When I first took over as the leaders of the in-house creative team at NCC, our team was in dire straights. None of our in-house clients wanted to work with us due to bad relationships and previous failures. When the main function of your job is to create for other departments who no longer desire your service, you’re in a really bad place. As I embarked on a journey of establishing a new identity for our team and re-establishing our damaged relationships, we developed a new set of team values to be our guide rails: Fun, Teamwork, Integrity, Creativity, and Killer Customer Service. We like’d to say it’s what made us F’n TICK.
To regain trust, we started a campaign of radical inclusion. We took our clients on engaging activities, invited them to open house lunches, and brought them into our creative work and gave them a voice and seat at our creative table…sometimes even in areas that didn’t effect them. I revamped our yearly review system around our new values, and brought clients into the review. We asked them to hold us accountable to our new values.
One of the ways we championed our new values was to bring moments of shock and awe by creating a deck of value cards that supported our values. These fun cards were based on pop-culture icons, as well as some of our clients and staff members who displayed the values we were aiming for. We would award these cards anytime someone on our team, or one of our clients did something that exemplified one of our values. We gave out decks to every member of our team, as well as to our clients. It was a wild success! People began looking for opportunities to recognize cowowrkes for the jobs they were doing and positive impact they were making. It even built some healthy competitiveness inside of our team.
