Last week, DDB London parted company with Ewan Paterson and Richard Butterworth, the joint heads of its creative and planning departments respectively. The agency is happy to leave the remaining planning and creative chiefs - Lucy Jamieson and Jeremy Craigen - to fly solo.
Over on the other side of town, Leo Burnett is coming to terms with the failure of its joint creative director structure, while M&C Saatchi, successfully led for so long by the joint managing directors Nick Hurrell and Moray MacLennan, has given the duo new, individual roles.
Are agencies beginning to recognise that in these pared-down, recession-raddled times, joint heads are not only a luxury but actually more trouble than they're worth?
There doesn't seem to be any single rule for management structure, with examples of both successful partnerships and single heads existing.
The majority of agencies do have a joint head of at least one of the key disciplines, however. Bruce Haines, the chief executive of Leo Burnett, says it can be an advantage: "It's always going to be beneficial to have more good people than fewer. Teams do better than individuals and if you get a pair that works, then it can be exciting and inspirational."
Leon Jaume, the joint creative director at WCRS, agrees and, having spent four years at the agency as its sole creative head, believes it was a good decision to partner the former DDB creative Leslie Ali.
"Running a department can be tough and sometimes you need a mate for both emotional and physical support," Jaume says. "As two you also become a more powerful force and with a stronger voice you can often get more done."
On a practical basis, having two heads of department can be advantageous because clients like senior people to be involved in their business and, with two heads, this becomes more logistically viable.
Andrew McGuinness, the chief executive of TBWA\London, implemented the now disbanded joint managing director pairing of Jonathan Mildenhall and Matt Shepherd-Smith in 2002. He also picks up on the practical advantages of two heads. "It's about making the structure of an organisation work around the talent you have," he says, adding that it's a prudent business move to make two worthy people joint heads rather than lose one to a rival.
However, it can't be a case of shoving any two people together. For a partnership to work, McGuinness says, the pair need "to bring different but complementary skills to the job" and have "clearly defined roles".
Certainly, finding the mix of the right chemistry yet different mentality can be incredibly hard but Jaume argues it's not impossible: "To make it work you don't have to have the same opinion on everything, just the same core belief and value system."
It all seems to boil down to the characters of the people involved and when personality, competitiveness and ego get in the way, that's when it becomes a recipe for disaster. Paul Shearer, whose partnership with Jim Thornton at the helm of Burnett's creative department dramatically collapsed in May, says: "Problems arise if you don't know the person well enough. You really need to have worked with each other before, rather than being artificially thrust together." If the people aren't the right combination, then obvious disadvantages arise.
Paul Hammersley, the chief executive at DDB London, says he is more comfortable with single-headed departments. "It is likely that two heads will have very different points of view, which makes it hard to set a clear direction or agenda," he explains.
In the case of joint heads of the creative department, it could be seen as a logical move for creatives who've come up through the ranks as a team. Even here Hammersley is unconvinced, saying: "An executive creative director is a very different role to being a creative. You need clear direction so the problem of two heads still applies."
There is also the argument that a joint role is not beneficial for the individuals involved. McGuinness, who explains that Mildenhall was made sole managing director to bring more clarity to the agency, says that any joint job suggests you only do half of one. "It's also hard to introduce yourself as a joint anything as it always leads to the question of who and where is the other half. People want a senior role in their own right rather than having to share," he says.
Hammersley argues that in the case of joint managing directors, it can become a cop-out with nobody taking the initiative to make decisions. "It takes responsibility away from the individual if they are sharing the role. They are not totally accountable and so there's not so much pressure," he says.
Certainly, there is no hard and fast model. It depends both on the agency and, more importantly, on the individuals involved.
Perhaps the real answer is, as Jaume suggests, that people don't have titles at all. "It would be better if you could just look at what needs to be done and who's best at doing it and then let people get on with it," he says.
.jpg)
.jpg)