Dear Future Managing Editor

As my quarter acting as the Managing Director for the applied IMC class comes to an end, I would like to reflect on the lessons I have learned and what I would have done differently. I am writing this with the hopes that the next executive team can learn from my mistakes and start their journeys more equipped with the knowledge of how to best execute their role and lead the class to success.

There is a laundry list of things I would have done better, but the first thing is to have fun! Specifically, to have fun with your new team as early as possible. I think the best action you can take in creating a comfortable and cohesive team is to schedule a mandatory meeting time to exercise some “team bonding.” Creating a friendly and cohesive team is especially important in this class because each Product Manager is working on their own products, usually separate from other groups. Naturally, a manager is most concerned about their own team, not another group! So, starting off the quarter strong with a fun activity and getting to know each other is the first step to breaking down the walls of independent groups. After all, it is called Integrated Marketing Communications for a reason.

The topic of integration brings me to my next lesson. As Managing Director, one of your primary roles is to integrate the individual teams with each other. This is something I wish I had digested sooner. I knew my role was to oversee each team's product and to be the liaison for our client, but being in charge of integration didn’t click with me until much later. It is vital to know your role as the “integrator” before teams start building their products so that as the Managing Director YOU can assist them with ideas on how their teams can build upon each other.

Building even further on this idea, there should be a system in place to make this easier for teams. I’m not yet sure what this is, but it could be something as simple as dedicating parts of weekly meetings solely to openly discussing each team's products and how they could be improved and better integrated with both each other and the parent brand (WWU Marketing department).

The next issue I faced as the IMC Director was something that I knew I was personally going to struggle with. As someone who is fairly confident, I have some level of ADHD, therefore, organization, and timelines are not my forte. Although there were processes that did help me stay organized and ensure that I got my work done, like the Kanban, there wasn’t a huge focus on a tool/process that was more forward-looking. Even if you are organized and don’t have what I like to call “future myopia,” you will almost certainly have people on your team who will struggle with this. One of the most important concepts that I wish I would have focused on implementing was a better calendar system. We did have a calendar, but it was not very detailed and should have been more of a focus during meetings. I believe by not focusing enough on what was coming next caused our team to fall behind. By not knowing the next project, our team wasn’t able to ask the right questions, therefore making it impossible to execute projects in a timely manner.

On a related note, my next suggestion is to release unfinished drafts more frequently. This was another reason that our team wasn’t 100% on schedule. An example from this quarter was when the Product Managers were creating ad campaigns on Spotify for an external client. Our class was tasked to create and run ads for a business outside of the school on Spotify, but before doing so, the Product Managers and their teams needed essential information from the executive team in order to get started. While working closely with our Spotify client, the executive team (myself, Sara Slone, and Karlie Kildall) were compiling this essential information into a creative brief. We started working on this brief which the rest of our team needed right away, but we did not release the document until much later when it was completely finished. In hindsight, it would have been much more efficient to release multiple drafts of the document as we updated it, or even provide a link to the document as we worked on it, so that the rest of the class could get started with creating their ads.

To summarize, my biggest lessons this quarter were to build our team chemistry sooner, think about team integration ASAP, utilize a team calendar or timeline with regular updates, and not let perfection get in the way of progress.

As I now check my own calendar to see 2 more days until my final day in college, the thought of leaving this wonderful group of people is bittersweet. I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to be the Managing Director for the AIMC class this quarter and I could not have done it without my amazing team: Karlie Kildall, Sara Slone, and Professor Dan Purdy!