Are You Really Being Candid?
Want to be a successful agency owner? One of the skills you need in your toolbox is the ability to have difficult conversations with candor and clarity.
Leadership coaching (with or without potential succession options)
Your leadership-level employees are the backbone of your agency. Ideally, they allow you to step away from the day-to-day and actually do your job. They also free you up to travel without being chained to your phone. And for some of you – they’re literally your future in terms of selling your agency someday down the road. But how do you get them to that level? Moving from an employee to a leader is a journey and most employees need a guide to make that transition. It’s certainly some skills learning but even more than that, it’s about: Vision for their own growth, their department’s growth, and the agency’s evolution The ability to inspire and lead The ability to grow and nurture talent Clarity of their role and how they can contribute to the agency’s success Confidence to lead Odds are your leadership-level employees are very good at their core competencies. But making the leap to leading is all about the soft skills. Our leadership-level one-on-one coaching helps you assess whether your employee can level up to be the leader you want them to be and if that’s the case – be their Sherpa. Here’s how it works: We meet with the agency owner to understand the vision and hope you have for the employee We meet with the employee to explore their goals and vision for their future We run the employee through our agency-specific assessments to measure their behaviors, motivations, and competencies. We look at their leadership potential (through the assessment) We identify the key growth areas for the employee to get them ready to fully embrace their leadership role and work with the employee to help create action plans to fill in [...]
Building Trust When Faced with Ambiguity
Navigating ambiguity is a primary concern for any leader. When the world is changing around us at an unprecedented rate, even the best leaders may struggle to set priorities, communicate clearly, and drive the vision. Nothing splinters clarity like the urgency of our recent global pandemic, and when ambiguity goes unchecked for many months, trust in leadership will crater. In this uncertain climate, it has never been more important for businesses to build trust. Without a clear plan, employees get confused, lose productivity, and feel less committed to the company and to their morals. In the absence of clear expectations, trust between leaders and team members inevitably breaks down. Leadership teams that don’t achieve alignment may end up executing entirely disconnected visions. This leads to more ambiguity, loss of trust, and a never-ending downward spiral. Trust is the antidote to uncertainty. An explicit focus on building trust is the only way to successfully lead through ambiguity. Here are four ways to tackle ambiguity by actively building trust: Share “the Why” So often on a demanding project, communication is the first thing on the chopping block, sacrificed to the demands of speed and deadlines. Urgency serves as justification for not taking time to communicate critical information. One of the first to go tends to be “the why.” In other words, why are you making one choice over another? Why are you taking one person off of the project and leaving the team to pick up slack, for example? When people don’t understand the rationale behind their leader’s actions, trust goes out the window. In the absence of a clear explanation, people will always gravitate toward the most negative possible interpretation. Not only will trust go down, [...]
The Hands, Head and Heart Model
Our goal as leaders is to help steer our team, motivate them when times get tough, and achieve the objectives and goals we’ve identified for the term. To do this well we consult with our clients on how to create Clarity, Alignment, and Purpose. Clarity of the vision. Alignment to make sure we’re all on the same page. And Purpose to understand how what we do matters. Purpose tends to be the missing link for a great many organizations and leaders. (Especially during a particularly challenging period of time. Our purpose gets lost in the stress.) Yet, when employees understand the purpose behind their work -- as in, why what they do matters -- you can unlock another level of effort, effectiveness, and efficiency that wasn’t there before. The difference between hands, head and heart. When you have someone’s hands, they’re willing to do the work and will achieve some level of productivity. Companies that have built great processes into their work can achieve their goals with just their employee’s hands. The challenge is, they may not be putting their “all” into the work they do and they’re definitely not thinking about how to make the process better. When you have someone’s head, they’re not only doing the work well, but they’re thinking about how they could do it better. An employee who is engaged at the “head” level will put more mental energy into the work they do and find different, better and more efficient ways of working. You’ll achieve productivity and profitability with a group of employees that use their heads, but there’s another level you can strive to achieve. At the ‘heart’ level, you’ve engaged an employee in such a way that [...]
How clear is your vision?
Begin to think about how would you articulate this vision for your future, and then how do you share it with your team to get them excited to help you get there?
How to become a more effective agency leader with Elise Mitchell
Many of us have earned our MBAs in leadership over this past year. As we wrap up 2020, we have some ground to make up and we can’t do that alone. We need to inspire our teammates to rise to the occasion, overcome their personal speed bumps, and build momentum as we drive to the end of the year. Elise Mitchell’s experience running agencies and coaching business owners provides actionable clarity on how we get there. […]
Employee Tenure
Every agency owner dreads when a valued employee gives notice. But it's an inevitable part of our business model. What is a reasonable tenure you should hope to get from each employee?
Why Good Writing Matters — and 4 Ways to Teach It to Your Team
In a time of emoticons, abbreviations, and 140 character-count replies, a three-paragraph email is the equivalent of “War and Peace.” But communication is a vital part of office life, whether you’re a lab technician sharing results or a human resources staffer announcing a new wellness program. There’s a simple way to guarantee that miscommunications happen as infrequently as possible on your team: ensure every person has good writing skills. Writing Right Clarity is vital to the business world. But in a world that operates at a faster and faster pace, brevity is key. Why write an email when a short text message suffices? There are many reasons. It’s easy to misunderstand a message that’s hastily or poorly composed. It’s even easier to read the wrong intention in a short email that doesn’t provide the right emotional context. Every member of your team needs to communicate precisely and concisely — in writing and face-to-face. Mastering the Message Every office tries to be timely and efficient. Most of them do it at the cost of context and clarity. When you’re pressed for time, the last thing you want to do is over-explain to your client or co-worker. A quick note might actually cause more problems than solve them. Are you neutral or irritated? Is this urgent or not? Mistakes and misunderstandings suggest that you aren’t well-educated, don’t care about your client’s project, or lack the skills to complete it capably. That’s why poorly written emails affect communications inside your office and customers’ perceptions of your business. That’s not an impression you want to communicate to your customers or your employees to communicate to each other. Here are four ways to build a team that communicates clearly: 1. [...]
How to Intentionally Build Your Company Culture (Rather Than Leave It to Chance)
Culture is like a hairstyle: Everyone has one, even if they’re bald. You can either pursue a style that accurately reflects your personality, or you can pretend it doesn’t matter and end up looking like Edward Scissorhands. If you haven’t been actively focused on your company culture, it can be hard to see clearly. It’s the same reason you don’t understand the quirks of your family when you’re a kid, but as an adult, you can look back on them with clarity. Whether you see it or not, company culture is a big deal for several reasons. 1. Employee satisfaction. An overwhelming number of statistics reveal the negative consequences of low employee engagement. Dissatisfied workers lead to greater absenteeism, lower productivity and higher turnover rates. If your employees are dissatisfied or bored at work, you have a serious problem. 2. Financial performance. Your culture is apparent to outsiders you interact with (vendors, customers, business partners, etc.), and no one wants to work with a negative company. It’s hard to communicate a positive identity when negative things are happening in your organization. For example, GitHub’s alpha-male culture apparently forced a female employee to quit. The PR and financial nightmare that ensued showed outsiders that it’s a bad place to work. A positive culture attracts outsiders while creating excited employees who advocate for the company. Culture increases productivity and boosts your image to improve financial performance. 3. Personal benefits. One of the privileges of running a business is influencing how it’s run. You don’t get to separate yourself from the culture you create: You suffer or enjoy whatever environment develops. Additionally, your personal values and character are reflected by your business, so make that image accurate. Taking charge [...]
What Makes an Effective Leader
Organizations that don’t have a set of guiding principles find themselves struggling to be consistent and to always be moving towards their bigger picture goals. A lack of defined expectations also makes it difficult for your team to understand what makes an effective leader. If you don’t give them a sense of what the company values and how you expect your leaders to behave – they have to make it up as they go along. Those challenges become even more pronounced in times of rapid change. And if there’s anything you know for sure about our industry – it’s that we are experiencing a state of constant change. My podcast guest John Rossman had a front row seat in being one of the co-creators of the leadership principles that have steered one of the biggest titans of industry, Amazon. They too exist in an industry that doesn’t even begin to resemble itself from a decade ago! Since he left Amazon, John has been using what he learned to help clients define and live by their own guiding principles. He also wrote the book, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles Behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company. In our conversation, John talks about some of the most critical of Amazon’s principles and how they apply to agencies today: What makes an effective leader Why you need to get really clear on what your future looks like John’s favorite Amazon leadership principles Why you need to be proactive and take action The importance of prioritizing getting to the right answer over getting along Structuring interviews so you find the employees that are actually willing to grow and improve Amazon’s “think big” and why it’s all about experimentation John’s [...]
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