It’s easy to talk about the importance of collaboration. It’s much harder to do it effectively. Giving creative feedback is no different, and it’s just as essential to our work.
In this episode of Margins, we checked in with three experienced creative professionals from different disciplines on how they approach sharing creative feedback.
Add us to your podcast feed and listen in!
A Lesson from Reality TV
Angus Woodward is a Baton Rouge-based novelist and the founding director of the Center for Innovative Teaching & Engagement at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University. Because he is both a writer and professor, Angus has an intimate understanding of the feedback process. Angus attributes his own openness to feedback to a “thick skin” born from writing countless drafts of novels and teaching numerous classes and workshops.
But learning to receive feedback is also a skill. It isn’t just about having that thick skin, but also understanding how to sort through the sometimes contradictory nature of the notes you receive. “If you’re workshopping a story and 10 people are discussing it, they’re not all going to come to a consensus on what could improve the story,” Angus says.
As you grow more accustomed to receiving feedback, you will also learn how to sort through the advice and critiques that work for you — and understanding the biases some people have. To better understand the issue, Angus recommends thinking about your various sources of feedback as judges on a certain television show:
“It’s sort of like American Idol, right? Where if Simon Cowell says you’re singing was just OK, then maybe it was pretty damn good.”
Get Fresh
Ave Shalom is a creative director at Aon. Not only is she responsible for overseeing a team of designers and writers, but she is also the liaison between that team and the client. So we figured she’s an excellent person to speak with about the challenges of giving feedback.
Ave has two principles she sticks by when addressing an employee’s work. First, she ensures that she is able to talk through why a piece isn’t responding to her. Editors must provide the “why” when giving feedback, as opposed to simply saying they don’t like a piece.
Ave’s second principle involves how she judges a piece. “I try and look at things through the eyes of the first person who sees it,” she says. This means trying to see the work essentially through an amateur’s eyes to attempt to gauge how the general public may react to it. Of course, this is a challenge when you’ve been through multiple concepts or iterations. So Ave has a technique she uses to try to get that clear frame of mind:
“In order to get fresh again, I just turn away — and then I look at it.”
Feedback … About Feedback
Rex New is a writer on our team, and he has also worked as a screenwriter. He co-wrote Dance Camp, YouTube’s first original movie, and he contributes behind-the-scenes on Margins from Managing Editor, helping write each episode.
Like a lot of writers, Rex has received a lot of memorable feedback, both constructive and … well, not so constructive. But he told us about the best feedback he’s ever gotten. It was literally feedback … about feedback.
The moment came after a screening of the movie “Friends with Benefits,” where the movie’s director, Will Gluck, was giving a question-and-answer session. When asked about the process of feedback and revisions, Gluck gave an answer that has always struck with Rex. Gluck explained that a lot of times when people are struggling with something in their script, they are really having issues with something that happened 10 pages earlier. Essentially, the core issue has a ripple effect that taints all that comes after it. “I thought it was really illuminating in terms of making sure your structure is right, your character stuff is right — all that stuff,” says Rex. “Those things are so interconnected.”
It was a piece of wisdom that changed how Rex both revises and approaches the feedback he gives to others:
“It’s my golden rule.”
People in This Episode
- Angus Woodward, novestlist and professor: Twitter, personal website
- Ave Shalom, creative director, Aon: LinkedIn, Twitter
- Rex New, screenwriter and writer at Managing Editor: LinkedIn, Twitter, Vimeo
Full Transcript
Ave Shalom
And, people you’re getting feedback to are human beings, so sometimes you know that the feedback is going to sting a little bit.
Angus Woodward
It’s sort of like America Idol, right? Where if Simon Cowell says you’re singing was just okay, then maybe it was pretty damn good.
Lee Price
From Managing Editor Magazine, this is Margins. If you’re using content to solve business problems, we made this podcast for you. We’ll explore what it means to communicate in the digital age. We’ll share stories about the messier side of content marketing, what works, what doesn’t and the big questions we’re all asking at work in this no advice and no checklist zone. You’ll hear from marketers, creatives and leaders. You won’t walk away from this podcast with all the answers; instead, we hope we help you think about the questions you should be asking. I’m your host Lee Price.
Mary Ellen Slayter
And, I’m Mary Ellen Slayter. On this episode of Margins, we’re going to talk about the messiest part of marketing of them all, the process of giving and receiving feedback. Lee, what’s your favorite thing about feedback?
Lee
I hate feedback. I hate giving it. I hate receiving it but it’s in my job for a long time now. So, I’ve had to get better at both sides of it. One thing that I see a lot, we really have to educate people whether it’s our clients or people who are writing for us or designers, anyone we work with, we have to set this baseline expectation that there’s going to be feedback, right? Like, I think that some people who haven’t been in the creative process in this work, they just expect that you give someone an assignment, they do it, you publish it, everyone celebrates. There are no messy parts of that process.
That’s literally never how it happens. So, just building the expectation that there are going to be edits, there are going to be changes. You’re going to collaborate. You’re going to work together and make it better together, that’s been really important. It’s something that I don’t think we can take for granted that people know.
Mary Ellen
Yeah, I know. It’s one of those things where everybody likes to talk about collaboration, but collaboration requires conversation and feedback. So, it’s easier to say like, “Oh yeah, I love feedback. I love collaboration.” It’s a lot harder to give it and receive it. As we’ve gotten better at this over years and working on it, I mean, that doesn’t just mean we’re giving it out, right? So, recording audio together was something that was very new for us and we had to learn to accept feedback in a different way like on a new medium. One of the ways that we got better at it is we sort of working with a screenwriter Rex New, who joined us and has been helping us polish our work on this channel. We actually decided to bring Rex in on this conversation this week. Hey Rex.
Rex
Hey guys.
Lee
So, I came to Rex one day and I was looking for a way to give better feedback about audio. It wasn’t something I had ever done before. He immediately said, “Well, you’re directing.” That was kind of a light bulb moment for me. There’s a whole world of people who do this, they’re professionally trained to do this. So, Rex, I want to hear from you how you think as a director. When you are giving an actor feedback, how do you deliver feedback in a way that’s helpful and gets them to change without making them mad or feel hurt?
Rex
You have to give them an action, a verb basically. You don’t want to use an adjective. You don’t want to use an adverb. It has to be very specific like an emotional intent essentially, because that internal action will translate externally. It’s just a lot easier for an actor to play. It’s very specific and they just know what they have to do.
Lee
Okay. So, instead of saying like, “I didn’t like the way you were playing that phone call.” What are some verbs you could give them to think about?
Rex
You could say, “Well, maybe you’re trying to warn someone. You’re trying to threaten them. You could even be trying to flirt with them. You could be trying to interrogate them.” It’s really just … it’s not rocket science sense. It’s just not very complicated. You can’t be trying to outsmart yourself at something I’ve learned a little bit over the years. Keep things very simple. The other thing with acting too is that recent terms of talking about feedback and the creative process. When you’re on set, people expect to play a scene in different ways, because really, when you’re on a set, sometimes your notes are trying to improve the performance but sometimes you’re also trying to get different things from the actors so that you have more options in the editing room.
Mary Ellen
Rex, when you were describing something with action, right? I think that’s one of the hardest things about feedback Lee when you and I talk about this is that people … when you give people feedback and you say, “I like this.” or “I don’t like this.” Unless there’s an action for people to take to correct it, like that’s one of the worst feelings in the world when somebody tells you that they don’t like something that you’ve done, but they can’t tell you why they don’t like it and they can’t tell you what you should do to correct it. So, the act of feedback. I mean that’s why this is actually an incredibly complex process. There’s you making your observation about the thing and then commenting on it and then like it hopefully translating it into an action item. So, I think even that process. I thought it was very interesting you said a verb because I do think that oftentimes people’s feedback is missing the verb like, “What am I supposed to do with this information?”
Lee
It’s easy to be a lazy editor and read something and think, “I don’t like it.” If you don’t take the time to figure out why you don’t like it or how it could be better or how it could be closer to what you assigned, you’re not really an editor.
Mary Ellen No, you’re just judgy. That’s not helpful, right? Plus, there’s so many things. There’s things that are like subjective and there are things that are more objective. We’re talking about creative work. So, when you’re giving feedback and it’s about something that you’re doing like as a person, it’s hard for this not to feel personal. You’re telling me you don’t like the way I’ve written something. You’re telling me when we work on this podcast, I think one of the … you’re giving me feedback about my voice. Is there anything more personal than your voice or then your words or then your writing or your art?
Lee
Rex, I think you’re really good at taking feedback as a writer too. You don’t often have personal emotions tied up in it. You’re able to just review the feedback and apply it pretty quickly and without a lot of stress someone during how you’ve learned to do that over time. How do you take the emotion out of the feedback that you get?
Rex
Well, I work freelance. So, anytime I have to do revisions, I’m like, “Yes, it’s a little more money.” You’re going to get things right the first time sometimes, but probably not all the time. What I hope is that if we’re in editing or something like that, that I trust y’all. If you’re working with an editor that you trust, that you usually know what you’re turning in that something isn’t quite right, so why not make it better? For me, I just feel like draft two or three is the one that you’re going to get right. I don’t know. Don’t lose sleep over it. We always say that a piece is never finished, we’re just finished with it. So, things can always be better and that’s just the way I look at it I guess.
Lee
Yeah, I like that. What I heard you saying was trust and I think that’s really important to think about especially as a lot of marketers are working with freelancers in the gig economy. Sometimes you’ll only work with someone once or twice on something. So, it can really be hard to develop that trust, but that’s so important that it’s a trusting relationship and not a transactional one, because transactional feedback just … it kind of feels bad for everybody.
Mary Ellen
So, from your perspective, what do you think is harder, giving feedback or receiving it?
Rex
It’s harder to give feedback because you have to sit down and think about it. If you don’t quite know what you say, you’ve got to figure out how to say something that the person can use, right? I think receiving feedback is really easy because you’re not doing anything. When I receive feedback, I actually try not to say too much. Some people like to have a conversation, and I don’t even like to rift through ideas or anything like that. I just want to hear what you have to say and then I’ll absorb it for a day or two and then I want to talk about it.
Mary Ellen
Now, see, I have a hard time with that part sometimes. It’s like, especially if I put a lot of work into something. Sometimes I’ll have to watch my reactions, because sometimes if I’m having like a really strong reaction to the feedback that someone is giving me, I will actually walk away from it. I’ll say, “Okay. This is like really pissing me off.” I don’t even know why sometimes. I guess there were other times I might have reacted like, “No, you’re wrong and here’s why.”
In my impending middle age, I’m working on just like, “Okay. This reaction is not rational. I have to step away from this. I’m having like whatever I’m having and I need to think through the intent behind what they’re saying and processes and figure out what they want me to do.” I find that that’s … that is work for me. So, you say that it’s easy to receive it and I find that’s hard. I don’t know Lee. What about you? Do you think it’s harder to give or receive?
Lee
I think both sides are hard. I struggle with both. I don’t want people to think that I’m mean. I want people to like me, right? So, that makes it really hard for me to give feedback on something that I’m not happy with. I also have a really hard time receiving feedback. I think it’s hard to get your ego out of the way and listen to what someone’s saying. What I’m hearing from both of you and what I’ve been thinking about lot too is how important time is in the creative process. I give terrible feedback as an editor if an assignment is due to the client at 5:00 p.m. and I open the writer’s draft at 4:45 p.m. and I have 15 minutes to either fix it myself or tell them what’s wrong. I open it and I don’t like it and I’m mad.
Lee
I didn’t leave myself any time for a process. I know from experience that when I get feedback, I think that’s something important to think about especially in marketing. We don’t always have a lot of time. A lot of this work comes and goes really quickly. So, if you’re not giving yourself plenty of time to edit thoughtfully and for your creatives to have time to think about your feedback and apply it in a thoughtful way, you’re probably not going to get the best possible work.
Mary Ellen
So, our first guest is Angus Woodward. He’s an English professor and a postmodern novelist who’s written some fantastic books. The reason I wanted to have him on, well I’ve never actually seen anybody receive feedback in such a stressful environment. It was at a book reading and I’ll let him tell the story. It’s got some great lessons for all of us.
Angus
Each of us read a little bit and then took questions from the audience. I read for about 10 or 15 minutes and took a few questions. Then, a woman in the front row said … he kind of gazed at the ceiling thoughtfully and said, “I don’t know if I would’ve read the section that you read because it consisted of a lot of lists which are just boring.” She really didn’t say it that way sort of unapologetically, but she didn’t seem hostile about it. So, I paused for a second or two and about 38 possible responses scrolled through my head, not all of them kind. I just said, “Well, I appreciate your candor.” Then, I try to explain what I was trying to accomplish with these lists. Then, later she bought a book. So, it’s like I said I don’t think there was any hostility in what she was saying. She was just a very candid person.
Mary Ellen
What was interesting as I was listening to that night, I mean, the whole audience just sort of like cringed and held their breath for you for a moment while you waited for that pause to figure out how you’re going to respond. I think that’s like challenging about that is because literally what would you have done with that feedback. So, what did you take away from that? It’s not like you can go change the book because the book is published, but would you change … based on what you’ve learned from her, did you decide to change anything about the next time you do a reading?
Angus
Yeah. I think that was really her feedback because she obviously appreciated the book. She was more critiquing my choice of a passage to read. So, as a writer receiving feedback, you have to have thick skin, because you get feedback all the time and you get feedback on what you’re thinking about writing and then on a draft of it and then on of what you’ve written, and then as you saw even on the finished product, you’re getting feedback. It takes thick skin because a lot of feedback is just in terms of rejection like if I send a book to a publisher or a story to a magazine, most of the time I don’t get feedback. I just get a no.
So, you have to get used to that as a writer or any kind of artist, just accepting no as an answer and then having thick enough skin to say, “Okay. Well, let me try somewhere else.” So, I guess that helped that my skin was toughened up already when she said that. You know what else? It takes openness. You have to be open to feedback, at least willing to listen to it. A writer or artist or anybody receiving feedback, if they’re motivated by a desire to improve their work, then they’ll be open to that feedback. So, I paused, just kind of amazed at what she had said in such a public forum, but I really … I didn’t react aggressively because I’m open to feedback always I guess.
Mary Ellen
A lot of us have trouble handling feedback. So, how do you develop that thick skin? Do you just stand outside in the sun waiting for people to pick your work apart? I ask Angus how he got to that place.
Angus
Definitely, yeah, I didn’t always have thick skin. You do have to develop it and I developed it as a student in writing workshops where if it’s good writing workshop, then the teacher acknowledges to the students that feedback can be hard to take and feedback can … even if it’s well intention, it can be painful for the writer or feedback has to be honest. There a lot of sweet spots you have to hit with feedback. So, yeah, it comes with experience. Also, I think it’s that openness. It’s like … a writer or artist won’t have openness to feedback if they don’t really think the work can be improved. If you bring a story or a painting or any kind of piece to a workshop thinking, “This is awesome and let me just sit back and have them tell me how awesome it is and confirm all of my pipe dreams and this can’t be improved at all because it just flowed out of me magically, and it’s all done.”
Then, that writer isn’t really motivated by desire to improve or that person and so they won’t have the willingness to listen. It’s tricky because it’s not a matter of you have to accept and act upon every piece of feedback that you get, because then if you workshop a story and 10 people are discussing it, they’re not all going to come to a consensus on what could improve the story, right? So, some will say, “It needs to be a lot darker.” Some will say, “It needs to be a lot lighter.” So, you can’t go back home and try to make it both, right? So, that openness means being willing to consider any feedback that you get and deciding for yourself which feedback to act upon. So, all that comes with experience I think and it’s motivated by if you have a real drive to succeed, that includes a desire to improve your work. It’s that simple.
Mary Ellen
But, is it really that simple? I ask Angus if he could help us figure out how to best sort through all the feedback that we get? His advice, watch American Idol.
Angus
If you get feedback from the same people frequently, then you start to learn what their biases are. It sort of like America Idol, right? Where if Simon Cowell says you’re singing was just okay, then maybe it was pretty damn good. If Paula Abdul says it was great. Well, maybe it wasn’t great because she likes to tell people things that make them feel good. So, is it Randy Jackson who’s keeping it real for you or is it Paula or is it Simon, right? You have to gauge all of that as well, I think.
Mary Ellen
I feel like you would be a Randy Jackson.
Angus
I try to be. Actually, I think that show is really helpful for like American culture to understand the nature of feedback. Maybe Simon and Paula and Randy are too far in the past now. It’s been a long time since they were judges, but that show really was about feedback and watching what people did with it and watching how people gave feedback and what they’re … and people learn the biases of the different judges after a while, right? Audiences at home. I tell my students … my creative writing students, I tell them you’re not maybe accustomed to a whole class discuss your work for 10 minutes and write comments on it and critique you and you’re not used to providing that feedback either, but you get used to it. You learn to do it and part of it is learning who your classmates are, which of your classmates always dislike that kind of work and which of them are always cheerleaders, all those sorts of things.
Mary Ellen
Lee, what’s your American Idol host would you be?
Lee
This is kind of a blast from the past. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched that show. I do watch a lot of competition TV shows, Top Chef. I even started watching this one on Netflix about running an Airbnb. I’d highly recommend it, but any competition show has a lot of feedback. The contestants usually don’t take it very well. Sometimes it’s really bad, unhelpful feedback. So, that made me start thinking about the worst feedback I’ve ever gotten. Mary Ellen, what’s the worst feedback you’ve ever gotten?
Mary Ellen
Oh, that I get bad feedback all the time. I think partly maybe we’ll talk about my definition of bad feedback because to me bad feedback is feedback that makes you feel bad and that you can’t do anything about. It’s that sense that like, “Okay, so you’re unhappy with me and I’ve now got to figure out why. I’m trying to figure out why.” So, to me, all the bad feedback I’ve ever gotten all falls in that bucket whether it’s been about my writing or in relationships. It’s like if any time you feel like, “Well, there’s nothing I can do about this.” So, to me, that’s the essence of bad feedback. If I can’t act on it, that’s bad feedback. What about you Lee?
Lee
Oh, in a past life in a former job, I had a really bad boss like earth scorch bad. I was making a series of YouTube videos about our products. I was the talent on screen just because I had no one else to do it. My boss would just stand behind the camera and say things like, “I don’t like the way you look.” It was one of the most demoralizing experiences ever because like you said there was nothing that I could do about it. I couldn’t change the way that I was standing or talking or looking. She just didn’t like me. So, Rex, I think to your point you talked about earlier, sometimes feedback is more about the person who’s giving it than the person who’s receiving it. Sometimes, you just have to be emotionally mature enough to recognize that and move on.
Mary Ellen
What’s the best feedback anybody has ever given you Rex? Do you have any memorable positive ones?
Rex
So, the most helpful feedback I’ve ever gotten … I mean, I’ve gotten lots of helpful feedback. It’s hard to remember, but the most helpful feedback I’ve gotten was really someone talking about feedback. I heard it from Will Gluck at a … he was a director at a Q&A. He said that if you are struggling with something in your script on say it’s page 50, that the problem isn’t really on page 50. It probably happened 10 pages earlier on page 40 and that has a ripple effect that just caries through, through those 10 pages and beyond. I thought it was really illuminating in terms of making sure your structure is right. Your character stuff is right. All that stuff and all those things are so interconnected. It’s the best … it’s feedback about getting feedback but it’s the best piece of advice I think I’ve ever gotten and it’s something that … it just changed how I revise. It changed how I even thought about feedback. It’s my golden rule.
Mary Ellen
So, I work with a lot of creative people but I’ve never met anyone quite like Ave Shalom. She’s a creative director at Aon. I can say with total seriousness that I have never met anyone who gives better feedback than this woman. We started our conversation trying to figure out how she got so good at it.
Ave
I do think that it’s in my nature to be empathetic and work with people and like people a lot. I know that we’re all going toward the same objective which is to provide the best quality and communicate our best with the information that we have and represent the things that we believe in which is our job in the company and why we work at this company and what drives us, what motivates us, I think there’s an aspect of that but I also think that I’ve had a lot of training. My dad is a graphic designer so I sort of grew up looking at the word that way, because it’s how my house was. It’s how very technological family early on. My dad was into graphic design but he adopted computer technology very early on. So, I think part of that frames how I see the world enough to give me the words to use to describe how I’m feeling about it, why does something that work, why does this irritate me.
I’m very particular and I think that maybe is genetic. I think I’m irritatingly particular. Sometimes I’ll go shopping and complain about a cuff on a shirt. Isn’t that right? And, how I would appreciate if they redesigned it for me or if you have any feedback you can give to the company. Like, “Could you tell them this?” So, it can be irritating but I think just being self-aware in the world about what … is it flowing right or what shuts my brain down or what I find to be blocking the flow whether that’s how I hate tucking shirts in because it makes me feel like I’m claustrophobic. That’s a personal thing. That’s a personal preference or when I was teaching, there was a coffee stand in the university and it was just … there’s always this long line and this terrible logo. The whole experience was just not comfortable.
If you’re going to stand there forever, first of all, figure out how to be more efficient, but also figure out how to make things enjoyable while you’re there. I post that to my class. So, we reworked what we thought the experience could be. So, it’s like living in the world and thinking about how it could be better. I think that’s probably approach design and how I approach feedback is looking at the document or the video or whatever with fresh eyes and see what gets me stuck or see what based on even my experience, what I think we could elevate to be more sophisticated or better or delightful. So, I don’t know if that answered your question, but definitely.
Mary Ellen
Yes, because it’s such a positive way to look at feedback. Feedback, it fills people both giving it and receiving it. Fills people with a lot of anxiety. I was shocked at how it’s hard to bring yourself to give someone feedback. I find that is one of the struggles that people have like in terms of collaboration. Then the next part of it is like you worry you’re going to do it wrong and you’re going to hurt people’s feelings.
Mary Ellen
What do you think is the secret to really effective feedback in a creative collaboration?
Ave
I think it’s intention. I recently got a document and it really didn’t reflect our brands and it didn’t communicate well. I felt like it wasn’t clear. I went through her document, the designer’s document and I made comments about why I made all these changes. The titles were inconsistent, the design language wasn’t reflective. I think just being able to say that, the why behind, instead of just saying “I don’t like it.” Well, what don’t you like about it? Is it subjective? There sometimes where I’ll even say in my design feedback, “This is my stylistic preference. Here’s why I have it, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s right.”
Then we have other times we’ll all say, “No, this isn’t right because it stops the flow. It orders off balance now or the scale doesn’t feel right if you look at the document as a whole.” I think two is I try and look at things like through the eyes of the first person who sees it, who doesn’t know anything about design, who doesn’t know anything about my company, who doesn’t know anything about what I’m communicating. I try and look at it with those eyes and I tell people this and I don’t think anyone ever does it, but sometimes I’ll even look at it. If I’m really close to the subject matter in order to get fresh again, I just turn away and then I look at it. I look for the thing that stands out first. I look at the thing that I don’t see at first.
Then I say, “Is that what I want someone to see first? Is that what I’m trying to communicate in the order that they need to see it in order to make sense?” If something standing out that’s an eyesore, that’s distracting me from what I’m trying to communicate. I think the third thing is understanding that the people you’re giving feedback to are human beings. So, sometimes you know that the feedback is going to sting a little bit. I had a director for it and I knew that when I gave feedback that there was going to be a period of time when that person was going to feel frustrated, but I knew that about this person. I knew that they would come back and be like, “I see your point.” So, sometimes, it’s just like knowing your audience in a sense. Sometimes it’s also recognizing they’re humans and that they need encouragement and understanding that your feedback is towards the same objective business result or the same objective of communication, so it’s not personal.
Mary Ellen
Finally, I asked Ave for some advice on something we all struggle with which is translating to and from the business side of the house to the creative side and being able to do that in an effective way.
Ave
I think just really sometimes creatives can get a little bit jaded or us versus them. In my time working with lots of different groups, it is never us versus them. It’s always us working together. So, really just showing respect even if someone seems like they don’t get it or maybe they don’t care about their job and they’re giving terrible feedback because they just don’t care. You run into people like that or sometimes you run into people who have a very different mindset. For instance, who do look at it like us versus them, like I’m telling you to do it this way and they’re not hearing you or they’re not giving you the latitude you need to do your job well.
I think that patience is really important and really understanding that everyone comes at things from their own experience. Whatever that is, whether they’re having a bad day, whether they don’t care or whether they just aren’t educated, I think it’s important to be patient and try and keep … I had to train myself not to roll my eyes in meetings, because I really, “Oh, here we go again.” Just being aware of that stuff and trying to be professional and really trying to see the world with an understanding eye. Sometimes you need to bring the hammer down. Sometimes you need to say, “No, this is something that I’m an expert in and I need to show you that.”
Then other times you have to say, “You know what? There might be a better way to do this, but because you own this project and I’ve given my best explaining to you why it needs to be this way, sometimes you have to let other people lead the way they lead and control the project the way they need to control it. You might not agree with that and that’s fine. You don’t have to agree with anything. It’s also important to speak your mind and really say the why and walk people through what your intention is because I think that’s also important too. So, I think it’s just patience and understanding and being fierce when you need to be fierce, but also getting that you have to back down sometimes too.
Lee
That’s it for this episode of Margins by Managing Editor. We’d love to hear your feedback. If you have an idea for this podcast or you want to tell us what you think, you can email us, hello@managingeditor.com. To hear more from us, subscribe in iTunes, stitcher or wherever you listen to podcast, and sign up for our Friday morning email. Join the club at managingeditor.com/subscribe. Thanks to the team who helped make this episode. Our guest Angus Woodward and Ave Shalom, CEO of Rep Cap Mary Ellen Slayter, editor and producer Wes Kennison, assistant editor Taylor Stoma, writer Rex New and me, the Managing Editor of Managing Editor, Lee Price. We’ll see you next time.
Mary Ellen
You don’t seem like-
Lee
[crosstalk 00:32:43] those words you’re trying to hide those words. I can barely hear them.
Mary Ellen
My mouth doesn’t like these words.
Lee
Your mouth doesn’t like them.
Mary Ellen
All right. You’re going to have to fix your face, okay? Your face is all wrong for this.
