Maintaining good relationships in any walk of life takes effort. That’s not news. But when it comes to nurturing healthy ways of working with your external design team, well, we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto. 

In some ways, the pandemic changed everything. Working structures changed dramatically and with WFH becoming so much more the norm, you’d be forgiven for thinking this should make collaborating with an external design consultant so much easier.

The truth is that, whether you’re staring into the whites of one another's eyes in the room or on Zoom, human relationships are just that. Human. Productive collaboration between people on both sides of a creative brief still requires honesty, open-mindedness and above all, buckets of empathy.

And, let’s not forget that there is helpful tension between client needs and creative integrity. Some of my most enjoyable work was born out of that very energy. So how to get the balance right?

Over the next 5 weeks, I’ll share 10 tips to help you coexist with your agency of choice in a white fluffy cloud of mutual understanding, if not forever, then long enough to create work you’re both proud of – and more crucially than that – work that lands in all the right ways with your audience.