ernie-arias &laquo; WordPress.com Tag Feed http://en.wordpress.com/tag/ernie-arias/ Feed of posts on WordPress.com tagged "ernie-arias" Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:41:08 +0000 http://en.wordpress.com/tags/ en <![CDATA[Delegation, The Power To Empower]]> http://erniearias.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/delegation-the-power-to-empower/ Wed, 02 May 2012 12:09:10 +0000 erniearias http://erniearias.wordpress.com/2012/05/02/delegation-the-power-to-empower/ By Ernie Arias

“I just do what I’m really good at, to delegate. The rest I delegate it.” @ERNIEARIAS twitted on July 14th, 2011.

My first gig as a studio manager was about ten years ago. A responsibility I earned because of my work ethic, outstanding skills as a studio artist and an excellent interaction with my co-workers as well as with the Traffic Coordinators, Editorial, Print Production and Account personnel. Pretty much everyone agreed I was right for the position and I was very excited in taking this new challenging opportunity. However, today I look back and realize how ‘green’ I was, regardless how super-talented I might be.

I still remember my first week as being such a traumatic and stressful experience, because either I wanted to do everything myself or at least be involved in it more than I needed to be as a supervisor. There I was, completely out of my comfort zone and as someone else pointed out, “I found myself distrusting my piers,” the very same individuals I’ve never judged or distrusted before when I was not a supervisor. On the contrary, they were all excellent professionals and we had a very strong studio process in place plus a newly created quality control unit. As a matter of fact, there was no rationale that could have possibly explained my behavior. So what was wrong? What’s happening?

My problem was very simple, I was not delegating as much as I should. It took me a while until I was able to adjust to my new responsibilities as manager and learned to delegate effectively.

The Big Picture
Delegation is probably one of the most important skills a studio manager must possess and it’s as simple as assessing the job requests, dealing with priorities and distributing the workload among your staff (and freelancers), always following the cardinal rule of not doing anything that doesn’t absolutely need to be done by you. It’s very easy to fall in the trap of creating a work overload on your desk if you don’t delegate effectively, especially to those who are very skillful and can take care of any task as good as any studio artist or even better. You need to focus in your task as a manager in order to maintain control over the workflow, priorities, process and quality of the final delivery. You must sit down on the ‘Captain’s chair’ to be able to see the ‘big picture’ and ensure the operation is running smoothly, as well as to identify, anticipate any potential problem and take corrective action.

Building Trust And Empowering Your Staff
By delegating, assigning important tasks, you build trust and create a sense of ownership and empowerment among your team. Trust is essential to leadership and team building, and also to earn respect beyond your appointed position. Good employees are very observant of the manager’s ability to delegate and when they sense they’re not being utilized as much as they can perform or to the level they can perform, they simply feel themselves as not being trusted, hence a bit demoralized. They can also misjudge the manager as not being confident or even worse, holding a heavy workload on your desk might also be misinterpreted as territorial protection.

The good news is that delegation is a skill, and as any skill it can be learned. Not surprisingly, there is a very tight connection between your title and your ability to delegate. The higher you climb up the corporate ladder, the more refined and effective your delegation skills must be.

]]> <![CDATA[Retrospective: Top 12 Social Media Tweets From An Advertising Studio Manager]]> http://erniearias.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/retrospective-top-12-social-media-tweets-from-an-advertising-studio-manager/ Sun, 11 Mar 2012 05:55:59 +0000 erniearias http://erniearias.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/retrospective-top-12-social-media-tweets-from-an-advertising-studio-manager/ It has been almost a year when I experienced a strong connection with social media and started using pretty much all social networks. To celebrate my first year of actively twittering, I’ve collected some of my most memorable tweets (descending chronological order) to share with you:

I hope you enjoy my story and can appreciate the ingenuity within these tweets. It’s like someone who’ve just discovered this powerful new thing and is so excited about it. Since then my enthusiasm has just grown exponentially and I’ve been studying and experimenting with social media. The more I do it the more I like it. I believe I’ve just found an activity that turned out to define a turning point in my life and professional career. ‘Enhorabuena Social Media.’

]]> <![CDATA[Corporate Fitness 101: Managing A Lean Studio]]> http://erniearias.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/corporate-fitness-101-managing-a-lean-studio/ Wed, 29 Feb 2012 00:53:51 +0000 erniearias http://erniearias.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/corporate-fitness-101-managing-a-lean-studio/ Advertising industry, with its highs and lows, offers quite an interesting challenge in financial management. The need to maintain ‘healthy’ quarterly financial statements regardless of business ‘going south’ on a downhill ride, it is perhaps the most important task and responsibility over the shoulders of a CFO and any department director presenting financial reports. And among all agency’s departments, the studio is undoubtedly the quintessential, role model of a business unit within a business because of its service-provider nature, therefore it’s at the same time the easiest one to be outsourced in its entirety.

I bring outsourcing into this article as the total opposite solution some Operation Managers opt for, when things go sour financially speaking. The bottom line is that it’s a business and it needs to be profitable otherwise it will collapse.

Technology, The Backbone Of ‘The Skeleton Crew’
Backbone and Skeleton might sound a little creepy, but the reality is that we must rely on cutting-edge technology to streamline and optimize tasks. Just like robotics technology replaced dozens of hard-labor employees in a processing plant, the same way cutting-edge technology like Dalim Twist, Xinet WebNative suite, FMP-JobCharge, etc., allow us to streamline our work flow, to increase productivity and to manage with a few good ones (über studio artists.)

You can go technical if you want, and utilize sophisticated methods to determine who are the studio overachievers that will allow you to run a lean studio; SWOT analyses, performance reviews, the Pareto or 80/20 rule,, etc., the truth is that you already know who they are and if you don’t my recommendation is to do the ‘mental exercise’ so when the time comes to cut staff you are ready for it. (This might sound cruel and heartless but the reality is every employee’s salary must represent 3X revenue in order to have a healthy profit margin, hence the need of managers to make sometimes unpopular decisions.)

Staffing Agencies + Social Networks
Now that you’re running the studio with a reduced number of excellent employees, one thing you don’t want to do is to burn them out. It wouldn’t be proper to “reward” or better say to punish them with ridiculous amount of work, unless you want to compromise the morale in your team.

It is true that in this business we have to put many times the extra effort. However, this should never be the norm. In order to create sustainability with this model you need to have a reliable source of freelancers that will cover the over flow, so having a good commercial relationship with staffing agencies plus building your own pool of talented freelancers by the means of social networks, it is the way to go.

Fluctuating Work Flow
With this business model there is absolute guarantee the staffers’ profit margin will be substantially high and bringing freelancers will always have a rationale, so regardless is billable or non-billable you should have a positive profit margin or worst case scenario, at least you’ll cut even.

Communication between departments is critical. Getting timely heads up from Project Managers and Print Producers will allow the studio manager to staff properly and to keep any project within the estimated budget. There is also the need to incorporate certain preemptive measures as part of our billing and staffing process to avoid undesirable situations with the requester.

Get Lean Without Being Mean
As I mentioned before, this is a business and it must be profitable otherwise it might collapse. But you don’t need to be a corporate tyrant in order to achieve this, on the contrary, now that you have a crew of super qualified and talented individuals who are giving you 110% whenever is required, you must consider putting your management efforts towards keeping a high morale within your group by the means of compensation, reward programs and even salary raises. If you used the 80/20 rule to pick them up you should know that they were the 20% of your crew responsible for generating 80% of the revenue, so they really deserve it.

]]>