When you’re a manager of a team, whether it’s a small one or a larger one, you’re going to have to figure out how to make sure that the work that needs to get done gets done. In other words, you’re going to have to delegate, and you’re going to need to figure out how to do that in a way that makes sense - from a budget AND a project perspective.

One of the biggest mistakes creative managers make, imo, is that the second they run into an extensive coverage need, they figure the first thing they need to throw out the window is their employee’s well-being.  Like, it’s “emergency mode”, all hands on deck, except that that mode doesn’t ever end because the requests and projects keep coming and coming.

Of course, there’re reasons for this. Creative folks get used to having their well-being discarded and they might figure that’s just how it has to be. 

Or maybe they got used to seeing the big boss have an easy life and they figure it’s their turn. 

Or maybe they assume organizing the team ISN’T their problem. They assume that it’s the completely the responsibility of the product manger, the design ops person, their assistant, or whatever. 

Perhaps they feel delegation is scary (or maybe just annoying), and that they need to be more of a lead-by-example figurehead, and less of a paper-pusher - or an organizer.

This is HUGE disconnect in our culture.

Yeah, maybe you’ll get to the level where it’s no longer efficient for you to be the one doing all the organizing, but most people don’t START there.

You NEED to know how to do this, and even if you decide to hire someone to take it over later, you need to be able to train that person and work together with them - realize a vision and be able to communicate to them. 

If you ignore this skill, you’re going to find yourself constantly chasing deadlines, running employees into the ground, and spending money that you don’t have to spend.

And you’ll also be at the mercy of people who ARE good at organizing others without ever recognizing the immense invisible work they’re doing. Sometimes that will lead to employees quitting on you in a huff. Sometimes it will lead to you getting your butt handed to you by your peers who DO have those skills. 

But most of the time, it’s going to lead to you losing business because operating from this place of scarcity (re: I can’t AFFORD to consider my employees’ wellbeing) translates into a bad product.

Personally speaking, I have a strong vision that I realize in a large part through how I organize my teams.

My vision and core belief is this:

Creative work (the kinds that moves society forward, wins awards, becomes best-in-class) needs:

-Rested, clear-thinking employees

-An environment that reinforces psychological safety so that we can trust each other and try things that fail sometimes

-A culture that operates from a place of abundance, rather than a place of scarcity

-Enough structure to keep the rails on, and enough flexibility to pivot


So if you're with me on that, I want to talk about how you can use that idea to reprogram how we think about meeting coverage needs.

And to do that, I'm just going to name a few really specific extended coverage situations that are going to come up all the time as, um, creative manager.

#1: A Client Needs Extended Support Hours
The first situation is having a client who expects you have an extended set of hours that you're responsive to them.

And this actually did happen to me pretty early on in my career. I was working on a banner ad campaign and our client requested that or required us to be online and responsive by 8 AM Eastern Standard Time until 8 p. m. Eastern Standard Time. So yeah...that's a 12 hour shift.

This project was 2 or 3 months long. So to me, it's an immediate disconnect to be telling my team, "Okay, for the next 3 months, you are required to come in at 8 and leave by 8 pm".

Even with people who were super eager or willing to do that, there's no way that a human person could consistently do that for three months. It's not really sustainable. 

So the way that I personally like to handle this is I like to just immediately start a shift schedule. So we had an early shift of people who came in at 8 a. m. and we had a later shift that ended at 8 p. m. And everybody had to sign up for a few of each of the shifts and we just divided it evenly between us — and I included myself in that. I also took the same number of shifts as everybody else. 

So yeah, when you're just in a situation where there is an absolute clear requirement that you have to be available within a time span that is, that exceeds a standard eight hour work day, then my immediate first response to that is to form shifts.

#2: Support Needed During Holidays and Summer Fridays
The second scenario I want to talk about is what to do when you have a need to support a holiday....eg, the holidays at the end of December - or for instance, Summer Fridays. I worked at a place that used to have Summer Fridays. And the thing is, the team had to meet deadlines that intersected with those Fridays.

And so what do you do?  I know the first instinct of many people is just to say, "well, that vacation's canceled. You just have to come in. Everybody's got to do it. That's how to make it fair." Or your instinct might be to approve everyone's time off and just do it yourself. I've seen that happen too.

Neither one of those things are good options for, for pretty obvious reasons.  What I have done in the past (and what some of my colleagues have done in the past). is to figure out the number of summer Fridays there are in the summer.

And then you look at the number of people who are on your team  and you think to yourself, you know, what, like, what is the minimum number of people that, that could be staffed on a Friday to fulfill our obligation to, you know, be available on, on like a full Friday? Maybe that's three people, something like that.

You figure out mathematically with the number of people on your team and you set up just a required sign up for one or two or three Fridays, whatever it is.  And that way everyone gets to take most of their summer Fridays, and then you just need to work like one or two Fridays during the summer.

And I think automatically that makes everything kind of feel psychologically better. And lyou sign up for those days, the same as your team, as well. It's good to lead by that example.  But at the same time, you don't have to absorb the full brunt of it either - the way that you might feel like you should so you don't upset people.


#3: Support Needed During Weekends
Okay, here's the third scenario. Let's say you work for a company where there's some type of weekend support that's needed, um, in addition to, like, being available the full week.  And that type of weekend sport is like a continual, it comes up every so often. And it's just a thing that you have to fulfill. This was a scenario in one of the jobs I've had. 

Because I had done some smart budgetary planning with how we had arranged our resources to begin with, I had a little of money, and I realized after I crunched the numbers that I had enough budget left to just hire somebody for a few hours on the weekends that this work came up. And in so doing, I could free the entire team of the obligation to add this extra 10 hours to this already ~50-hour week that they had just worked.

It was such a small cost in comparison to bumping up the morale of, like,  15-20 people. So, those are the kinds of things I think about when I plan coverage. The other thing that's great is that the person that we hired was, they came into it knowing what they were signing up for and signing up for it willingly, rather than it being this like unexpected add-on.

Those types of intricate planning moments where you're really "getting in there" with the math are so impactful to the overall lifestyle of you and your team - and the overall creative output. 

I hope these three examples help to give you an idea of how to thoughtfully delegate when a big extensive coverage need comes up for your team.  

Approaching coverage from a place of abundance rather than from a place of panic or scarcity is going to yield the best result, the best product, and the best team culture. 

That's what I have for you today. I'll be talking more about the nuances of delegation in a later episode.