Work outside your title

Growing up in a public school system, they teach you to work independently. You are trained to view everyone else in your class as competitors. This is the Hunger Games and the odds are only in your favor if you can get the best grades in every subject, every time.

It’s a lot of pressure, and it’s also not going to get you anywhere in the creative world. In the creative world they constantly encourage you to learn every skill that exists here: writers need to be art directors and art directors need to be able to write. They say it’s in case you need to fix something quickly or someone can’t make it to every pitch, but I think it’s really to get people used to the idea that the tag line is not always going to be created by a copywriter. The new logo design doesn’t only come from the art director.  Everyone is surrounded by good ideas constantly, so it only makes sense that the division between all of the titles eventually gets blurred.

Creativity isn’t on demand, but it is supposed to be in the advertising world. No one snaps their fingers and spews brilliance. Sometimes, you and three other people spend 7 hours in a room fueled only by Starbucks and the thirst to crack the brief and finally get some sleep. At the end of seven hours, no one is turning down a brilliant line because the writer didn’t come up with it. Later, no one gets to have an ego about it. The copy gets complimented, and the team wins. This is no longer a competition. The people at the desk next to you are no longer hunting for the same acceptance letter you are, and their success doesn’t take away from yours.

It’s a long road to turning this innate competitive streak we have into a productive “all for one” mentality, but it’s necessary. The funny thing is, just because the person you’re interning for has the title professional doesn’t make them any better at embracing their teammates than a beginner. However, I’d be willing to bet, if you like working for them, if they have teams that enjoy their jobs, if they view these people they see every day as family- that professional has mastered the art of working with a team.

The fact that you’re working as a team also doesn’t mean you and the people around you are going to click right away. The copywriter you’re paired with could be a guy five years older than you from a country that doesn’t speak English natively, but let me help you out with the first lesson of working with these people: they are there for a reason, they have that job because they add value to the team. Even if the person supposedly there to write the copy makes grammar mistakes with every sentence they churn out, they will have something of value to add. Sometimes, it’s as big as the main concept for your campaign, and sometimes, it’s being the person to tell you when something doesn’t work.

As a born-and-raised American, who came to Miami knowing five token sentences of Spanish, mostly about beer and the location of the bathroom, I can tell you it’s not always easy. But even with the most difficult experience I’ve ever had, I can without-a-doubt tell you, it’s worth it to figure it out. At the end of the day, you will like what you produce more if you stop looking at people’s titles to get the job done, and embrace whatever talents they bring in that moment to that campaign.