Rituals

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute coming to you again from Tower 23 in San Diego. This is one of the favorite hotels of all of our peer groups. They love coming back here. And so we get to be here probably once or twice a year, which is not a bad thing at all. I love the idea of coming back to places that you love. I love the idea of creating ritual. And it's an important part of agency life. It's an even more important part now that we are not all in the office five days a week together. And in fact, we may not be in an office at all. So ritual is critical. Ritual, I believe in this in my personal life, I believe in this in my professional life, but rituals are threads that weave us together. They are memories, they are habits, they are funny stories, but they all happen on purpose. Rituals don't happen just by accident. The first time it may happen by accident, you may go to a restaurant, and have a funny experience, and now that becomes the restaurant you and your team go to once a year. Or you may do something before a big client pitch and all of a sudden you win the pitch. And so now, like a baseball pitcher that's superstitious, you eat the same meal or do the same thing before every pitch. But it's important as agency leaders for us to think about rituals. Rituals around team anniversaries. Ritual around big wins. We don't celebrate our wins often enough. So you can create great rituals around that. Rituals around promotions of your team, rituals around retreats. Or when you do gather everyone together, that there is something that is common that everyone looks forward to. Whether it's karaoke, or pizza by a bar, or whatever it may be. For every agency, it's going to be different because a ritual is very much baked in your personality and your style and your agency's personality and style, but do not discount the power of rituals. Do not discount that power of repeating yourself in the same way that is memorable and meaningful for the people that you repeat it with, whatever that may be. And again, it could be a meal, it could be a battle cry before you go into a pitch, it could be a place where you always have your retreats, it could be what happens on someone's 5th, 10th, 15th anniversary. Doesn't really matter. What it matters is that it is something that weaves you together, connects all of you, and is part of the agency's store. So if you don't have a lot of rituals in your agency, I'm highly recommending you get that done, and you think about it, and you create some new opportunities for connection inside your shop. I'll see you next week.