Today I wanted to talk about the importance of learning how to get your work approved.

The psychology of YES, as it were.

Getting things approved is a SKILL. And it’s an important one.

Approval doesn’t happen just because the work is amazing (even though our society seems to have this invisible agreement where we pretend we only care about the quality.)

IMO, only 50% of the key to getting work approved is the quality of the work itself. Maybe less.

You can do the coolest work in the world…the most transcendent, beautiful thing…but if you don’t understand the factors involved in why people need the thing, and who needs to sign off on it, and what they might be up against, it won’t have a chance in hell of being selected to go into production.

And then it might as well not exist.

Sorry to be harsh.

TBH, it’s a giant red flag if I’m considering someone for a senior position and their portfolio is mostly pitched or proposed work that was never green-lit.

Don’t get me wrong..it’s okay to have *some* work like that. But not more than 5-10% if you’re going for a senior position.

It’s because at a certain level you have to master the process of getting things approved. You have to fundamentally understand how and why people decide to do things at all. You have to have the patience to present the concept as many times and in as many ways as it takes.

If I don’t see a lot of work that went into production in a person’s portfolio, I wonder how well they will be able to handle the complex politics of gaining agreement from a large number of people.

And then I also start to wonder if they can handle all the pivoting and patching that happens when that perfect concept meets the real world and it has to adapt to factors beyond their control.

I don’t want you to think the importance of “getting green-lit” only goes one way.

Also consider whether the company you’re working for is good at getting work…Do they spend most of their time chasing clients that never say yes to their services? This is a red flag too. To set some context on this — if you’re working for an ad agency, pitching IS going to be a big part of your job…but just pay attention to the relative amount of pitch work to paid work. Every time the agency does a pitch that doesn’t work out, they lose money.

I'm going to be digging into all the ways that you can improve your chances of getting your work approved in subsequent episodes. 


But for now, I want to leave you with a quick overview list of things that you can do to improve your chances of getting your work approved:


1. Make a presentation that walks your audience through what you're proposing.

2. Annotate your work. 

3. To do a little before and after: show what came before, next to the thing that you're proposing.

4. Get "concept approval" whenever possible.  

5. Leverage precedence - research what came before to suggest solutions that demonstrate that you deeply understand the problem space.

6. Be organized with your project plan, but at the same time, be flexible.


I'm going to be delving into each one of those in a little bit more detail in subsequent episodes. 

So stay tuned and good luck!