The title gets you into the building. It doesn’t get you into the room.
I was once sent into a design organisation with a remit to change how it worked, and found no way in. What opened the door in the end wasn’t my job title. It was one developer who believed in an idea.
That wasn’t the only time I found myself in that position. The second time, I made a different mistake.
A year trying to earn their respect
When I took over the creative side of the business, I spent the best part of a year trying to prove I belonged there. Not to my boss. To the team.
They knew me as the strictly-business guy, the commercial person who understood numbers, margins and customers. Now I was leading the creative organisation. I knew I needed to earn their respect, and I wanted them to see I understood their world.
So I went to everything. Colour palettes, sketch reviews, assortment meetings. I wanted to show them I cared about the work, that I understood it, and that I wasn’t just the commercial guy coming in to tell the creatives what to do.
For a while I thought that was exactly what I should be doing.
But something happens when the most senior person in the room is also trying to prove they deserve to be there. People start looking to you. They wait for your opinion, even when you haven’t asked for theirs.
I’d worked hard to become part of the room, and my presence was changing how the room worked.
I hadn’t really considered that.
What I was actually there for
Somewhere in that year I started to understand the difference.
I wasn’t there to replace the creativity. I understood it, and I understood it well, but it wasn’t mine to do. I was there to make it better.
That meant asking different questions. Not how do I show them I belong, but what are they missing? What’s getting in their way? What could I help them achieve that they couldn’t before?
So I gave the team more space to do the creative work. Freedom within a framework. The one thing I changed was this: every idea had to come back with its commercial consequence. The win, or the return.
Not because everything creative should be reduced to a spreadsheet. Because we were building products for customers, and the creative calls we made had commercial consequences. I wanted the team to understand those consequences and be part of the conversation about them.
And the designers were genuinely interested. They wanted to understand how their work performed and what it contributed. They’d just never been treated as equals in that conversation. The business had always kept the two apart. The designers created, the commercial teams evaluated, and it had never been set up any other way.
Once we brought those conversations together, the team started thinking differently about what they were creating and why.
And I started contributing differently too. I didn’t need to be in every creative discussion to add value. I needed to bring something to the team that wasn’t already there.
The difference between appointed and effective
I’ve watched plenty of senior leaders arrive in new organisations with a mandate to change things.
Some come in with a clear view of how everything should work. They’ve been successful elsewhere, they were hired for that experience, and they want to show quickly why the business brought them in. So they start changing things, sometimes before they’ve understood why those things worked the way they did.
Others spend months trying to prove they belong. Getting involved in everything, demonstrating their knowledge, showing the team they understand the detail.
I’ve done both.
The first assumes the appointment gives you the influence to change things.
The second starts with something necessary. Earning the team’s respect is not optional. It becomes a problem when the proving takes over from the job you were appointed to do.
Being effective isn’t about whether people do what you ask. It’s about what becomes possible because you’re there.
That’s a much harder test. You can have the title, the mandate and a team that does everything you tell them, and still not be making the contribution the business actually needs from you.
What I’d do differently
If I walked into that role again I’d still spend time with the designers. Sit in the reviews, ask questions, learn how the organisation ran. Earning their respect mattered, and it wasn’t something I could demand because of the title.
But I’d be clearer, much earlier, about why I was there. I’d want to know what the team was already doing well, where they were struggling, what they wanted to achieve but couldn’t, and what I could bring from my experience to help them get there.
The commercial perspective was never a threat to their creativity. It made their work more valuable. And theirs made me a better commercial leader. Neither of us needed to become the other.
When you take on a bigger role, there’s a natural pull to show people why you were given it. You want credibility, you want the team’s trust, and you want to show the people who appointed you that they made the right call.
I understand that. But proving you deserve the role and doing what the role needs are different things.
The work changed when I stopped asking what I needed to prove and started asking what the team needed from me.
Looking back, I wish I’d made that shift sooner.
Andrew
PS. If you’ve taken on something bigger in the last year and you’re still proving rather than doing, the first conversation is thirty minutes and it’s private.