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Welcome to this week's useletter
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focussing on your future not my past, the newsletter that's useful.
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The most random things pop into my head.
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Do you sometimes drop them on social media?
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To see what other people think. About the random, not random, things?
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Sometimes they'll drop into the infinite abyss without a sound.
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Occasionally, one'll sorta fly and make a noise.
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Like this (abridged) one I dropped on LinkedIn a few of weeks ago:
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The most valuable service architects offer is leadership.
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Leaders in sustainability.
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Leaders in climate resilience.
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Leading social responsibility and housing.
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Leaders for our cities and built environments.
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Leading positive change through creative and second order thinking.
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It seemed to resonate. The idea is gathering a momentum in my thinking.
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There's an opportunity to be seized within that insight. To lean into your leadership and your values. To develop how you lead as an architect. Oh, also! And in doing so, it might also up your marketing game.
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This fortnight’s Useletter is all about why marketing is not just want you think it is and why leadership is an important service offering for your practice.
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Leadership as architectural service
(and marketing)
When most people engage an architect, they’re doing so with the end in mind. An end that typically involves a completed building.
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But first, they choose an architect (or designer, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole).
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Marketers will exhort architects to better demonstrate and communicate their value. And they totally should. But that’s not all.
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Marketing is about what you tell people.
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And marketing is their subjective experience of you.
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As Margo Aaron observed, the real marketing question is, “Who is this for? And why should they care?”
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And that’s where the importance of leadership as service becomes most consequential.
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It’s not just that your practice is concerned about sustainability, climate resilience, social responsibility, the built environment, and so on, but that the practice is leading in one or many of these areas. Not talking about it, but actively leading change. Not when suitable commissions come along, but in choosing to lead change without being commissioned to do so. Doing the work for people that care and the work that they care about. That's why they'll choose you.
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Engendering and realising values and ambition in all your commissioned work is a great place to start. Then, instead of thinking about it as your input into the brief, start to make it about a broader change you seek in the world. Leadership not in service of your clients, but in service.
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It’s not for or about marketing, marketing is a side-effect.
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This week I want to encourage you to experiment with this thinking. Take up a posture of leadership as service even. See where it leads you. I’m keen to know your thoughts. Am I wrong? What I might need to rethink?
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Want to develop better leadership?
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I help practices work on their leadership team and strategies.
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Supporting practices to become more open, fluid, and adaptable.
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Realising the collective energy, passion, and capabilities of their people.
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Let's chat about your leadership development
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What else is going on at unmeasured?
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I send news and updates out separately in my occasional Updates & Events email. Click the button below to go to the sign up page and have your details added to that email list too.
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recent useful blog posts...
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It might be time for the architecture profession’s leaders to starting learning form the ground up.
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There’s two main ways to stand out. Be different. or Be better. Copying is the route to unexceptional.
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Or…
do architects do too many of the wrong things?
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“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant.” - Max De Pree
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