Account Man's Best Friend

I am the account director and my boss expects me to responsible for all aspects of the account but the creative director goes off and racks up a whole of time by doubling the number of teams working on a job or dumping a whole load of his time on my account job numbers. I don’t have a great relationship with him, he is a partner in the business and yet he seems to be unaware of profitability issues. He is making my job a misery – what should I do?

This is similar to a previous question which I answered last year. Have a look at the previous post but let me look at things specific to your question:

Firstly don’t take it personally. Just see it as something that needs sorting out like if a process is not working out. It would be very easy to slip into the trap of demonising him when in fact he should be your best friend. As you know, we can be extremely buttoned down account handlers working our hearts out on the client relationship, but what will really excite and inspire clients is the creative work and a good creative director can come in with all his/her non-account handling techniques and make all that happen. So you need to allow that creative spirit to flourish – with the client and within the account team.

However, you seem to have a tough situation. A partner in the business who is not conscious of profitability and someone to boot who does not know that his client services staff can be such strong allies in the pursuit of good creative work (if treated correctly) sounds very old-school.

You obviously need a conversation with him but you will need to couch it in his terms. Therefore anything which gets better work through the client, makes him look personally good and his department more famous is something he will listen to.
He may not realise what his actions are doing to the account profitability. A few choice examples may show him that he won’t be able to afford his new Harley at the end of the year if money is being wasted in this way.

Don’t forget there is going to be a healthy tension between an account director’s view of tidy finances and the desire to do speculative creative work. I find if that the rules for creating speculative work to excite the client can be agreed within teams, then some of the tensions are dissipated. And the account planning process can make sure that everyone is in agreement why speculative work should be undertaken and to what budget.

The account planning process also allows you to expose some of the issues to the wider management team and get agreement on how much time is going to be invested in new areas – without giving the creative director the impression you are ratting on him to his peers.

Experiment with these ideas. And good luck - just see it as an easier form of liontaming...