19. In Praise of Solo Artists
We are all solo artists — and we all need some spotlight
Among the best advice I’ve ever received about team-building is this:
“Hire great people. Get out of their way.”
Team-building can be as easy as this, and yet seldom do team builders follow this simple blueprint. (I have been guilty, I’m sure.)
Instead, employees often find themselves held back by complexity, uncertainty, red tape, micro-management, and a host of other team-building sins that prevent them from being the amazing teammates they were hired to be – teammates with talent, with brilliance, with unique ideas and viewpoints and tastes and stories. Imagine how great the workplace could be if people were allowed to do their thing!
Case in point: We had a simple ritual in our marketing meetings at Oyster where people could volunteer to do a show-and-tell of something they were working on or interested in, like an overview of a marketing program or a new skill they learned. One week, a teammate shared an overview of custom Slack emoji. It was transcendent. Not only did we learn how to upload a custom Slackmoji, but we got a complete rundown of emoji protocol, best practices for async emoji communication, and bespoke emoji that we could use with our team. I was delighted.
How do we get more Slackmoji moments in our everyday work lives?
In the book Yes to the Mess, author Frank Barrett draws on jazz music to describe a handful of leadership principles, including how to create more Slackmoji moments. He calls them solo artists:
“Ensure that everyone has a chance to solo from time to time.”
A solo artist, in the work context, is anyone who is able to give a unique contribution, showing off their passion in a way that can be celebrated and appreciated by others. The music equivalent of a jazz solo could look any number of different ways at work:
A creative presentation on the utility of Slackmoji
A unique opinion shared in a team meeting or all-hands
A fresh idea for the new client you just started working with
A campaign that you dreamed up
A website headline that you crafted
Big or small, these solo moments contribute to a more innovative, more diverse, more enjoyable workplace. The benefits of having more solo artists are the same as the benefits for bringing more creativity into your day-to-day: higher quality work, more inspiring ideas, greater agency and control over your future, differentiation from others, and yes, even revenue.
All you need to do is set the stage for the solo artists to shine.
For people managers, the most obvious way to create more solo moments is to “get out of people’s way,” but there are many other creative tweaks and tactics that can build this mentality into a team’s rituals and rhythms. And it’s not just a job beholden to people managers! We can encourage our colleagues and advocate for ourselves to create more solo artist time and space. Here are a few of our favorite tips, whether you’re building solo time for your teammates or creating a solo for yourself.
How to empower you and your colleagues to have more solo moments
Solo moments occur when you give people the space to bring forward the things they are passionate about and uniquely qualified to create, discuss, and offer. This can happen in public settings like an all-hands or in smaller settings like a chat room. Solo artists just need the right environment in which to thrive.
Oftentimes creating this environment requires a mix of the right team culture and the right team rituals. Some of us may have more control over a team’s day-to-day and an easier time implementing changes, but apart from this, anyone can advocate for a more creative environment. Here are some ideas of where to start, or some inspiration if you’re already well on your way:
Nominal group technique. In Yes to the Mess, Frank Barrett talks about this technique, which works like this: Every individual takes turns brainstorming, out loud, while others listen to their ideas. No one is allowed to interrupt; instead, people are asked to build on the ideas they’ve heard.
The seven-second rule. When asking for feedback or thoughts from a group, wait seven seconds – oftentimes, in my experience, through excruciating silence – before moving on to allow people time to process and share. This is especially helpful for people less inclined to speak up quickly in meetings or people who don’t share your native language.
Psychological safety. This deserves a newsletter issue of its own. I am only barely scratching the surface by saying that whatever you can do to show your own vulnerability with your solo work will go miles for your colleagues’ willingness to embrace their own solo moments. For me, this meant being quite silly and dumb with my team presentations. (I am in Giphy’s top one percent of users, I’m sure.)
Google and 3M’s 20 percent time. Carve out a portion of time for people to spend on work that they are passionate about (and would bring business value, if necessary). If you can’t spare 20 percent, maybe you can spare a Friday afternoon once a month?
Experiments budget. When I was at Buffer, each person on my team got $15 per month to spend on any type of marketing experiment they wanted – perhaps a new tool to try, some social post to boost, the sky’s the limit!
How to embrace your inner solo artist
Of course, we may not have the influence to re-design our workplace to better suit solo artists, or we may be lacking a workplace altogether (hello, freelancers and entrepreneurs!). Nevertheless, the act of going solo with something remains an incredibly valuable habit to build.
For these solo artists, the blueprint looks quite similar to what we’ve discussed in our series on building your creative practice. In that series,
has shared a ton of great ideas like:Give yourself constraints: block your calendar for creative time
Be kind to yourself: Stop talking to yourself worse than you would talk to your friends!
Set a Pomodoro timer to batch your various types of creative work – maybe squeeze in a solo moment or two
Do you identify with the solo artist?
Do you wish you had more solo time at work? When have you experienced this solo artist impact on your teams or on your creative practice? We’d love to hear from you. Drop us a comment or reply anytime.
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