Chapter two.
Erik Cargill:I'm Erik Cargill.
Rachel Elnar:And I'm Rachel Elnar. And this is Cheers and Tiers
Erik Cargill:Design leadership tales retold.
Rachel Elnar:Today, we're gonna have fun with our guest. He is a group studio director of brand design at VML, orchestrating operations, talent, and cultural initiatives for a premier team of designers. With over twenty years in the industry, Erik, he has tackled complex challenges across leadership, education, and design. A true advocate for the creative community, His influence extends beyond VML. He's played a pivotal role at AIG as its first director of chapter development, setting standards that still shape the organization today.
Rachel Elnar:From his Chicago base, Mike Joosse continues to drive innovation and elevate the design landscape. Please welcome Mike Joosse
Mike Joosse:Hi, everybody. Hi, Rachel Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Erik Cargill:And thank you for being flexible on your schedule.
Mike Joosse:My pleasure. Pleasure. Happy to end the week with you all.
Rachel Elnar:Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into AIGA, and on the board, how did you serve? What was your leadership role?
Mike Joosse:Oh, boy. Okay. So I've got like fifteen years worth of history that I'll try to shrink down into into a sound if I can. So I've gone on record, by the way, as saying that AIGA is responsible for almost every job I've ever gotten. And it absolutely changed my life.
Mike Joosse:I've made the closest friends I've ever had. So I owe a lot to the organization and to the people that I met as part of it. I mean, would not be who I am today, would not be where I am today without it. So I'm really happy to talk about this chapter in my life. I was a senior in college in February.
Mike Joosse:The guy who eventually became my boss at my first job, his name was Sam Shelton. He runs a little design studio in Washington DC called Kinetic. He was a judge at the local design award show in Raleigh, where I went to college. And I saw him do a little presentation as part of the judge's dinner or whatever and just loved the work that he did. And so I said to myself, I'm gonna work for that guy.
Mike Joosse:I'm gonna work at Kinetic. I didn't apply anywhere else, which is the dumbest thing you could possibly do, and was lucky enough that he hired me. And he was somebody who was sort of the AIGA, I don't know, grandfather or something in the organization. He was a huge advocate for for it, volunteered at the national level, ran a bunch of committees and just was so involved. He said, anybody who works for me is going to, I'm going to pay for their AIGA membership.
Mike Joosse:I'm going to basically make you go to as many AIGA DC events as possible. And that was fine with me because I was 21, I was living in a city that I didn't know anybody. And the AIGA DC chapter has always been an unbelievable fountain of resources, people. They'd have so many events. It was huge.
Mike Joosse:Even at that time, was probably 800 people in size. So I really enjoyed being a part of it, and it got me to understand the community. It got me to meet a lot of people. I started to volunteer the AIGA DC chapter and really enjoyed myself. And then circumstances happened where I left DC, I left Connecticut, and I went back to North Carolina.
Mike Joosse:By then, I was a part of a chapter that was maybe only 150 people. And so that's when I said, well, I think they need me a little bit more than the DC chapter did. They need somebody, they need more people. So I got involved in that. I went from being a volunteer to being a board member at large, to being president, to being the president's council chair, to being a full time AIGA staff member for three and a half years, to then moving to Chicago and leaving AIGA.
Mike Joosse:I was AIGA Chicago vice president for three years. And that takes me to, I think, twenty sixteen, which is when my term ended and my time with the chapter came to a close. Man, just could not have asked for a better arc for personal growth, for, again, meeting so many people. I definitely got skills from being chapter president that got me higher level jobs, got me promotions, and that sense of leadership and learning how to communicate with an audience and with a board, absolutely helpful to me in my twenties as I was becoming a designer and then becoming whatever I became next after a designer. So I think that answers the question.
Rachel Elnar:That answers, like, all the questions. We had, like, a whole list of questions, and you pretty much did on all of them.
Mike Joosse:Well, we're done here. It's been nice. I'll see y'all later.
Erik Cargill:I have one. When was your first retreat, and where was it? Your either leadership
Mike Joosse:or Yes. So my first leadership retreat was 02/2006. It was in San Francisco. And I don't know if I still hold the record, but I attended 10 leadership retreats. And I can't think of anybody that I'm aware of who attended that many over the course.
Mike Joosse:So San Francisco, Miami, Omaha, Portland. Then I started working for AIG and it was Chattanooga, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City. I crashed the Philadelphia retreat, didn't attend. After that was Denver, Grand Rapids, and Dallas. Okay.
Mike Joosse:So that's my 10. So it's 02/2006.
Erik Cargill:I'm surprised we'd never met because I was at Denver and Grand Rapids.
Mike Joosse:No kidding. Okay.
Erik Cargill:Yeah. Yeah. I was I was at those, but I know that Rachel has a great story about Omaha.
Rachel Elnar:I have a lot of great stories about Omaha.
Mike Joosse:I'm sure I know where this is going.
Erik Cargill:The time that you drank the bar out of all their liquor and they were closed the next day. Do you remember this?
Mike Joosse:No. That is new information to me. I was a very good, morally upstanding retreat attendee for several years. And I didn't go out with everybody. I wasn't part of the Sunrise Club or the Breakfast Club or whatever they called it, staying up all night.
Mike Joosse:So no, the story that I remember from Omaha, and I would love to hear about the bar story, but Omaha is where the human pyramid started. And I was there for the first one, and I tried so hard. I despise them. And I tried so hard to make them not be a thing. But every year for seven years, there was somebody who would show up to retreat and be like, hey, everybody, let's do a human pyramid.
Mike Joosse:And I just, for whatever reason, just never warmed up to him and people would do him in hotel hallway and make a bunch of noise and get security out and everything. I was just like, it's not for me, it's for my senior.
Erik Cargill:Was your bag? Yeah.
Mike Joosse:No. Where
Rachel Elnar:was the first one, Mike? Do you remember the exact location? I know that Lauren Langfitt was the one who really got us into doing those pyramids.
Mike Joosse:Yes, so my memory of that is we did so for a while, maybe it's still I think that it happened the whole time that the last night of the retreat there would be this sort of closing night party. And the one in Omaha happened at the Omaha Zoo, which was, I think, an awesome first of all, let me just say I really like the Omaha retreat because the previous two years were in really, really expensive cities. We stayed at the freaking Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. That's like a hotel from movies, right? It was so expensive.
Mike Joosse:Miami was so expensive. It was like $30 for a martini, even in 2007, that was crazy. For a bunch of volunteers and people who were getting their chapters to pay for it, I really chafed against the idea of it being such an expensive thing. And so when I learned that it was going to be in Omaha, I was really thrilled. We were staying at Suites and everything was so affordable.
Mike Joosse:I mean, they had free breakfast and all the places downtown were super cheap and affordable. So I was really a big fan of being able to go to these smaller cities and do some exploring. And I had heard, I think everybody heard that the Omaha Zoo was kind of a special place, at least as far as Midwest cities go. And I think it's fun when we can go to a museum or something as part of that closing night party. You can talk and share with people, but there's also some activity going on.
Mike Joosse:There's something you can go see. So we went through all the exhibits, whatever ones that were open and whatever animals that were awake at 9PM or whatever. But it had really tall ceilings and it was in a really big room. And that's where I remember the first human pyramid happening.
Rachel Elnar:Ah, okay. I remember that room too. I just remember going around with a Sharpie, writing room numbers on people's arms. So I do have photos of that room with people's writing on the arms.
Mike Joosse:Okay. That's great. Yeah. That's great.
Rachel Elnar:Oh my gosh. So 10 retreats.
Mike Joosse:10 retreats.
Rachel Elnar:Wow. A lot of learning, a lot of structure. Some of the greatest sessions that I remember, the Myers Briggs one, I thought that was great from Omaha. But after after evenings, after parties, do you recall any great stories at the bar and the pyramid or some sort of, like, interaction or conversation that still have an effect on your life?
Mike Joosse:Boy, I think the one that comes to mind So when I joined AIGA in 02/2009 as a full time employee, I was the first director of chapter development. And among the many roles that I had, because the staff was very small at the time, it was under 20 people, I think, it was everything having to do with chapters. And so not only was I the main coordinator and planner for the leadership retreats, But I was having daily communication with chapter leaders, presidents, board members, doing a lot of organizing and a lot of kind of facilitating for chapter volunteers and board members on a daily basis. So it was just a thrill and a joy. Two out of those three years were the best two years of my life.
Mike Joosse:So I'm really thrilled about that. So for me, a retreat was like a big family reunion, I think even more so than it was for the attendees, where I had that not only the connections with everybody, and I mean everybody, like it's strange that you can go to a party with 200 people and you know somebody in every group that's there. And so it was really great for me to be able to connect with everybody in person and obviously meet people that I'd only connected with virtually. Those retreats were even more special for me because I got to plan them. And I made sure that every hour of those retreats, except for the after parties, was more highly structured.
Mike Joosse:More people were involved. There was just an opportunity to make the most of that time. And I was really serious about it, but also got to appreciate it in a fun, playful way to be able to be there with everybody. So the Salt Lake City Retreat was the last one that I planned. And I think my favorite in terms of the content, I think just everything worked out perfectly.
Mike Joosse:All the speakers, presenters, everybody who shared a success story, all that stuff, it was great. And it was held in this huge hotel retreat center that they had this giant outdoor garden. They had a candy shop inside the hotel and there's a lot of activity going on at all times. And that was the one where I said, okay, I think this is the last one that I'm gonna plan. I wanna go out with a bang.
Mike Joosse:And part of that was, I wanna go and see people and hang out after hours. I wanna hang out in people's hotel rooms. Let's go to bars. I'll do whatever and go wherever because this might be my last chance to be with all these people. And so I really remember the AIGA Philadelphia room as being the center of the party.
Mike Joosse:Those of us who know Christine Scheller and Nick Prestileo and Alan Espiritu, there were a bunch of people who would come year after year and they were definitely a work hard, play hard group. And they just said, in that spirit of brotherly love, they just said, anybody come hang out. We don't care. We want you. We want everybody to feel free to come over and just be a part of this.
Mike Joosse:And it was such a welcoming environment that I felt like the hard work that I had done for not just six months beforehand, but being on edge as you do when you're planning an event for an entire day for three days, then you unclench your fists. You get to relax and to be able to do that in an environment with so many great people. That was my favorite experience. That was the one that I ended up staying up until I think four or 04:30 in the morning. When you hear the birds chirping outside, that's when I'm like, I can't make it the whole night, but I'm gonna go to bed now.
Mike Joosse:And I remember waking up feeling just awful and then going to the airport just feeling awful. But I think those were the just getting those chances to talk about nothing and, you know, not talk about retreat stuff, that's a good outlet for a lot of that, that energy that that really comes up in in leadership retreats.
Rachel Elnar:I think a lot of the magic happened after hours, honestly. Yeah. About the talking about nothing, really getting to know each other above and beyond AIG, above and beyond who you are, what you do, what your job is, whatnot. Yeah. Really dig into those, Hey, we don't have anything else to talk about.
Rachel Elnar:What do we talk about now? Yeah. And really learning about each other.
Mike Joosse:I think there's I read something a long time ago in the New York Times that people in their twenties make friends with the people that are around them, and people in their 30s make friends with people that they respect and admire. And so a lot of those workplace friendships happen at the office, or they happen between people who have a lot in common that you can sort of see in someone else something that you admire and respect. And everybody who came to a leadership retreat, first of all, everybody who came to an AIGA, who was a part of an AIGA leadership board, I respected automatically. Just loved and appreciated that they were a part of the organization. It suddenly got dark in here.
Mike Joosse:And then everybody who went to a leadership retreat was automatically just there giving up a week of their time in the summer to come here. And I wanted to make sure that they had as good a time as possible, and it was as effective as possible. And so I really respected everybody there for the commitment that they made. And so anybody who's on an AIG board, I was just talking with somebody in the Kansas City chapter who's a volunteer yesterday who works at VML. And I just said, thank you for whatever you do for the Kansas City chapter.
Mike Joosse:Thank I really appreciate people who give their time to an organization. You don't have to do that. Nobody is, unless your boss is making you do that when you're 22, nobody's making you do that. You're doing it of your own time and your own accord. So I really respect the folks who get involved, and therefore, I wanna get to know them.
Mike Joosse:I wanna get to know them outside of AIGA as much as, you know, inside AIGA.
Rachel Elnar:You're so generous. Mike, do you wanna adjust your lighting or are you okay?
Mike Joosse:Can I pause it real quick and go? I gotta go like do this to the lights. I'll be right back.
Erik Cargill:Yeah, I was in my 40s before I joined AIGA.
Rachel Elnar:Oh really? Yeah. It's never too late.
Erik Cargill:Well, think that's a testament to the community is it's never too late, get involved. Right. In whatever capacity.
Rachel Elnar:And whatever level you're at. Yeah. I mean, there are like junior designers, there are emerging designers who are in leadership, there are people who've been running their own agencies for, you know, decades, there are people who are ahead of in house. I mean, you you but that's the great thing about being part of that organization, is that when you're in the leadership retreat, you have one on one conversations with everyone. You get exposed to so many points of view and so many types of people.
Erik Cargill:Yeah. Well, Mike, you hold the record for 10 retreats.
Mike Joosse:I hope I don't, I'm happy if I don't. I hope somebody has beaten me by now, but yes.
Erik Cargill:I imagine you've taken away a lot from those, a lot of lessons and applied them to the work that you do now. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Mike Joosse:Not necessarily at the retreats, but something that Rick Raffet used to talk about, and I really took to heart, that's something I still kind of practice today is the idea of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And that's become like a big, big framework for me as I've been. And I remember I wrote, I don't know how many hundreds of pages in the chapter workroom wiki that existed for a while, RIP. And a lot of that was about trying to get people to understand and get boards to understand that everybody who comes to an event or a board meeting or a retreat, they're there for a different purpose. And that purpose can kind of be mapped to somewhere on that hierarchy.
Mike Joosse:So if they're there at the bottom, if they're there for trying to get a job, trying to make connections, trying to make friends, I think those are basic needs at the bottom. And those might be people who are in their 20s, people who are in college, people who are looking to get into design as a career. You go higher up, and then there's less about what do I need from it, but what can I excuse me, give back and what can I take from this experience and apply it to other parts of my life? And then you get to the top of the pyramid where you've had all your basic and intermediate needs met, and maybe your advanced need is, wanna give back. And in AIGA terms, that's, I wanna be a chapter president, I wanna be a leader, I wanna be a national board member, I wanna be involved at some point where I can just give back.
Mike Joosse:I can teach other people what I've learned. And I I thought that was such a great framework to remind, especially chapter presidents of that your organization is not a monoculture. Your chapter is made up of so many different people at so many different steps, places along that hierarchy that you have to kind of keep all of them in mind. And so it's not necessarily about creating an event for college students or creating an event for senior designers or retired designers, but it's about finding ways to engage all of those different people in different ways. It may not be an event.
Mike Joosse:It might be a volunteer opportunity. It might be, again, a mentorship program, which so many chapters, including Chicago, developed really amazing mentorship programs. I love the ability to bear out information and sort of have those people talk to each other and just whatever it might be. There's a lot of knowledge sharing. That's what I liked the most about the leadership retreats and what I liked most when I was planning them was find as many opportunities for people to share the knowledge that they've gained.
Mike Joosse:So the Wichita chapter has something to teach the San Francisco chapter, and the Portland chapter has something to teach the Houston chapter. And there's somebody out there who's gonna wanna learn what this thing, what they're doing over here in the other part of this country if they haven't already heard about it. And I I would see in real time chapters pick up events and activities that they heard about at leadership retreats, and implement and sort of adapt in their own way and make it unique and make it really interesting. And I would see people like Gage Mitchell, who would go from chapter to chapter and they would take ideas with them and take inspiration. And so for me to be able to facilitate that was really awesome.
Mike Joosse:And I think in my career since being a designer, the biggest thing that I've taken from AIGA is the sense that designers are unique, designers are wonderful, and designers need, I think, somebody to champion them, to help them do what they do best. And at VML, that's branding and design designers, brand identity designers, pipe designers, motion designers, things like that. I just want to get out of their way to let them do what they do. And I think with AIGA, especially leadership retreats, my goal was to just provide them this safe space to talk and to share ideas and to just do what they do best, and then stand back and let that happen. And obviously take notes and have that be an iterative process.
Mike Joosse:And especially when I was teaching at a UX UI bootcamp, iterative learning and iterative processes were such a big part of that. I think that was another thing too of taking the lessons learned from the two thousand and seven leadership retreat to the 02/1981 to the 02/1991 and just tinkering with that formula. And knowing that you can never really make it perfect, but as long as you're striving for that, as long as you're aiming to make it better and better, that's what's really going to be most beneficial for everybody.
Erik Cargill:Gage Mitchell, he was the president at Seattle where I was on the board. And I know that he was always going out and learning from other chapters and bringing his knowledge in. That was just my little world at that moment. But it's nice to hear that shared knowledge expanded.
Mike Joosse:Yeah, absolutely. I think being able to see that exponential effect of information sharing and sort of knowledge sharing, and again, being able to facilitate that was just awesome. And, I think one of the things that I really loved doing when I was with AIGA was having this mental Rolodex of 500 people across every chapter and what people's roles were and what was their background and everything and having that institutional knowledge that I could drop an answer to any question about anybody who was there. I absolutely took that to VSA partners when I went there after AIGA, and that was a group of about two fifty people and just knowing everything about everybody. And then I went and became a teacher, and that was 500 students that I taught and the same thing.
Mike Joosse:Now with VML, my team is 40 people. And it's my job, I feel like to know everything about them and be able to just know what they need and anticipate those needs, prepare them for the next step in their career, because AIGA helped me do that for myself. And so I think that was really one of the things that I've taken away from those experiences and just said, I will never go wrong if I do this. It will always be beneficial. It will always be helpful to people if there's someone like me who's looking out for them and and championing them.
Rachel Elnar:Oh, so amazing. And I'm glad you're doing that as well, and that you get to place yourself in roles that help to connect these people, you know, not only the people who are in your team, but across all your communities. It feels like you still are have a hand in the different communities that you keep talking to. And I really love the idea that you take what you've learned in Leadership Retreat and try to recreate it successfully, because I think the channel and the connection makes a huge difference.
Mike Joosse:Yeah. I mean, I I I just think there's something magical about and and you know this too, Rachel, when we were at Adobe together doing events and whether those events were for 10 people or 1,200 people, there's something magical about having people in a room together or an online room where they're all there for the same purpose. And they're all there to learn and to grow and to hopefully make connections or just feel like they have something in common with other people. That was always really the magic to me of AIGA. And I think where the leadership retreats felt the most you felt that the most acutely, that everybody was there for for the same reason.
Mike Joosse:There's something just special about that. It's sad to not be part of that anymore in some ways. It's sad to miss that, and certainly COVID did a number for chapters and for organizations to be able to get together in person like that. But pretty much any organization that can do that. And anytime I can do that for the communities that I'm a part of, I really love doing that.
Mike Joosse:And I think just, yeah, again, magic happens, in that in that environment.
Rachel Elnar:Even when you're brand new to the leadership retreat, I remember coming in at Omaha going, alright. What am I here for? Am I here to learn, or am I trying to figure out how to be a better communications chair? And you realize that you have just as much to give as you are to take. Like, you don't feel like you do.
Rachel Elnar:You feel like you don't have anything to contribute. But once you get to know other chapters and see how they're structured, you're like, oh, I have some experience that might help you, and I really love what you guys are doing. Those are great events. We would love to borrow some of that Absolutely.
Mike Joosse:And I think one of the things I really liked about leadership retreats is you could find yourself at the center of a bunch of concentric circles of different sizes. And so you could be having breakfast with four or five other people and feel like that's a small group. And then you could meet with all the other communications directors or treasurers or events people, and then you're in a group of 20. And the way that you interact with all those other people is different. And then you're in the room with everybody and that's two fifty people.
Mike Joosse:And then you go back to your chapter and you're in a different room with different people. And so you can feel yourself as part of that group that changes size. And the way that you can interact with them, the way that you can share and gain from other people gets to change with every size change that happens. And so I loved, again, being able to facilitate those where there's a breakfast, there's a lunch, there's small round table sessions, there's big presentations, and there's the parties, where you're one of six people who's sitting on a, you know, bed in somebody's hotel room and just shoot in the breeze. That's a whole other group that you get to feel like you're a part of no matter how temporary.
Rachel Elnar:Those were the fun ones. Those were definitely fun.
Erik Cargill:Yeah. People that I didn't know that ended up in my room and then I just got to know. Yeah. Where are you from? Oh, hey, welcome.
Mike Joosse:I made it a policy that anybody that I was staying with, said, We're not gonna be in the party room, but we'll let's we can go to the party room. Like, I can't I can't do that. Yeah.
Rachel Elnar:What I loved about the after hours events, whether they were planned or not, or they're after after parties or whatever, is that you mixed into groups that you were not part of. So Mike, you just said that we would have a lunch with all the chapter leaders and communication, and then you were part of different things. When you're in the after after parties, you would mix with people you would not meet all day because there's nothing in common necessarily. And so you would have to use that time to find some commonalities, which is magical.
Mike Joosse:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think that was I can't put it any better than that.
Erik Cargill:Oh, well, you're wearing a badge. I'm wearing a badge. I don't know you, and I don't know where everybody else is. Let's have a conversation, then figure out where everybody else is together.
Mike Joosse:Yeah. That reminds me like a month ago. You're you're maybe the two of the only people who would appreciate this story. But about a month ago, I had a dream that I was in a big house somewhere, like a retreat house somewhere, looking for the restroom. And Denise Wood found me and said, where's your name badge?
Mike Joosse:Because leadership retreats this was this was weeks before you invited me to be on this podcast. It was not triggered by that. It was just a a dream where Denise Wood shows up and says, where's your name badge? So I woke up and and was just like, nobody would ever understand this dream except for leadership retreat people. So I'm I appreciate the chance to to share that in a safe space.
Rachel Elnar:This is definitely a safe space with everybody who's listening, who don't understand what we're talking about, honestly, unless you've been in AIGA I'll have to say something about Denise. I love Denise. She was
Erik Cargill:Mhmm.
Rachel Elnar:Great. She was great in every However, after the AIGA Omaha leadership retreat okay. So let me back up a little bit. There was this new platform called Facebook that just opened up to the public. So I signed up literally maybe two days before the retreat.
Rachel Elnar:Came back, and I was on such a high. I went through that piece of paper, you know, the little pamphlet that they give you with everyone's name, and I looked everyone up, and I invited them all to Facebook. And most of our friends have said the first time that they joined was right after the leadership retreat in February and And then I got a call from Denise Wood saying, AIGA is not on this platform called Facebook, and please close please close everyone's accounts. And I'm like, that's not how it But okay. Yeah.
Mike Joosse:Oh, boy. Yeah. I don't I think I had just joined Facebook right before that. And the the retreat was absolutely the first time where my friend list just exploded. And all of a sudden, was like Yes.
Mike Joosse:Oh, these are people that I actually do care about, learning what's going on in their lives. I'm excited about that. So, yeah, I forgot. I I I I remember now that you are the person that a lot of me thank for continuing those connections after retreats. Absolutely.
Rachel Elnar:I had to tag people on these photos. So, know, can't have a human pyramid unless I don't remember who those people So true. Wanted to ask you a little bit about Community now for You've done a lot with Community, especially with AIGA. Is there anything that is comparable at VML?
Mike Joosse:Not for me right now. No. And that's something that I think I had a little trouble with at the beginning of of being here because, when we were at Adobe, we could create those events and create those communities, and that was really wonderful. And before that designation, the UXUI bootcamp, there was a huge community built into that. Just alumni kept coming back being involved and everybody who was a part of it, I think felt that community.
Mike Joosse:So I have EML. I don't have that right now. And I'm the only person on my team who's in the Chicago office. I think have translated a lot of those activities and desires for community to my team. As my team has grown, I started four years ago, and it was about 17 people, 18 people, and now it's 41.
Mike Joosse:And then there's kind of a whole ecosystem of people around us that we work with, account people, strategists, project managers, things like that. But that team of 41, I definitely think of myself as like the den mother you know, of that group. And I really, I love working with all them. It does feel in some ways comparable to AIGA because they're all all over the country. There's a bunch in Kansas City.
Mike Joosse:There's a bunch in New York. There are people scattered in Milwaukee and DC and Portland and just different places. And I want them to always feel connected to each other. And I always want them to feel the larger purpose of why they're here and why they're a part of our team. And that is absolutely a direct line back to AIGA.
Mike Joosse:Right? Back to especially when I was the the chapter development director, where that feeling of I want to return the investment that somebody puts into this organization. I want them to feel it returned back to them. The commitment, the whatever it is that they bring, I want that returned to them. And so I feel like that's my number one job at VML is really to make sure that people feel connected to each other.
Mike Joosse:They will likely not be in the same room physically as the people that they work with. So how can we make sure that those digital threads that connect everybody feel strong and they feel elastic and they feel like there's room for people to move in every direction, not just like towards each other. So whether that's finding them opportunities to learn new skills, or we do an event every Friday morning that's a community meeting, and we just have people give presentations about their life outside VML, they never talk about work. The guy today talked about taking a road trip from Orange County to the Death Valley where they do the Jedi, What what did he call it? The Jedi flyby or something.
Mike Joosse:Anyway and it's just it's awesome to hear about somebody's life for twenty minutes outside of work. And then we'll do we'll do we do all kinds of other activities that are like that. So I think I've built all of those things to scale up so that when we go from 20 to 40 people, and in the future, we go to sixty, eighty, a hundred people, all of those threads will remain strong. And all of those connections can be expanded and multiplied. And there's this feeling that whoever you are, whenever you join my group, you're gonna feel as connected to everybody else as the people who have been here for years and years.
Mike Joosse:That's what I would wanna see if I was joining a group. That's what I felt when I joined AIGA and was a part of various chapter boards and volunteering. I just want to keep that going for as long as I can, wherever I go.
Erik Cargill:I love that. Mike, real quick, I feel like I should know this, but does VML still have a Seattle office?
Mike Joosse:It does. Yes, we have a Seattle office and when we merged with Wonderman Thompson, I think we gained quite a few people who were also in Seattle. So it's much larger now. But there's there are a number of accounts.
Erik Cargill:Oh, it is?
Mike Joosse:Okay. Yeah. That are based in Seattle. Yeah.
Rachel Elnar:So I say how amazing it has been just talking to you, listening to your connections and the way you connect people, and how you've translated that from our in person culture prior to the pandemic, and you're still doing that now after the pandemic connecting all your team members. So I think I see a huge connection between what you learned in AIGA and what you're doing now in You're
Erik Cargill:living it, and I love it. I love hearing that it's still working for you.
Mike Joosse:I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I feel it too. Thank
Rachel Elnar:you so much for being the den mother of our AIGA leadership memories. I really appreciate you orchestrating all those leadership retreats because they were memorable and the whole basis for this podcast. Yeah.
Mike Joosse:My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Bye, everybody.
Rachel Elnar:Cheers and Tiers We'll be back next time with more design leadership tales retold.
Erik Cargill:Please subscribe, rate, review, and share this podcast with your creative community, design leaders, and friends.
Rachel Elnar:Cheers and Tiers Design Leadership Tales Retold is a production of chapter two and hosted by us, Rachel Elnar and Erik Cargill. This episode was produced and edited by Rachel Elnar. Podcast graphics by Erik Cargill. Animation by Verso Design and Megatoe Design.
Erik Cargill:The theme music track is loose ends by Silver Ship's Plastic Oceans. Follow Cheers and Tiers on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube podcasts, or wherever you get your audio and video podcasts. Subscribe to our email list at cheers and tiers dot com so you don't miss an episode.