Ep 202: Laurie Howell & Toby Treyer-Evans - Fearless - Fast

Edited highlights of our full conversation.

When you’re the leader, where does your impact end?

Laurie Howell and Toby Treyer-Evans are Executive Creative Directors at Droga5 in New York and have been partners for a very long time. They have also been responsible for important and extremely impactful work, including the New York Times campaign called The Truth Is Worth It. 

But as their careers evolve and the world changes, it is their impact on people in the immediate vicinity that has their attention.

It is a truism of the creative industries that the people who get recognized for coming up with the best ideas are eventually put into positions in which they are suddenly responsible for the professional well-being of others.

Not everyone navigates that evolution successfully.

And to add to the challenge, the bar has just been raised.

Today, it’s not enough to plan only for the professional development of the people that work for you. You have to worry about how their work is affecting their personal lives too.

To use Laurie’s language, how you lead affects the rhythms of the people that you lead. From how they feel to how they sleep.

In a pre-pandemic work-life relationship, the employee was responsible for adapting their rhythms to the needs of the job.

Today, when you take on a leadership role, the need to adapt the job to the person falls on you.

So if the question of what’s keeping your employees up at night isn’t keeping you up at night, perhaps it should - at least until you know the answer.