How would I go about preparing myself for handling the pressures of leading a small team and working late nights developing different advertising and marketing strategies?

Always remember, management and leadership positions are always earned, never given. Don't stress about management or leadership right now. First, focus on developing the skills you need to get your foot in the door at an ad agency or digital marketing company. For example, majoring in marketing is great, but also get involved in local conferences, meetups, and clubs. This will show your passion for the space and help you network and meet people in your industry. You will start to stand out among your peers when interviewing for a great internship. Land a couple good internships during undergrad by doing research early and learning about what's out there.

Once you are in a firm, focus on learning and seek mentorship from a senior team member. Assume you know nothing and don't stop trying to get better. After a 3-5 years of experience you'll have a chance at management and then it will be your turn to start mentoring the eager college grads coming in.

There's already been some great comments made on this. I'd like to just elaborate on a few points.

As far as how to handle pressure and deadlines. You will have good practice in college. Learn how to prioritize your workload between classes and work. Too many students don't study enough during the semester and cram before a midterm or final. During college see if you can get an internship at a marketing firm. Read time management books like the one minute manager. It's a fun book with some simple stories about how to be an effective manager.

Hey Marcel!

That's a great question. Unless you're working in account management or as a project manager, you probably won't be leading teams right off the bat unless you're working for a very small company, like a start-up or a small business with very few employees. It's far more likely that you'll be part of a team, and in most agencies, they're very hierarchical in terms of title & types of responsibilities and you'll probably be starting from the bottom like most others.

It sounds like a bit of what you're talking about is media optimization, and at least for paid search, those types of positions might involve lots of late nights on a regular basis, but for short periods of time, if you need to update bulk sheets. Most ad agencies are very much client-driven project work where you have a certain number of billable hours that you need to meet. At certain points with different projects or key deadlines (like at the end of a quarter, beginning of the month, the end of a fiscal or calendar year or when they're pitching or responding to an RFP for a new piece of business), the hours may be considerably longer, but usually they go back down.

What may be a better use of your time is to focus on narrowing down potential employers that you'd be interested in working for, and then seeing if you can pursue a summer internship with them while you are still in college, and in some cases, you might even be able to in high school. I would say that most of the larger companies have them, and that experience would likely give you a better taste of what working there would be like. In addition, if it turns out to be a great fit, they'll remember you and may be more likely to actually hire you right when you graduate from school. Your odds will likely be much better than if you had been otherwise coming from and competing from a general applicant pool.

There's the corporate culture, which is important, but in advertising, the team culture matters a lot and the makeup of that can very much depend on which client team(s) you're assigned to work on and who your peers will be. That translates into everything from number and types of hours/work your team bills for (which may be very different from other clients & teams), and how much they focus on efficiency & time-tracking of billable vs. nonbillable time.

There definitely are companies where you may be more likely to achieve more of a work-life balance, but they usually aren't for external client-driven work and are more likely to be in-house with business partners. Something else to keep in mind is that things can tend to change pretty rapidly in an agency environment, and that includes client base, which may in turn translate into how much time you spend working vs. personal time. Ad-hoc requests, sometimes very last-minute, may pop up from the client. Usually, they're handled at a higher level, but not always if you're the one who's responsible and closest to the day-to-day work if it's a really specific question that needs to be answered. As you work your way up and become more client-facing, you may be more likely to lead a team.

In terms of concrete skills, it would be helpful to become better at negotiating, specifically negotiating your workload effort and time, and that's not just for marketing in advertising, but for any company, including if you were ever to work for a nonprofit work where the funding is very much cyclical & grant-driven. In both of those work environments, your time is often split, including sometimes amongst different managers, who, more often than not, may not always be great with communicating with each other about how your time should be spent if they only have a certain percentage of your time. Inevitably, if you don't take a consistent & proactive approach to it or the other managers involved don't communicate well with each other because they're busy other tasks (and you can't assume that just because they're a manager, they'll be good at that type of multitasking or interpersonal people skills since they may have become a manager for different reasons that have nothing to do with managing people), they may drastically underestimate and not appreciate the full scope of the concurrent work you do for other teams, managers or clients, and in those situations, you're far more likely to end up with longer hours and a lot more stress.

Becomming better at articulating your specific needs for what you need to do your job well and becomming a great internal communicator who's adept at bargaining, negotiating, and reprioritizing your level work effort is really key to succeeding well and helping your collective teams do a good job.

One of the great pieces of advice that I received was whenever a certain situation arose, to actually stop and brainstorm some possible solutions, and then to rank them before presenting others the options for how to proceed. Those with decision-making power often need justification from a business perspective for how to move forward, and that includes how your time is allocated, and it's really important that you become an advocate to protect certain time for specific work efforts and because you're the one who's the closest to the work, you're the one who actually knows and you've got to become good with communicating that with them so that if there's a discrepancy, you can problem-solve together from a team-based approach.

In some cases, it may mean that certain teams need to hire more staff, but that's actually something interesting to keep in mind, because more often than not, a team or a unit has to make a business case to personnel for why additional positions should be opened, and that often means that they need to have a certain number of billable hours for a certain period of time that everyone needs to collectively work to justify having additional help. If you work somewhere that's like that, no matter what you personally do or how efficient or productive you are, the hours may always be long. Although hopefully you're compensated for it in other ways, that's not always the case, especially if you're there on salary and are non-exempt from overtime, and you can't count on it.

The truly great managers take the time to listen to and support their staff, and as you move forward in your career, you'll find that not everyone's like that, and you'll start to become better at recognizing good leadership, including as early as the interview process. Typically, I've found that those individuals are well-respected and liked by their staffs, have lower attrition rates, have a good rapport with those around them, are productive, and care about and take action to support the career development of their staff and feel a personal responsibility for helping others around them do well. That type of effort definitely takes time, but you'll start to recognize it and gravitate towards it. Sometimes it can be present with more seasoned staff members, but not always.

I would also focus on doing activities and taking part in organizations, groups, volunteering or mentorship where you can become better at building relationships. Not necessarily for the types of relationships with specific people from a strategic, career-advancing perspective (although that may be beneficial, but in no way is it a given), but from an everyday, get-to-know-your-neighbor, kind of perspective. Not everyone is great at that, and I think if you take a look at some of the really great movers & shakers and leaders in various industries, a lot of times, although not always, I would say that people in those positions are often really great at synthesizing information and communicating with those around them. The preferred method of contact varies a lot based on position, demographic and personal preference, but becoming sensitive to that and adjusting to your audience accordingly really makes a difference.

It can even be as simple as becomming a better friend. Marketing & advertising is all about relationships and inspiring action and change, where you work to identify and understand what certain target segments want, how they want it, and becoming a liasion or trusted friend by providing help or client service solutions to make their lives easier or better. That's the macro version. But the micro version: find ways to relate to your neighbor to open up a dialogue.

Building good relationships with those around you will probably make a bigger difference in terms of job satisfaction while finding ways to learn new things will help to keep your mind engaged. Unless you work in an incredibly small company, you're going to need to work well with others since more likely than not, you'll be relying on their expertise to help you do your job well, be it approving certain forms, granting you access to needed information, etc. And even if you were at a small company, it'd still be important to understand and think of yourself as a customer. Being able to empathize & put yourself in other people's shoes matters a lot, but especially in this particular industry.

Good luck!!

My advice would be to take a leadership position in a school club or a community service group. Choose something that you have the most passion for. You will learn how to work with other people, resolve differences, and make an impact.

A lot of good points here. One that I would add is to be pro-active and find opportunities to lead cross functional projects. I found this to be the best spring board to becoming a manager.

To lead cross function teams, you need to influence without direct authority, recognize team members skills, abilities and strengths in order to leverage them toward the project end goal. Finally, you need to delegate and rely on your team member for the project and the team, not you, to be successful.

Having led several cross-functional initiatives before my first official "manager" role, gave me the basis of working with a divers team and helped me focus on the new aspect of the role instead of having to handle it all at once.

In my experience leading a team has the components of all good leadership skills - namely communication! Delegate - don't feel as though you have stay up late nights devising all the marketing strategies. Assign different members of the team these tasks. Concentrate on the overall big picture - what is the goal your team is trying to achieve? Mentor and coach your team to stay on target with the mission and spend your time organizing, and strategy planning. As a team lead you're a decision maker, and need to concentrate on making the most expedient ones!

I'll pass some advice on about leadership and pressure that's served me well in my own career. Understand that stress and pressure are inevitable at all stages of your career, whether you're leading teams or not.

1. Prioritize. Decide what matters most to you (e.g., being home for dinner, not working on weekends) and set boundaries that you communicate to everyone you work with. You're going to be forced to make hard decisions when it comes to work and family, so thinking about this ahead of time makes it a lot easier. Revisit your boundaries every once in awhile too.


2. Always get clear on the expectations, of both the ones others have of you and the ones you have of your teams. That saves you and everyone you work with a lot of time and can help lower the pressure/stress. The best way to do this is to recap what you think you understand before you move forward with work assignments, and use this as a team norm when you're leading your own groups.


3. The work will always be there so take time off to relax and renew regularly. You're no good to yourself or your teams if you're exhausted and burnt out. That balance is difficult to maintain but really important especially as your career advances and your responsibilities at work and at home increase.

I hope this is helpful. Good luck to you!