that you would never toot your own horn, but just seeing your community there and seeing how people responded to you and responded to what you have built there, it just really showed me the kind of integrity that you bring to your business, because you were able to attract people from all over the place to come to Louisville to spend some time with you, learning about the things that you wanted to teach them.

Just as encouragement to you, it was really, really amazing to see your community in action there as well. You didn’t ask me to do that, but I wanted to do it anyway.

John Jantsch: Well, I appreciate that, but longtime listeners know I’m not really that humble.

Todd Henry: Okay.

John Jantsch: So let me ask you the big question that came to my mind as I was reading Herding Tigers. How does leading creative people differ from being a creative leader?

Todd Henry: Oh, that’s a great question. No one has ever asked me that, actually. Listen, we’re all creative. We all have to solve problems every day as a function of our job. That’s just the nature of the modern workplace. So, if you have to go to work, solve problems, figure things out, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, you are creative to a certain extent. What I wanted to do in this book was talk about the dynamics of leading highly creative people.

Leading highly creative people is different from being a creative leader, because you can be a creative leader and lead a team of engineers or a team … which, by the way, engineers are incredibly creative and incredibly bright in that way. But, you can be a highly creative leader and be leading a more mundane, process oriented business and still be highly creative, because you still have to solve problems, figure out systems, et. cetera.

This book really is about leading highly creative people. People who maybe think a little bit differently from the norm, maybe people who might be a little more difficult to wrangle. What I wanted to do is really address some of those common dynamics among teams that are highly creative. What is it that makes them especially difficult to lead, and how can leaders, especially leaders maybe that are stepping into a role of leading highly creative people for the first time, how can they better position themselves to set their team up for success?

That’s the goal of the leader is to help their team succeed, not necessarily for them to succeed because if their team succeeds, then they will succeed.

John Jantsch: I guess it kind of begs two questions. Maybe you’re defining creative person in a very strict sense like the graphic designer or the writer or the video editor. Is that fair?

Todd Henry: I think it is fair, but I think that this applies to really leading any group of people that has to figure it out and make it up as they go, so if you’re a sales organization, you’re having to come up with creative solutions all the time to reach potential clients, having to re-strategize all the time. Like I said, if you’re leading a group of engineers, that is a project based business, a project based function, but it’s highly creative because you are doing nothing but problem solving all day. You’re looking out, exploring what Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible, looking for potentially useful fodder for your creative process.

All of those industries have some of the same dynamics I describe in the book. Now, that said, yes, my background, my experience is in leading the ‘traditional creative’ which is the designer, the writer, the videographer, those kinds of people. Yes, I was writing specifically from those kinds of experiences, but I think that the advice in the book applies more broadly to any group of people who have to solve problems and make it up as they go.

John Jantsch: So fundamentally then, what does this group, what do these creative people need that is fundamentally different?

Todd Henry: There really are two primary things that creative people need from their manager in order to thrive. The first one is stability, and stability is about ensuring that you have clarity of process, clarity of expectations, that they know that the rules of the game aren’t gonna change midstream. In a lot of industries that don’t require a tremendous amount of overhead in order to accomplish the work, it’s not that big of a deal if the objectives change midstream, because okay, now we’ve got a new strategy, that means my job is gonna be different tomorrow.

But, when you’re doing highly creative work that requires a tremendous amount of ramp up and forethought and then iteration, when the rules of the game change midstream it can be extremely frustrating. If somebody isn’t bought in to a strategic direction, and let’s say you get two weeks into the project and suddenly your boss’s boss swoops in and says, “You know what? This isn’t really working for me.” Well, your team has spent two weeks iterating on that idea, and now they have to go all the way back to the beginning, re strategize and start all over again, simply because someone wasn’t bought in.

That’s tremendously expensive to the organization. It’s very frustrating to a team of people, and so over time, the team of people just basically says, “Alright, I’m just gonna wait until you tell me what to do. I’m not gonna bring my best thought to the table or my best effort until I know it’s not gonna be wasted effort if the rules are constantly changing.” They need some degree of stability.

There’s a myth, John, that highly creative people just want complete freedom. Just don’t fence me in, give me no boundaries, I just wanna do what I wanna do, but that is a myth, because the reality is that healthy creative process has boundaries. It has rails in order to focus the creative energy. Without that, that energy is just gonna wither up and die. So, stability is the first thing that we need. Clear boundaries, clarity of expectations, clarity of process.

The second thing that highly creative people need is they need to be challenged. They need to be pushed. They want to know that their leader has faith in them. That their leader sees things in them maybe they don’t even see in themselves yet. They want to be pushed to be the best that they can be and to try new things, to tackle new kinds of projects, to venture out into those risky territories, and to know that if they fail, that somebody has their back.

This is also very important, people won’t take risks unless they know that the leader is there to have their back. If it’s a strategic risk, not if it’s a stupid risk, but if it’s a strategic risk then the leader needs to have their back and they need to know that they’re not just walking on thin ice. Hey, you could die and lose your job at any moment, or else people will begin to hold back just a bit.

The problem with stability and challenge is that they exist in tension with one another. As we increase the amount of challenge, we tend to destabilize the organization. This is where a lot of startups and entrepreneurial organizations live. We’re building the bicycle as we’re trying to ride it and we’re going a hundred miles an hour down the highway and we’re trying to avoid traffic and, oh isn’t this just wonderful?

Yeah, it’s wonderful for a little bit, but then over time, people begin to fry. They begin to burn out because we’re not wired for that kind of challenge without the supporting infrastructure to support that challenge. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, you have organizations that settle in and they’re so processized that there’s no challenge any longer for the people on the team. People get bored, they get stuck, they start looking for broader horizons, and this is often where you hear people say things like, “I’m just not really challenged around here. I just don’t feel like I can really do my best work here. I feel like I’m not growing.”

Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel challenged. They don’t feel like they’re getting what they need from you as a leader in terms of challenge. As a manager, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, somebody who runs a business full of talented people, you are in the unique position to be able to identify that right mix of stability and challenge for those people on your team. If you notice somebody seems to be burning out pretty frequently, well, you need to ask, is it because there aren’t processes in place? There’s no stability there to support what I’m asking from them in terms of challenge, or if somebody’s constantly complaining they feel bored, they feel stuck, is it because I’m not giving them an opportunity to grow themselves, to challenge themselves, and to venture into those uncomfortable places?

John Jantsch: One of the places that you spend a lot of time, and I was glad to see this because I see this actually in lots of organizations with lots of small business owners even, whether they’re managing creatives or not, if they’re managing people, so often they get in this weird cycle of giving work, assigning work, creating process and structure, and then the minute something gets a little hard, they take it all back. There’s no way to grow for anybody, including the organization if you keep taking the work back. I think you called it stop doing the work.

Todd Henry: Right.

John Jantsch: You need to learn this. First off, what do you feel leads to that, and I guess, secondly, how do you solve that?

Todd Henry: I think that especially for entrepreneurs, think about somebody who started a business, I know a big chunk of the people who follow your work are small business owners, entrepreneurs. There’s a tremendous amount of identity wrapped up in starting a business, in the business itself. So, you identify yourself by the output of that business. Sometimes in healthy ways, and maybe sometimes in not so healthy ways. As you start to grow your business and you start to hand off more and more responsibility to other people, it becomes difficult sometimes to separate yourself a bit from the business from an identity standpoint, so that you’re allowing other people to take ownership of certain aspects of the business so that you’re not the one constantly there over their shoulder.

If you are the person constantly over their shoulder, then again, they’re just gonna say, “You know what? Just tell me what you want me to do.” You’ve hired great people and then you’re gonna look over their shoulder and micromanage every decision they make, that’s not the way to scale a business. It’s easy for that to happen, because so much of your identity is wrapped up in the work that gets done, in the business.

What we have to do is we have to transition from a maker mindset to a manager mindset. We have to transition from a mindset of presence to a mindset of principle, or from a mindset of control, which is what really all this is about, it’s about us wanting to control the work of the organization, to a mindset of influence.

We need to establish rails. We need to have a clear leadership philosophy. We need to help people on our team learn how we think about the work and how we think about decisions that we make, not just which decision in a specific scenario is the right decision to make according to us, and so I think it’s difficult to make that transition, to move from control to influence. I think a big part of that is just extricating yourself.

I think about the world that I come from, somebody maybe was a great designer or a great writer and they get promoted. What happens typically in organizations is somebody is really good at something and so somebody comes along and says, “You know what? You’re a really good designer. You know what you should do? You should lead other designers.” That’s a fundamentally different skill set, that’s a totally different thing, and yet that’s exactly what we do. This person, basically they’ve built their entire career upon the fact that they’re really good at a thing. That thing may be is design, or maybe that thing is financials or whatever it is. But, they’ve been really good at that thing and now, all of a sudden, they’re transitioning to not doing that thing, but leading other people who are doing that thing.

How do they identify themselves? Who are they anymore? What is the value they contribute? Before, they could point to a thing and say, “I did this.” Now that you’re leading other people, what is it exactly that you do? I think that’s where the identity crisis often resides in this. Our job is to shift our mindset from a maker mindset, from control, to influence, which means I’m going to teach my team a series of principles to help them make better decisions on their own. I’m gonna teach them how I think about what a good idea is. How I think about a good risk versus a bad risk. I’m gonna teach them how to determine the quality of a product and say, “Okay, is this good? Is this a good output, or is it not quite there yet?”

How do we define excellence as an organization? I’m gonna teach them how conflict should be handled so they can handle conflict between themselves instead of having to come to me every time there’s a conflict on the team. Once we begin to teach these principles, then we can step back and do the job that we’re actually accountable for, which is either growing the business, or leading the team to grow the business, depending on the type of business that we’re running.

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, over the years, the lessons I’ve really learned is that this has to be very intentional, of course. But, there are times when I’m doing my thing. Like you, I’ve go out and I speak and I write and I’m doing the work really, in the business. But, I have a team of people too, and it’s almost like I have to switch on that hat and remember that now I’m leading, so I’m not supposed to have all the answers. That to me is the hardest part because people come to you as the leader, and they say, “Todd, should I do this?” And your response, or at least my response is usually, they ask me a question, I’m gonna give ’em the answer and what I’ve learned over the years is you’ve gotta establish this practice of giving it back to them, saying, “What would you do in that situation?” Or something of that nature.

Todd Henry: Yes.

John Jantsch: Then, of course, the other challenge is you’ve gotta stay so consistent, I think, with it, because how many companies have read a book like yours and the person goes back and says, “It’s gonna be different now!”

Todd Henry: Yes, that’s exactly right. The challenge in all of that is either that we, as a leader, our area of greatest insecurity is the place where we have the potential to do the most damage. As a leader, if we’re not aware of that, the fact that it’s really hard for us to let stuff go, the fact that it’s really difficult for us to let our team run with things, those areas of insecurity become the places we have to turn into watch points personally, because your area of greatest insecurity is the place where you have the potential to do the most damage to your team, and ultimately to your business if you’re not careful.

John Jantsch: How much of the job of the leader, because I think creative people seek inspiration. They tend to be maybe a little more curious about how things work and why they work and don’t work. How much of the job of the leader in this case is to keep those folks inspired?

Todd Henry: I think it’s a huge percentage of the job is keeping them inspired and keeping them focused on the right things. Setting good rails, making sure that they’re looking in the right places. “Hey look over here! Hey, have you seen this? Hey, let’s not focus on that right now, let’s look at this thing over here, because this seems to be the thing that has the most potential.” That’s not the same thing as doing the work for them, that’s basically doing traffic flow for them. It’s making sure that they’re windowing out the stuff that you can see is really not essential and focusing them then on the things that are actually most important.

The thing is, if we wanna be an inspirational leader, then we have to be inspired ourselves. This is something I find often in the lives of leaders; they want to inspire their team but they’re not building practices into their own life to keep themselves inspired. They’re not dedicating time for study, for going out, for exploring, for tilling the soil and looking for potentially useful things in the environment that they can funnel to their team. They’re not doing any kind of personal and professional development themselves and yet they expect their team to be doing that, but they’re not developing themselves.

I think the first thing we have to recognize is that if we wanna be an inspiring leader, if we wanna be the kind of leader that’s bringing ideas to the table and pushing our team in the right place and is able to think systemically in a way that’s actually valuable and useful to our team because we’re seeing the patterns that are emerging in the work and in the team dynamics, then we have to be dedicating time and energy to developing ourselves, to studying, to looking for patterns out there in the marketplace and patterns out there in the environment.

That’s really one of the things we’re uniquely positioned to do as leaders because of our perch, and yet often we don’t do that. If you are not inspired, then you cannot inspire your team.

John Jantsch: One of the things that’s gotta be part of any leader is we’ve got objectives, we have key results that we’re trying to do, we have deadlines, there are things that have to be measured and tracked. I would suggest that some people would say that that’s harder to do with creatives? Maybe a deadline works, maybe it doesn’t, but how do you define and track what might be different with a creative team?

Todd Henry: That is a really great question, because you’re right. If we’re doing accounting, it’s pretty easy to tell whether we got it right or not. You could sorta say, “Numbers aren’t adding up. Okay, let’s figure this out. This isn’t working right.” It’s a different kind of problem. With creative work, it is highly qualitative often. In the end, somebody is either gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down based upon, in some cases, their subjective opinion. No matter how research based your work is, no matter how tight your rationale is, they’re gonna give you the thumbs up or thumbs down, and it’s basically based on what they perceive to be right or not right with regard to the work.

So, one of the tools that I like to teach people to help them determine, in a little bit more of a not quantitative way, but a little bit more of an objective way, which idea is the right idea? It spells the word EPIC, which, I don’t like doing things like that where, hey it spells this, but it does, it spells EPIC, is, if you have a handful of ideas you’re trying to evaluate, you’re trying to decide between, I encourage you to use this framework to do it. It works really, really well.

The first thing is, you’re gonna ask, is it effective? Is this idea effective? Does it solve the problem we set out to solve, or does it not? You can even rate this on a scale of one to ten, so you can put these ideas up next to each other and say, “Okay, which of these is most effective? On a scale of one to ten, how well does it actually solve the problem that we’re trying to solve?”

The P is practical. How practical is it for us to execute this idea, given our resource constraints, given our time constraints, given the fact that we only have a couple of team members who can work on this. How practical are each of these ideas, again, on a scale of one to ten?

Then, is it interesting and cool is the final metric here. On a scale of one to ten, how excited are we about this idea? Because sometimes maybe there’s an idea that doesn’t seem as effective, but it’s really cool and so somebody is really arguing for it. Okay, well, that’s fine, give it a 10, but it’s only a four on effectiveness, or a five on effectiveness, which means maybe it’s not the best idea even though it’s got a lot of energy in the room, because it is cool, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem we’re trying to solve.

Once you’ve ranked all of your ideas using this framework, effectiveness, practicality, and then is it interesting and cool, then you can actually have a meaningful conversation. You can say, well, idea two isn’t quite as practical as idea one, but I think we can make it more practical if we dot dot dot. So, it’s a great jumping off point for iteration. It also, as a leader, it gives you an opportunity to do some teaching with your team about how you think about ideas, or how you think about practicality, or how you think about resource allocation, or how you think about what is cool and what actually is interesting from a creative standpoint.

This is, in a world of highly subjective measurements, I find this tool to be really..

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