Today, I hosted a live event on Creativity and Innovation Soft Skills with bestselling author, Tania Katan. We’d love to continue the discussion!
Tell us about a time at work where you did something creative that surprised you, whether it was something that made a difference for your team or the company, or maybe even just yourself and the way you work.
To this day, one of my biggest achievements was creating HubSpot Academy’s Content Marketing Certification Course. The original version of this course was published in 2016 with over 140 pages of content and 1,000 slides. This experience was transformative. Since then I see things differently. I approach projects differently. I approach strategy differently.
Recommendation: Find things that push you out of your comfort zone. When you get out on the other side, you’ll be a different person.
My favorite creative win was at a mortgage bank (so serious and ‘boring’!) and being able to bring my skills as a TV news producer and speaker to a series of videos for home buyers I called 60 Second Mortgage Tips. It helped us help first time home buyers, home buyers who hadn’t been in the market in years and others. Since then I’ve launched podcasts, created campaigns, helped clients and so much more. That was my first big win I can think of. And it wasn’t all that difficult— and it was before TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Vine.
I led the creation of a Blue Community Makeover in Minneapolis, a very complex public-private program that involved government agencies, businesses and residents in improving water quality in an impaired Minneapolis lake. The idea was fun, important and HUGE and therefore somewhat intimidating. But by collaborating with MANY people who shared the vision we made it a spectacular reality.
In a past career life, I was charged to launch a 1-month regional insurance sales campaign with my team in an area I wasn’t familiar with at all. The realization of the unfamiliarity combined with no baseline was scary and challenging to say the least. When my team starting brainstorming, we wanted to start simple.
In that simplicity- we took pauses and breaks outside around the time when the seasons were changing. That sparked the idea to launch a campaign around seasonal accidents/occurances we knew our customers would connect with and the team knocked our goals out of the park. The best part was the relationships we were able to deepen with our customers. We learned to think with a more “people first” approach and remembered that lesson for future campaigns.
