A gentler kind of strength

I grew up in agencies where it often felt like survival of the fittest. Creative directors could rule by terror. The loudest voices ruled the room. Passion for the work was treated as a licence for almost anything, and working through the night was worn like a medal of honour.

At the time, much of this passed for ambition. We were making creative work, after all. It was supposed to matter. Pressure was part of the job, and if you couldn’t take it, perhaps you weren’t cut out for it.

I’ve come to think we got toughness badly wrong. Gentleness isn’t a compromise. Being hard doesn’t always mean being effective.

In the agencies I grew up in, toughness was everywhere. Strength through adversity. Push through. Don’t show weakness. The person who could take the most punishment—or dish it out most convincingly—was often mistaken for the strongest person in the room.

But what if the harder thing is admitting you’re struggling? Saying you don’t know? Changing your mind? Being kind when you have the power not to be?

Steve Magness makes a version of this argument in Do Hard Things. Toughness doesn’t mean suppressing emotion and forcing yourself onward, whatever the cost. Real toughness requires us to pay attention to discomfort and deal honestly with what is happening. That takes more strength than just pretending everything is fine.

Passion can make us care enough to do extraordinary work. It can also become obsessive, consuming the rest of our lives and binding our sense of worth to the next result.

Honesty? Agencies often confuse going all in with having no limits.

Of course we cared about the work. Some nights ran late because an idea was close and nobody wanted to let it go. I’m not pretending that creative ambition can be reduced to a tidy working day, or that brilliant work comes without effort.

But there’s a difference between choosing to give something your all and being expected to prove your commitment through exhaustion. Once overnights become a badge of honour, people stop asking why they were necessary. Was the brief clear? Was the decision made too late? Were we improving the idea—or just demonstrating how much we could endure?

I think we also need to be honest about what intimidation does to the work. If speaking up might invite humiliation, you learn to keep doubts to yourself. You learn which ideas will please the person in charge. You learn to present certainty, even when you can see a problem. In that kind of room, a good challenge can die before anyone hears it.

The loudest voice then wins by default. Not because it has the best answer, but because quieter people have learned the cost of offering theirs.

The loudest voice then wins by default. Not because it has the best answer, but because quieter people have learned the cost of offering theirs.

It was harmful to a generation of people who worked in those agencies. It was also a poor way to make creative work. You need honesty to find the weakness in an idea. You need enough trust for someone to suggest a direction that isn’t fully formed. And you need people with different ways of thinking to contribute before the room settles on the answer it already knows how to approve.

The culture that claimed to be fiercely committed to creativity often made creativity harder.

I don’t say that from a position of innocence. I grew up in it. I absorbed some of its rules, and I’m sure I’ve carried some of them into rooms of my own. It takes time to notice the difference between a high standard and a needlessly hard experience. It takes longer to change the habits that once helped you survive.

And this isn’t only an agency problem. Much of that old idea of toughness is bound up with what men have been taught to be: self-sufficient, competitive, unshakeable. We know masculinity has a problem. We talk about the unhappiness it causes men and, of course, the people around them. Yet we still reward some of the behaviours that help create it. We admire the man who never admits doubt. We call cruelty candour. We treat kindness as softness and vulnerability as a loss of authority.

It’s time to ask what actually works.

Could a leader be demanding without being frightening? Could a creative director care passionately without making everyone else pay for that passion? Could we make work we’re proud of without asking people to damage themselves in the process?

I believe we can. Gentleness doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations or lowering the bar. It may mean having those conversations sooner, more directly and with enough care that the other person can actually hear you. Kindness doesn’t prevent ambition. It gives more people a chance to bring their best thinking to it.

There is courage in that. The courage to admit that a way of working you once admired caused harm. The courage to hear a perspective you might have dismissed. The courage to say, “I don’t know,” when everyone expects you to know. And, perhaps hardest of all, the courage to change when the old way has served you well.

We can’t undo what happened in those rooms. But we can stop confusing the ability to endure a bad culture with evidence that the culture produced great work. For the industry’s sake, and for all of ours, we should be asking for something better.