Superiority Complex

Your insecurities may not be the biggest problem.

I have read and heard and been part of a lot of conversations over the years, about how one can get over their inferiority complex. How we can stop second guessing ourselves, and start to have confidence in our own ideas, worth, and role in the process. I’m not going to write about that today, it’s been pretty well covered. But in a conversation with some other strategists in Rob Estreitinho’s Salmon Crew, the mirror version of this feeling came to mind. The sense of illusory superiority that can sometimes lead strategists to assume the problem is everyone else, and if people were just as smart as them, the work would be easier.

Let’s call it a superiority complex, for simplicity’s sake.

Strategy gets perceived as a “smart person job”. This is fair in some ways (good strategists are mostly very well-read, able to link disparate ideas, and capable of research and synthesis in an above-average way) and wildly unfair in others (there are plenty of jobs a top tier strategist is not suited for that require more or different types of intelligence). It’s a specific skill set and practice that requires a few unique things from you. But in an agency setting, where the other character classes are Creative (creativity, craft, ideas), Account Service (charisma, organization, relationships), Production (know how, dexterity, adaptability), Media (detail, reach, tangibility) and the Client (power, authority, expertise)… you can see how strategists might start to believe their own hype re: intelligence. This is a problem for a lot of reasons.

Photo by Fernando Santander on Unsplash

Thinking you’re smarter than your client is the most obvious issue. They are likely someone who knows more about the subject at hand than you do, but strategists can often forget that they are ‘microwave experts’ - the kind of sprint-gained knowledge in a category that means they quite literally know just enough to be dangerous. The place where they (should) have deep expertise, in how marketing works, in the psychology and biology of communication, in research methods, in culture, in effectiveness and frameworks and platforms, sometimes gets hidden behind the pursuit of the insight, of the big and shocking idea. The strategist is ideally a bit of a polymath in the at times narrow worlds of culture and communication, too, though.

That doesn’t mean they know more than the client about the operation of a specific CPG business, a specific target, or the inner workings and politics of a specific organization. But when strategies don’t land in the room, too many of us default to “they didn’t understand” or “I guess I need to dumb it down”. As though the core competency we’re suppose to have is not the ability to formulate and express complex ideas clearly.

A strategy you can’t convince the client to believe in, is not a good strategy. In these situations, the assumption that you’re the smartest person in the room is immediately disproven by the fact you couldn’t explain your idea to the room well enough to get them on board. The arrogance inherent in the conclusion that the problem was on the other end, is likely the biggest sign it wasn’t. (You’re likely not as smart as Richard Feynman was, and he’d argue he didn’t understand something until he could explain it simply.)

Thinking you’re smarter than your team is another huge problem. There is no such thing as a great strategy that your creatives think is unworkable, or that your accounts team thinks isn’t aligned with the client business. The problem might be that your ideas aren’t as great as you think they are, or that you’re explaining them poorly. Both of these are more likely than you being a misunderstood genius.

Thinking of yourself as superior means you lose out on meaningfully incorporating the expertise of the rest of your agency team in crafting better work, considering other perspectives, and in communicating all of this effectively to your earliest audiences. There have been times the CD had a better insight than I came up with, so we changed the brief. Or when an account person came up with a better way to think about metrics, so we changed the KPIs. In every case you have the opportunity to welcome a good idea from someone else who is a different type of expert. The strategist obsessed with being “the smartest person in the room” rarely lets themselves benefit from anyone else’s intelligence, though.

Levelling up as a strategist requires a few forms of ego death, in my personal experience.

You need to accept that the client will always know more than you about their business. This is a universal constant of our world. Even if you’ve done all the reading. Even if you’ve worked client side in that industry or company in the past. Things change quickly, and their whole professional world revolves around that brand, company or division. Let them (or their boss, or team) tell you when you’re wrong. It doesn’t make you any less capable to ask them questions rather than try to divine the answers yourself.

You need to accept that your partners within an agency are much more capable than you in many areas. I am a really good presenter, for example. But I have worked with many better ones. We probably couldn’t present each other’s material, but if I need to land a great emotional point, I’ll engage the best person in the room to do it. Getting a different perspective on your work will literally only make it better. Even in a specific skill like writing, the best strategic writer can learn tons from the best creative writer, for example.

You need to understand that there are as many forms as brilliance as there are types of beauty, and that borrowing liberally from all of them makes you a hell of a lot smarter than arguing for the superiority of your specific flavour of smarts. If you have a niche or an area of subject matter expertise, that’s a tool to leverage, it’s not the full universe of possibility. People have this deranged idea that there’s only one type of smart, and they’re forever judging goldfish by their ability to climb trees.

You need to stop seeing self-doubt as an enemy to be conquered, and instead as a tool to sharpen your thinking. Your job is to be wrong, a lot, in pursuit of being right. You are Rosie Revere, Engineer¹ and you should be cranking out perfect first try failures as often as possible so you can figure out what actually works. Question everything, but by all that is holy start with yourself.

But mostly, you need to remember that you might be the weird one, in almost every situation². This is often sublimated into an idea of superiority. That because other people haven’t read what you’ve read, or watched what you’ve watched, or done the research you’ve done, they’re inherently more likely to be wrong. To be lesser. This is, to be clear, insane bullshit.

Strategists are generally pretty weird. The best ones I’ve ever worked with tend to have several unique obsessions, or a lifetime of experience on the periphery of the mainstream, looking in, or both. They are voracious consumers of information and entertainment. They love a directionless, tangential conversation with no conclusion in sight. They say things that will be inevitably interpreted as judgments, when they’re genuinely intended as observations. They’re the people who get excited about Pew research charts.

Most people are not like this. If you remove the value judgement about who is ‘better’, you’re left with the understanding that most people you’re going to speak with, work with, or meet, are not going to see the world the way that you do. Asking them to do the heavy lifting of having your media diet, education and life experience to understand your point, is arrogant to the point of comedy. Even more so if you’re supposed to be helping them figure out how to communicate things to large groups of people who are indifferent or disengaged.

Being this kind of person can be alienating. Some strategists I have known and spoken to, had some isolating experiences as youths or young adults, and retreated to their intellect in defence. Some have been celebrated and rewarded for how their brain fit the relatively narrow definitions of intelligence that shows up in standardized testing or extra credit projects. There’s usually less of us in an agency than anyone else, our output is often less visible in the final product, etc. So we can sometimes lean into “smart” as a salve for our own insecurities, especially because for many of us we’d made it our identity in one way or another.

But the idea that you’re smarter than other people is debatable at best, and toxic at worst. The idea that you’re better than them because you’re smart, can be rejected outright. When you catch yourself falling into this trap, it’s probably worth remembering that a legitimate genius who can’t get other people to listen to their ideas, has equivalent impact to someone incapable of generating those ideas.

I think there’s a decent chance you’re spending too much time worrying about inferiority complexes, and not enough time worrying about superiority complexes.

1. This is a children’s book that I occasionally read to my son and almost always need to fight back tears when a fictional adult explains to a fictional child that failure is a key part of progress. Reading children’s books is basically going to therapy at 2 removes.

2. This isn’t supposed to be depressing, it’s intended to be freeing. Embrace your weirdness, and use a different descriptor if you want, but accept that not everyone is you-shaped, and stop expecting them to be. Doing this is a one step guaranteed improvement in relating to other people, which is at the core of strategy. Plus, if you just accept it, you can actually lean into it in a way that brings other people along, rather than separating you from them.