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Your employees need clarity
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Your employees need clarity

Agency Management, Agency Staff, Employees, Uncategorized

Your employees need clarity

I know it seems like common sense and your brain may agree — but your mouth often takes a different path. If you’re struggling to work with some of your team members, odds are you have not embraced the idea that employees need clarity. Truth be told — most agency leaders struggle with this, especially if they are offering constructive criticism or even tougher — disciplinary action. One group of employees that really needs you to get good at the whole clarity thing are your millennials. They come into your agency with very different ideas about how employees behave, what success looks like and how they can contribute. They’re eager but raw. But if you really find a way to be straightforward and very directive with your feedback, I think they will surprise you. Be it millennials or any other group of employees, agency owners and department heads can be vague, passive-aggressive, or just absent in their management style (you may well be the exception to the rule) and I think there are a few reasons for that. In a recent blog post, I dug into what gets in the way of us being more clear and then offered up some tools we can use to get better at it. Check it out and let me know what you think.

June 10th, 2019|

Does your agency need a project manager with Ben Aston

Who is responsible for keeping the agency’s work on time and on budget? That is an oft debated topic among agency owners. At AMI we believe that a specific role (Project Manager, Traffic Manager, etc.) to keep everyone and everything on track is a luxury if you have fewer than 10 employees and by the time you’re at 15-20 employees, it’s usually a necessity if you want to keep your team and clients happy. But who you hire and how they go about implementing a traffic system is a challenge many agency owners struggle with. […]

February 8th, 2021|

Your Employees Aren’t Practice Dummies to Test Management Styles On
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Your Employees Aren’t Practice Dummies to Test Management Styles On

Agency leadership

Your Employees Aren’t Practice Dummies to Test Management Styles On

If you don’t manage people well, they will find someone else who will. According to The Mercury News, Americans are quitting their jobs at the highest rate in 16 years. In January alone, 2.2 percent of the entire American workforce either left in favor of a new opportunity or quit outright. As a business owner, you face the same problems that managers have encountered for decades. Unfortunately, you don’t have the luxury of management training -- your daily interactions with your team are your training. However, your employees are not practice dummies for you to feel out your management style. They expect you to be a competent, fair and engaging manager, regardless of whether you’ve had formal managerial training. In my experience, many startup managers new to the role end up using a passive-aggressive style, alienating employees and making them feel disrespected. To avoid this fate, you must learn to ask for forgiveness as you actively seek to improve your abilities as a manager. Own the transition from employee to owner Your passion and ability for your craft led you to create a company. Perhaps you were an excellent art director or programmer, but now you’re tasked with supervising accounting and sales departments. People who were once your peers are now your employees. If you don’t learn how to handle that transition, things can get ugly fast. Many of the challenges in this transition stem from a lack of clarity, both within your own decisions and in the way you present them to your team. If you didn’t have good role models for management before you started, you likely don’t know what to do when someone needs constructive criticism or disciplinary action. When you fear hurting people’s [...]

November 22nd, 2017|

EOS Model: Why Your Agency Needs a Visionary and an Integrator with Mark Winters
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EOS Model: Why Your Agency Needs a Visionary and an Integrator with Mark Winters

Agency Operations, Evergreen, Lifelong Learning

EOS Model: Why Your Agency Needs a Visionary and an Integrator with Mark Winters

Most agency owners are visionaries – able to see the future and come up with idea after idea to keep their agency on top of things. But most agency owners struggle to move those ideas forward on their own. They need an integrator to help them get things done – to wade through the details and processes. The integrator is the one to follow through and put the visionary’s ideas into practice. This perfect combination of visionary and integrator is what my podcast guest Mark Winters focuses on in his book, Rocket Fuel. Mark is a Certified EOS Implementer, working with agencies to identify this combination of the “visionary” who makes it up and the “integrator” who makes it happen and puts them together within a framework that will get your agency to extraordinary. See how identifying the visionary and the integrator in your agency can push you to the next level of success by learning: The “visionary” and the “integrator” from “Rocket Fuel” by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters How visionaries and integrators can build trust so that integrators can take control of what visionaries create What business owners need to do when they are an integrator and they need a visionary (most owners are visionaries) If you are a visionary, how to determine if you have an integrator on your team and what to do if you don’t The seven-step visionary integrator connection process for finding the right integrator How to know if you’re going to be able to sell your agency to your integrator or not (and what your exit plan can look like in both scenarios) Things that make visionary-integrator relationships fall apart The five rules and five tools for [...]

September 21st, 2017|

Why is Communication Important in Leadership?
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Why is Communication Important in Leadership?

Agency leadership, Agency Staff

Why is Communication Important in Leadership?

Why is communication important in leadership? If you’ve been struggling to work with some of your team members, odds are you have not embraced the idea that employees need clarity. Truth be told — most agency leaders struggle with this, especially if they are offering constructive criticism or even tougher — disciplinary action. Agency owners and department heads are notoriously passive aggressive in their management style (you may well be the exception to the rule) and I think there are a few reasons for that. Read more to help answer the question “why is communication important in leadership?” Most agency owners/leaders are accidental leaders Odds are you were a brilliant writer, art director, account exec or some other tactical role earlier in your agency life. At some point, you either got promoted or decided to hang up a shingle. Suddenly, you’re the boss and now you have to supervise people. In many cases — the people that used to be your peers. And you’re flying without a net because you’ve never been trained or coached on how to mentor and coach a team. You don’t have a practice dummy When we’re trying to learn a new skill, it’s ideal to be able to practice before we have to actually execute. Managing people doesn’t work that way. So you need to ask for a lot of forgiveness as you improve. Admitting that you didn’t handle a conversation well or could have been better at a coaching opportunity doesn’t negate your authority. You may not have good role models It’s easy to conjure up the name of a bad boss but much tougher to point to someone who really did mentor you, give you constructive and specific [...]

October 9th, 2016|

Timesheet specifics

Let's talk to you about timesheet codes, the function codes you use to track and define how time is being spent when you do your timesheets. Many agencies have these big black holes, particularly around your non-billable time. It's uper important that you track both billable time and non-billable time. Why? Timesheets aren’t really about billing. They're about understanding what your team is doing. How long it takes. It's about looking for efficiencies and effectiveness. Who needs more training?Are our estimates accurate? It answers a ton of questions that actually have nothing to do with billing. But it starts with A) doing your timesheets every day and B) having the right function codes so you know how people spend their time.

May 1st, 2024|

Time To Be Clear

One of the areas where I think most agency leaders and owners can improve is the clarity of communication that we have with our team members. I'm challenging you to work on improving the clarity of your conversations. Start having smaller conversations with team members, less intense conversations, things that aren't of critical importance. Practice having candor and clear communications, so that on the day when you have to have the big conversation about something that really matters.

August 30th, 2023|

Fear
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Fear

Uncategorized

Fear

Whew — fear can be crippling, can’t it? I’m a leap and while in mid-air look to see if there’s water in the pool sort of guy, but I will admit that fear has shut me down more than once. But when I look back on my life, it was the moments that I stood at the end of the cliff, scared to death, but took the leap anyway that have provided me with some of my most satisfying moments. Pushing past fear into big, life-changing adventures (becoming a dad, buying the precursor to AMI and creating what AMI is today, etc.) are some of my most pivotal moments. But there were plenty of smaller moments too. I’ve always liked how tattoos looked on other people but the fear of the needle/pain combined with not having clarity about what would be meaningful enough to have permanently put on my body kept me from pursuing it. When I’m honest with myself — it was the fear of the needle that kept me from really contemplating the art part. Last year my daughter asked me to get a tattoo with her. The significance of that request and her idea for our shared tattoo was motivation enough to actually consider enduring the pain. When I actually got the tattoo — I discovered that the pain was far less than I imagined and the satisfaction of doing it was far greater. Why had I allowed fear to deprive me of that for so long? What is fear depriving you and your agency from experiencing? For much of 2023, agency owners have behaved out of fear. There are many sources of that state of fear — the economy, the challenges [...]

June 30th, 2023|

The necessary evils of optimizing your agency operations with Marquis Murray

When running an agency, efficiency is key. While we would probably prefer to focus on any other task, establishing effective systems and processes is imperative to our agency operations. The systems we create and teach our team members will ultimately define our day-to-day, client satisfaction, and employee retention. This week, Marquis Murray of Ditto will share his knowledge on implementing agency operations adjustments into our team culture. Whether it’s project management software, a well-organized Excel sheet, or simply improving team communication across the board, Marquis knows exactly how to work with agencies to identify where they have the most room for improvement. When everyone gets on the same page and knows exactly where they belong and what is expected of them, the whole team can focus less on who’s doing what and more on what’s important to their specific role. It doesn’t need to be complicated or high-tech, but it does need to be sustainable, scalable, and repeatable so your team members can do what they do best, effectively. […]

August 15th, 2022|

Improvement Plan

For many agency owners, giving team members constructive feedback, growth goals, and course correcting bad habits and behavior is not easy. That's partially because we often do the work that the employee needs to do.

July 20th, 2022|

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