How to Get Your Team to Work Well Together, with Marcus Blankenship.

Speaker 1:

If you’re going to take the risk of running an agency, shouldn’t you get the benefits too. Welcome to [Build a Better Agency 00:00:08], where we show you how to build an agency that can scale and grow with better clients, invested employees and best of all, more money to the bottom line. Bringing his 25 plus years of expertise as both an agency owner and agency consultant to you, please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, everybody, Drew McClellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency, really excited today to talk about systems and team and getting a team to work well together. At the end of the day, you are as great as your team or you struggle mightily if your team is struggling, and that’s what we have to sell is how we work together as a team and what we can deliver as a team. And so having systems and process and respect and understanding amongst your whole team and having everybody pulling the wagon in the same direction, as many of you have heard me talk about is critical to the success of your agencies. So let me tell you a little bit about our guest. So he comes from an interesting background, has worked a lot with technical people, owned an agency for seven years.

So he has all kinds of different experiences that he brings to the work he does with teams across many industries, but including agencies. So let me tell you a little bit more about, so Marcus Blankenship is his name, I should tell you that right off the bat. So one of the things that he talks about is, everybody wishes everyone could work together and get along and that a lot of industries and a lot of organizations, including agencies, get caught up in a lot of buck passing and not my job man kind of thing, and a lot of excuses around missed deadlines, quality issues, going over budget. I know that this is not happening to any of you listening, but some other agencies deal with these issues, and so we’re going to talk about them. So what Marcus talks about is how to get the team in alignment and how to make sure that everybody is doing great work, has transparency in the process and in the deliverables and obviously at the end of the day is knocking out of the park for clients. So Marcus, welcome to the podcast.

Marcus Blankenship:

Hey, thanks Drew. I’m really happy to be here.

Drew McLellan:

So let’s talk a little bit about agencies, like most small businesses. They run based on how well their team runs. So typically when you engage with somebody, what are some of the things that you identify as problems or challenges that need to get a little bit of course correction?

Marcus Blankenship:

Yeah. One of the first exercises I ask folks as I’m onboarding into my coaching and mentoring services is, we do a ranking of the team members and we just talk about performance and attitude. What I’m really looking for is for the agency owner to identify their high performers and their low performers. And then I ask them to go on and think about who would they clone if they could. That’s another way to like, who is so good that you wish you had three more of them, but the real impact comes when we talk about who shouldn’t be on the team and they’re still there. And so I actually-

Drew McLellan:

[crosstalk 00:03:27] every agency, I’m going to bet there’s at least one of those.

Marcus Blankenship:

I was going to say that, yeah, exactly. I have never found anybody who said everyone is great. Or if they did say everyone is great, and I said, really? They said, well, except Jim, Jim, I haven’t really talked to Jim. So that’s my next question is, okay, does Jim know he’s not great? Well, no, Jim never knows he’s not great. So this is a problem, or-

Drew McLellan:

No, in fact Jim thinks he’s great.

Marcus Blankenship:

Well, yeah. Then this is my favorite thing I’ve heard this so many times is I might say, does Jim realize that you and I might be talking about letting him go, because Jim’s in danger. And the person, the agency owner will say, well, I don’t know how he couldn’t figure it out.

Drew McLellan:

Other than I haven’t told him.

Marcus Blankenship:

Other than I’ve… Yes. Because I’ve shunned him, I’ve shamed him, I don’t smile at him, right? Whatever the signals are, he ought to get the message. [crosstalk 00:04:26]-

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Unfortunately many agency owners practice a little passive aggressive leadership.

Marcus Blankenship:

That’s maybe even an understatement [crosstalk 00:04:35].

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus Blankenship:

Well, and I think to be honest, a lot of it comes from agency owners, at least I was, when I had my agency, I didn’t start thinking, you know what I should do, is own an agency and manage 20 people because that sounds like fun. I thought, why don’t I bring the technical expertise, so then we add a design expertise, why don’t we do that for other people, we’ll make a boatload of money and I’ll be my own boss and it’ll be great, and if I have to add somebody, I’m only going to add the really great people to the team.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I describe this as accidental ownership. So I think a lot of agency owners wake up one day and go, oh crap, I own an agency, I have all these peoples and problems, right?

Marcus Blankenship:

Exactly, I call it accidental management. I always knew I was the owner, this’s what I’ve seen, but [inaudible 00:05:28], what’s it mean to be a manager? And I guess an owner is the same as a leader so that I must have covered.

Drew McLellan:

Right. Well, and I think a lot of times since agency owners often grow up through the ranks, I think the other thing that they struggle with is they’re used to the peer group inside the agency also being their buddies. And it’s hard to manage your buddies.

Marcus Blankenship:

Yeah. I have a saying and no one likes it and that’s, you can’t hire someone that you can’t fire. And [crosstalk 00:05:59]-

Drew McLellan:

Which would include siblings, parents-

Marcus Blankenship:

I was going to say. [crosstalk 00:06:01]-

Drew McLellan:

… Best friends,

Marcus Blankenship:

I didn’t hire my kids. And they were either late teens or early 20s. And I got a lot of pressure as the owner. I just bring them in and can’t they help out. And I said, you know what? If I have to discipline them or fire them, I don’t want there to be awkwardness at Thanksgiving, right? And I’m going to openly avoid giving them any criticism because I want to play the role of their dad, I don’t want to be their boss.

Drew McLellan:

Right, right. So when you do the evaluation, do you have just the owner to the evaluation or do you have a leadership team evaluate the whole team?

Marcus Blankenship:

It depends on the size of the company. Oftentimes I’m working with agencies that are under 25 people. And so they’re just starting to really put together what they call their art director or their technical director. And depending on the relationship with those people, sometimes we’ll move down a level because at about 25 or 30, the agency owner is maybe a little bit removed from exactly how well everybody’s doing. Although I’m always shocked at how flat organizations get, and I think that there’s a trend, I don’t like the trend of holocracy and these other things where the idea is like, if you just hire great people and set them free, everything wonderful will happen. I’m a fan of structured management, but I think a lot of agency owners want to be hip and cool and say, well, let’s not have bosses, let’s keep it really flat. And what that means is nobody’s really managing anything.

Drew McLellan:

Right, right. So when you say structured management, what does that look like? What do you think the best practice is around managing a company of 25 or so people or smaller?

Marcus Blankenship:

I think the first thing is you’ve got to set up your communication channels and you’ve got to practice those things religiously, one-on-one meetings, team meetings, evaluation meetings, onboarding practices, termination and discipline practices. These all sound like HR, but in a lot of ways, these have nothing to do with the production practices. And so they really get overlooked by the agency owner.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and oftentimes they’re not pleasant conversations. So if you don’t have the system or the process, maybe you can just avoid it all together.

Marcus Blankenship:

Right. On the face of it, they don’t make you money. And that’s what we are all about, at least I was, was the billable hours, that time clock is running and I’ve got to earn so much every day to pay these great people. So I really don’t have time to do these fancy one-on-ones or to have a lot… We can play ping-pong and we’ll go out for beers and stuff, but to have a structured conversation where bidirectional feedback is given, where trust is built and where I actually say to you, Drew, I was really disappointed that you’ve come in late in the last week, what can I do to help that? That’s can be a hard conversation if you don’t know how to approach it.

Drew McLellan:

So do you find that most of the people that you work with, the most of the business owners, are they equipped to have those conversations or have they only been on the receiving end of those at some point in their career?

Marcus Blankenship:

Well, I see two kinds. I see people who have always worked for themselves and like you call it, the accidental owner. I get a lot of folks who say, I never even worked at a big company or I never had a great boss, so I don’t really know how it’s supposed to be done, so I feel a little lost. But then you get people, and this is kind of my case where I came from an enterprise, 30,000 people, big global company, I did have a really good boss, I had a good management systems that I both were affected by as an individual contributor and participated in as I went up the management ranks. But when I left that, I had a bitter taste in my mouth about a lot of those big company practices, and I wanted to be agile and nimble. I wanted to be different and creative.

So I thought, well, we don’t need to bring all that over. It only took about a year for me to figure out those kinds of intentional communication channels were exactly what I needed to start building the team, that that was the team my company needed.

Drew McLellan:

Well, otherwise you have a bunch of people who are in essence, independent contractors, and everyone’s doing their own thing in their own way. And I think part of the other challenge is when an agency starts out super small, when you’re all within shouting distance of each other, that can work for a while. And so I think as a new agency owner with three or four employees, you get lulled into thinking that, isn’t it awesome that we don’t have to do all that stuff and isn’t it great the way this is working, but the minute you get to about, I think about 10 people, all of a sudden that doesn’t work anymore.

Marcus Blankenship:

Right. And I think that we’re also tend to look to the operational delivery practices when things start to go awry. I’ve found owners usually say, well, if we’re a technical firm, let’s move to agile or let’s get better at our agile or let’s do agile design or lean or, nobody is doing waterfall anymore, because that’s just a dirty word. But we automatically move to think the problem is the delivery system. And sometimes, it is.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, on the production side, right.

Marcus Blankenship:

Exactly. Sometimes it is, don’t get me wrong. But plugging people that are disengaged and unmotivated or have a sour attitude into those systems isn’t going to result in what you need.

Drew McLellan:

So tell me this. So when I talk to agency owners and I start talking about the importance of reviews and one-on-ones and all of that, I can tell by the lack of eye contact that it’s not happening. And so when I say to them, I’ll be teaching a workshop or something, how many of you are doing annual reviews? I get a lot of, sort ofs, or yeah, well, every other year kind of a thing. How do you go from zero to whatever, how do you help managers or owners begin to work some of these things into the culture and the system and process and timetable and calendar of their organization?

Marcus Blankenship:

I think it can be really hard. But I start with emphasizing the importance of it. If we look at the Gallup polls last year, I believe they came out with the state of the American manager, where they talked about 50% of people who answered the survey had actually left a job to get away from their manager. Oh man, all of a sudden managers matter. If we look at concepts like leader-member exchange theory, that really says that the primary predictor of job performance and job satisfaction is an employee’s relationship with their manager and that those [psych-sociologists 00:13:03] have gone on to say that the manager-employee relationship is a lens through which that employee sees the entire organization and all of their work. Now we’re starting to say, wow, this relationship really matters. So from there I try and scare them into like, and then I usually ask, tell me about a bad boss you had, has anybody ever had one? And we oftentimes talk about horror stories. And believe me, some of these poor people have been treated so badly.

I just feel terrible for them. And while I don’t think they’re that bad, those bosses, I remind them probably didn’t think they were that bad either. So kind of starting with how important it is, I moved to saying, all you need is a few standard processes, you need your one-on-ones, you need probably your team meeting, probably monthly at least, maybe weekly, if you’re going to do a huddle.

If you’re doing any agile work, you’re probably going to want some kind of standup. And a lot of them already have that because they’ve heard standup is a great practice and it sounds like fun. But then the importance of the evaluation and how to do that, because many of those people hate the idea of doing employee evaluation because evaluations have been inflicted on them so much in the past. And so I teach them how to do evaluations that are zero surprise, where you promise the employee, you’re never going to hear anything in here, in this evaluation that we haven’t talked about before, so there’s no blind siding, and we are actually going to talk about important things that matter to both of us and then coming full circle using their one-on-ones to make sure that’s a time to give all of that feedback.

So there is no surprise at the evaluation. And also of course, because even though managers and owners are inherently perfect people, sometimes we really need feedback to correct our own work. So if we build in feedback loops through one-on-ones, we start to build trust, we start to get help, other people see that it is safe for them to come and talk to us.

Drew McLellan:

So what I’m hearing you say is, couple things, one, I preach, in fact, I did a podcast probably a month ago where I talked about the kinds of meetings agencies have to have, and [inaudible 00:15:31] talked about the one-on-one and the importance of that and I actually have a whole podcast around that, because I actually think that’s, and I’m curious about what you think, I think that’s the foundation for great management is, yes, you need to do an annual review and yes, you need to do the team meetings, but at the core foundation are those consistent one-on-one meetings where the employee knows they’re going to have your attention and they’re going to have focused time with you where they can bring their concerns, their ideas, their celebrations, whatever it is, and that they know that they’re going to get mentorship and feedback from you, what do you think?

Marcus Blankenship:

I totally agree. And if we go back to that, with that leader-member exchange theory, all those surveys and all that research shows us is it’s about the individual unique relationship that you have with your employee. So doing team meetings builds it a little bit, doing staff meetings, doing group activities and standup, sure, those are little contributors. But you’re exactly right, the core practice has got to be the private one-on-one meeting, and that’s where you start to actually build real trust. And I think that’s what you trade on, when you have to have a hard conversation or someone has to have a hard conversation with you. Oftentimes these managers can remember the few brave employees that braved the power dynamic and said, I think you might want to reconsider the way you’re talking about this, giving them candid feedback.

Drew McLellan:

Right, yeah. My people have been with me for a super long time, so a lot of people have heard me talk about the fact that the average tenure on my team is like 14 or 15 years, and we agreed a long time ago that we needed a trigger sentence. In essence, when they needed to tell me that I’d messed up, which as you might imagine is a regular conversation, that we needed a trigger word so that they knew it was a safe time and a safe place and that they were not catching me off guard. And so literally if one of my employees walks in and says, hey, we need to have a difficult conversation. I know immediately to put everything down and to either say, you know what, this isn’t a great time, can we do it later today, or that I need to really be open to that conversation and even little tricks like that allow people to have a candor that perhaps they are not used to having in the workplace.

Marcus Blankenship:

I love it, I think that’s great. Netflix has this culture of giving and receiving feedback. And the idea is anyone at any level is expected, if they see something where they’re working with someone in a different team on their team, their boss, someone five levels up, they encourage people to stop a conversation or to make sure they know that they can say, can I give you some feedback on what I’m seeing? And that’s kind of what I’ve heard is their opening sentence. And it’s funny because I’ve talked to some people there who live in that culture, and what they tell me is, I said, well, isn’t it really hard for people who work for somebody much higher than them or to give feedback upwards.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, at the [crosstalk 00:18:44].

Marcus Blankenship:

And you probably… Exactly right. Ed Shchein’s book, the Humble Inquiry does an amazing job of helping leaders and managers like us be able to create safe places by being humble in our inquiries and opening up ourselves for those kinds of conversations. But at Netflix, what I’ve been told is that people down further on the chain oftentimes get very comfortable giving people above them, one, two, three, four levels above them, really, I would call it super candid feedback. But of course the higher you go, the more careful you have to be. Their phrase I heard was, we don’t punch downwards. And the idea, it’s not that you withhold feedback from people who are three levels below you, but you realize that the power dynamic dictates that any feedback you give them, especially anything that smells critical has to be properly couched because it’s going to be a little terrifying for them, does that make sense?

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Marcus Blankenship:

So they really coach their upper management, you’re going to get a lot of feedback, but really be careful in how you give feedback. It’s not that you shouldn’t, it’s that you should realize your positional authority gives you a 10X multiplier on how that’s [inaudible 00:20:05] taken.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, it’s like shouting without shouting.

Marcus Blankenship:

Yeah, exactly.

Drew McLellan:

So when I talk about one-on-ones and the agency owners start to sort of, the expression on their face is, oh my God, I don’t have a spare minute in my day. And the first question they’ll have is, and it’s injustice tone, how often do I have to do this, right? So how do you respond to that because I suspect you hear it too.

Marcus Blankenship:

I do. Almost every boss appears to be busy. I don’t think I’ve met one owner or manager who says I’m just lounging around waiting for my next meeting.

Drew McLellan:

[crosstalk 00:20:46] up on my desk, [inaudible 00:20:48].

Marcus Blankenship:

Exactly, right? So what I tell them is among the attributes of one-on-one meetings, I do think they have to be done privately, that’s not usually a problem. Although I’ve had managers who have a very open space and they’ve got to be a bit more intentional about that. I tell them that regularity is important and consistency though is the key. So if they are unsure and I always tell them to start by running an experiment, promise your team, tell them I want to do one-on-ones for one month or two months, and then we’re going to evaluate their usefulness. And so as you’re going to do an experiment, set a time schedule that you can be very committed to, right?

So while I might be telling you weekly is best, you may not have the space in your life to do weekly, so frankly every two weeks and keeping that promise to do it every two weeks is much better than promising weekly, breaking 50% of your promises or reshuffling every week, as one of my clients says, I chase my one-on-ones across the calendar every week. And I say, you shouldn’t do that, right? Instead, if you’re not sure if you’re feeling really busy, set them for every two weeks.

Heck, I’d be happy if you set him for every three weeks, maybe make them a little longer, try it for three months, call it an experiment and then have a discussion with the employee and think to yourself, what’s changing because of this, what’s working, what’s not, do I want to consider, I’m sorry, do I want to continue or is this something I need to make an adjustment to before we move forward? But I really believe that every time you throw a calendar appointment on somebody’s calendar and you say, okay, we’re going to have our one-on-one meetings at this time, and then you move it, I got to count that as a broken promise, and that’s going to hurt trust in the long run.

Drew McLellan:

Well, it just makes it feel like it’s not a priority for you, right?

Marcus Blankenship:

It’s not really important. I had this guy email me [inaudible 00:22:55] my list and he said, every time my boss cancels our one-on-one, it makes me wonder if he’s mad at me, it makes me wonder if maybe something bad is happening in the company, maybe he can’t even control his world, is this company that chaotic, or maybe he secretly has some hard feedback that he doesn’t know how to give me, so he’d rather just move it or postpone it, no matter what happens, I feel bad when he cancels or changes the date because it makes me feel like I don’t know what’s going on.

Drew McLellan:

Fascinating. So I want to circle back and talk about how we can as owners and managers, help our people give us feedback. And we talked a little bit about the power issue, but it’s scary to tell somebody something unpleasant when they can fire you. So-

Marcus Blankenship:

It is.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. So how does a manager or a leader, how do they make that safer for the employees?

Marcus Blankenship:

There’s a few different ways. If you’re interested in this topic, Ed Shchein’s book, Humble Inquiry, I think is the best writing on it. But what he talks about is the idea of, if we imagine, let’s see if I can properly outline this, if you imagine an operating room and you’ve got people like surgeons and nurses and anesthesiologists and all the way down to, you might think about the power hierarchy is very clear down to a surgery tech. And the chief surgeon has a tremendous amount of prestige and skill, and because of that, in that environment, they are the boss. And then there’s all these different levels. And yet you could imagine the surgery tech might notice blood dripping out of the patient from a place that it wasn’t expected.

You might imagine the nurse noticing the patient’s breathing wasn’t quite as expected. And for us non-medical people, we sure hope that all those people would raise their hand and say, doctor, there’s a problem, in the same way as we hope our people would raise their hand and say, owner, there’s a problem. But study after study shows that that’s not the case, that there are some cultures and sometimes when, and this sounds terrible, but task failure is actually preferred over the possibility of humiliating the person at a higher power status, isn’t that amazing?

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, wow.

Marcus Blankenship:

And so as a person who might go in for surgery, I sure would want everybody in that operating theater-

Drew McLellan:

If you see blood speak up.

Marcus Blankenship:

Right, exactly. And yet, so many patients have died and then later as they’ve interviewed the anesthesiologist and in this case, maybe they were from Asian culture and there is a very strong concern about humiliating people, calling out the expert. Maybe there’s a cultural changes, a difference as American, British, there’s lots of things. You have to first realize that you, as the owner sit in this special place. And by special, all I mean is you are at the top of the power dynamic. And if you imagine that anybody’s going to easily [inaudible 00:26:15] tomorrow and say, hey, I think you’re really screwing up that project, and I’m really upset with you that we didn’t have our annual evaluations and read you the Riot Act about something, you’re probably wrong. My guess is those people are simply going to quit or they’re going to start brushing up their resume.

They may not quit immediately, but they don’t, probably, unless you have done something to make them feel safe. And so let’s move to that, right? If you want a safe environment where you get feedback in the one-on-one meetings, start by asking for feedback. Now Drew, my guess is if I [inaudible 00:26:53] came to work for you and in our first one-on-one, you might say, Marcus, do you have any feedback for me? What do you think I might say?

Drew McLellan:

Well, I think you’re going to say I’m awesome, probably, right?

Marcus Blankenship:

You are awesome.

Drew McLellan:

Yes, yeah.

Marcus Blankenship:

That’s right.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. I think you’re going to say no, everything’s great.

Marcus Blankenship:

I am, that’s exactly right.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, right.

Marcus Blankenship:

And then if you’re like most managers, you’re going to feel like, well, that’s because I’m awesome. And then you’re going to say this, this deathly deadly phrase, well, my door’s always open, so if you’ve got anything, just march through it and let me know, I’m always here for you. And then you’ll never ask again. And you’ve just committed two or three deadly sins. The first one is you need to ask for feedback every single time you meet. Okay, that needs to be part of your one-on-one, because-

Drew McLellan:

Should they request be more specific?

Marcus Blankenship:

[inaudible 00:27:43].

Drew McLellan:

Like, hey Marcus, do you have feedback for me? Is that too broad?

Marcus Blankenship:

Well, I think it’s scary. So I like to ask for situational feedback. In fact, if we consider that you’re the owner and I’m the employee, instead of you saying, how am I doing, which is really vague, and I’m always going to say, you’re doing awesome. If you say to me things like, how could I have handled that situation better or do you think we could have gotten better outcomes with that client management? If you ask me for feedback on a situation that you were involved in managing, we’re kind of triangulating, it’s not me against you, it’s you and I on the same table, looking at a third thing, the situation. It’s much easier for me to say, well, in that situation, I guess we could have tried X or Y or Z, or I saw a failure to communicate with the client, and so that really resulted in this other thing happening. That is the feedback for your work, right? It’s just much less scary than me saying, you really screwed up that project, Drew.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, that’s a much better way of getting them to ease into giving feedback, but it’s sort of like, you know how you’d mention that you have kids, you know how you always have great conversations in the car because you’re not making eye contact, right? It’s the same sort of thing, right? It’s sort of a non eye contact way of getting feedback.

Marcus Blankenship:

Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And sometimes people get really excited when you ask them for their ideas on how you can improve your work. But they never would’ve told you, if you just said, how can I improve my work or even if you’re only asking once a year in that 360 evaluation, that’s a pretty scary time too. So I think you’ve got to ask consistently. I think you show them that you really want it when you don’t stop asking the third time that they say, oh, everything’s fine. And instead, you dig a little deeper, well, what do you think about this policy we’re doing or how do you think the process we put in place could be improved? When you’re talking about those third things, it’s much easier for them to sort of reflect it [inaudible 00:30:06] it doesn’t feel like they’re just giving you anything that could be construed as offensive feedback.

Drew McLellan:

One of the other things that I try to do is when I get feedback, and as you might imagine, I get quite a bit, I will try and publicly say, hey, you know what? So and so mentioned to me in our one-on-one that I do this and you know what? I need you guys to catch me doing that and make sure that I don’t keep doing that or that when I do this, this happens, so I’m going to really try really hard not to do that anymore, would really appreciate you helping me catch myself and know that I’m working on it.

Marcus Blankenship:

Yeah. There’s a private moment when you get that feedback, that’s just you and me. And how you receive it is really going to tell me if I’ve made a mistake. So in that moment, sitting back, opening up, going, man, thank you for telling me that, maybe you’re actually hearing feedback that upsets you, in which case you should say, I really need to give that some thought, and before I just address it immediately, I want to really give it the due thought that it deserves, can we meet tomorrow for a follow-up? And then the other thing I love that you did this, because I’ve done this as well, is model to the broader team that you are getting feedback from some team members and they are not fired, you appreciate it, they’re still at the company and this is how you intend to use it. And I think this hits on the last point, it’s important to tell people why you need feedback, tell them what you’re going to do with it.

If you have this idea that you need feedback to make sure that you are doing the best job that you can, and you acknowledge that you, as the owner, don’t see everything perfectly, tell them you need feedback to improve, that you don’t see everything perfectly and that you depend on a team that trusts you and that you can trust, because nobody’s perfect, everybody’s going to just continue to get better through these feedback cycles.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, yeah. Well, and then it also makes it feel less scary and intimidating when you’re giving them feedback because it just become part of the culture, right?

Marcus Blankenship:

Right, yep. And I do think that leaders have to go first. I’ve noticed that people are more likely to give me feedback when I start giving them small bits of feedback immediately upon their coming to the company. In fact, I have a policy, when I had my agency, that we would bring in new people, I would meet with them personally, 15 minutes, four 15 minutes at the end of each shift. It was like a tiny little one-on-one meeting. And I would do this for two weeks. The idea was in that two weeks are the time when the most questions come up, the most things that seem confusing, kind of the, why are we doing this? And we’re also trying to figure out what kind of relationship we’re going to have. Every boss in the interview tells you, I’m approachable, my door’s always open, I’m a people person, I really desire to have complete transparency. And then you get in there and you find out that’s not at all true, but those are all just like sales pitches, right?

So if you set up, for a couple weeks, a quick one-on-one at the end of each shift with a new person, you have an opportunity to ask them questions and start giving them feedback. You can start to give them adjusting or affirming feedback, yeah, I really liked it when you did this or, here we usually do it that way. And it’s completely non-threatening because in the beginning, everyone knows they’re a novice at a particular company, right? When we walk in the door, we’re assuming that somebody’s going to show us the ropes. And so that’s the time to get these little gentle corrections. If you withhold any corrective feedback for a month, and then you sit down with somebody and you say, well, I’ve got a list of sins that you’ve committed over the last, then I want to go through them with you, not only would probably no one do that because you’d figure, well, that happened so long ago, I don’t know how to bring it up, but the person would be completely overwhelmed and upset.

Drew McLellan:

Well, and that’s another great point is that, one of the great things about one-on-ones is the feedback can be more immediate, and so it has more relevancy because both of you remember what the heck happened.

Marcus Blankenship:

Right, Ken Blanchard’s book One Minute Manager’s, [inaudible 00:34:44] classic for a reason, talks about how to give feedback, correction, affirmation in the moment. But if you don’t have that ability to do it, and it’s not always the right time, having a weekly one-on-one ensures that the feedback never gets older than a week.

Drew McLellan:

Yep, absolutely, absolutely. So this has been fascinating and you I, I feel like we just have scratched the surface, but if owners are listening to us and they are like, okay, all right, all right, all right, I get it, I got to do this. If they’re doing the experiment, should they do it with everybody, should they do it with just maybe department heads, how can they ease into this?

Marcus Blankenship:

I think that doing it with the people that they directly manage, so if you’ve got department heads, if you’ve got five people across your company that work for you, start by doing it with them. We as the owners need to model behavior and go first. So I don’t like the idea of you telling your department heads, okay, you guys go set up one-on-ones, and get going and Marcus said, and Drew said, don’t ever skip them because that’s the worst. So I expect you to do that, I am super busy though, and so I’ll get to mind with yours, we’ll do ours when we can.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. Right, exactly, right.

Marcus Blankenship:

That would be the wrong thing. So yeah. Do them with the people, remember leader-member exchange, again, you can look it up on Wikipedia, lots of science here, it’s the direct supervisor relationship that matters. So the people you’re supervising are the people that matters to the most. So I would say set them up with your department heads, try it for a few weeks, have candid conversations about what kind of topics and content work best in your one-on-one meeting. I have a one-on-one framework guide, I’m have happy to give you as a PDF that can go along with the podcast, Drew, if that’s helpful.

Drew McLellan:

That’d be great, we’ll put it with the show notes.

Marcus Blankenship:

Yeah. And use it as a starting point. It’s there, not to say this is the ultimate one-on-one framework, but frankly, this set of topics is a good start. And if all you did was spend 10 minutes on each one, at a high level basically, you’re going to make sure they walk away with the right priorities, you’re going to give feedback, get feedback, talk about shared action items and meeting nodes. And frankly, you’re going to have some just chit-chat about their families and them and their career and things like that. You’re going to want to customize these depending on the level the person you’re having them with is at. So for example, if you’re having them with your art director, who’s managing a team of seven designers, you’re going to want to have a different conversation than if the art director has the one-on-ones with the designers. It’s at a higher level, and it’s probably actually a little bit more honest, not sure exactly, but the whole thing here is you’re going to want to create unique relationships through these one-on-one practices.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah. And when you think about it, for most owners, their direct reports are people who are driving the business. And so to your point, if the science and the studies tell us that this is a way to build a team, to keep a team intact, to keep an employee satisfied and staying for a long time, that gets back to the very first thing we talked about is, wow, this isn’t making me money, well, actually a stable team, I can speak from experience, is exactly what makes an agency money. And so this is important for agency owners to do.

Marcus Blankenship:

It is. I remember one time I had a client pushing back on our prices and he was like, I could just go hire a team of contractors and pay them all far less than you want from an hourly rate perspective. And I said, well, that’s why you’re going to pay me because I’ve built a team that knows how to work together, I’ve built a team that knows how to work within a process that everyone joyfully delivers on time and in budget, and that’s the magic of hiring me. And if you don’t like it, go get your contractors and good luck.

Drew McLellan:

Right, that’s okay, right.

Marcus Blankenship:

Yeah.

Drew McLellan:

Absolutely, absolutely. This has been awesome. Thank you so much for your time, thanks for sharing your expertise. If folks want to track you down, learn more about you, I know you do some specific things with agency folks, how do they learn all about that?

Marcus Blankenship:

Yeah, my website is marcusblankenship.com. I just released a book called Seven Habits that Ruin your Technical Team on Leanpub. And you can find it on my website as well. I have individual sort of ownership, coaching opportunities, if you want to work privately. And I also have agency owner mentoring groups where you’re in a small group of no more than five people, and we talk about everything relating to making an agency that you actually want to go to work at every day.

Drew McLellan:

Yeah, which is really, if you’re going to take the risk of owning an agency, you sure better go in there every day.

Marcus Blankenship:

Exactly.

Drew McLellan:

Hey, this has been great. I wish we could talk for another couple hours, but I know you have important clients to take care of, and so I want to be respectful of your time, so thank you very much for spending the time with me today and for sharing these best practices.

Marcus Blankenship:

Thank you so much for having me on, Drew.

Drew McLellan:

You bet. Hey everybody, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. I will be back next week with another guest who is going to share their expertise and help you build an agency that is bigger and better and stronger and serving you and your family and your team and your clients in a way that you are proud of and that you can make some good money at, because again, it’s your house on the line, so I want to make sure that this is a venture well worth you doing. In the meantime, if you’re trying to track me down, you know it’s just [email protected]. Otherwise, I will see you next week.

Speaker 1:

That’s all for this episode of Build a Better Agency. Be sure to visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to learn more about our workshops and other ways we serve small to mid-sized agencies. While you’re there, sign up for our e-newsletter, grab our free ebook and check out the blog, growing a bigger, better agency that makes more money attracts bigger clients and doesn’t consume your life as possible, here on Build a Better Agency.