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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.  

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Do your employees trust you and do you care?

As we struggle to find and keep great employees, we need to do a quick self- assessment. Are you creating an environment that breeds trust and connection among your team? Especially with you and your leadership team? MediaPost asked me to explore how agencies can create a culture of trust and connection and I’d love your thoughts on my recommendations on the topic. So, how do you find out if your environment is one of trust and connection?  You ask.  We have built an assessment tool that will help you measure the health of your agency in five key areas - account service, finance, Bizdev, staff management, and agency owner happiness. We're aggregating a large number of agency owner participants so we can come back to you this summer with a comparative analysis of where agencies ranked on these issues. And so you can compare your rankings with other agencies. All you need to do to take the assessment is click here. Just a few minutes of your time and you will get your results as well as a follow-up email with your results.  Later this summer I will be letting you know that we're going to do a webinar where we will walk you through the results and you can compare yourself to everybody else and see how you're doing.

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Are your employees stale?

Many agencies are struggling with what I have termed “stale employees.” These are seasoned pros who have probably been with your agency for a long time. They were incredibly talented and valuable back in the day, but their skills have not evolved as your agency and the marketplace have. Odds are, they’re someone who has stuck by you through thick and thin as your agency has gone through its ups and downs. Which is why you’re ignoring the issue. But the truth is — this employee is typically one of your more expensive salaries and they are contributing less and less. Not only is this team member costing you money but odds are, they’re going to cost you some of your most valuable employees too. American Express’s Open Forum asked me to dig into the issue and offer some solutions. If you’ve dealt with a stale employee — I’d love to hear how you resolved it.

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Four Ways Mentoring Employees Leads to Company Growth

Regardless of the type of business you own, your staff is your greatest asset. It’s crucial that you’re getting the most from your employees, and you do this by actively mentoring employees on your stellar team to produce growth for your company. This growth-centric mentorship isn’t casual or sporadic. In fact, at least 20% of your time should be devoted to mentoring employees. It’s a purposeful weekly meeting scheduled by, prepared for and owned by the employee. The meetings don’t have to be long, but they’re the best opportunity for employees to discuss their goals, get feedback and present their ideas. As their supervisor, it’s your opportunity to encourage and ask questions to push them to do their best work. Bestselling author and keynote speaker Mitch Matthews -- who’s worked with organizations like NASA, Walt Disney and Principal Financial Group -- is a big advocate of what he calls “project-specific mentoring.” He says, “Project-specific mentoring is where you identify someone in your organization that you really want to invest in. So you look for a specific project where you give them more autonomy, more ownership.” He also says mentoring allows for limited risk and fast learning: “At the same time, it also increases the sense of ownership and increases the loyalty, and it increases engagement.” Mentoring employees to ensure growth An increased sense of ownership, loyalty, and engagement leads to a successful mentorship program, which in turn ensures growth. You achieve this by making these one-on-one mentorship meetings, allowing you to ask the best questions, demonstrate how you think through business challenges, and show each employee that he or she is a priority. Because these meetings are individual, train midlevel managers and department heads to be mentors, too. Mentoring [...]

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Four Questions To Ask Before You Think About Adding A Minority Partner

Agency owners want to reward their best employees and prevent them from leaving. Obviously, the best way to do both is to offer equity or to become a minority partner in the agency, right? Not so fast. Crafting a pair of golden handcuffs for a model employee sounds like a great idea, but when those handcuffs are forged from the company’s own foundation, the proposition gets dicey. A model employee might be vital to the agency’s success, but initiating the transition from worker to owner can have far-reaching consequences. In fact, the world watched it happen two years ago: Former McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson stepped down after the company saw its worst U.S. sales slump in more than 10 years. Not surprisingly, Thompson happened to be the poster child of an employee-turned-owner. Starting in 1990, he worked his way up the fast food chain’s echelons from project manager to staff director to regional manager and, eventually, to CEO. As an agency owner who’s searched for a successor myself, I’ve seen the pitfalls. Before taking the leap to take on a minority partner, ask yourself the following: 1. What is a minority partner, really? Minority partners are a myth. If you offer someone part of your business, that person will act like a fellow owner — and not a minority one. He won’t think in terms of percentage of ownership, but in terms of haves and have-nots. In his mind, even a sliver of ownership puts him in the “haves” camp, and he carries all honors and benefits thereof. In some cases, that means the minority partner brings great ideas that drive the agency to new heights. In others, he slows down operations and starts fights [...]

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How to Make Metrics Relevant for Creative Teams

As a marketing executive, you understand that metrics matter. When your creative teams work together on metric-oriented goals, you can serve your clients better, reduce mistakes and miscues, and maximize every dollar spent. Unfortunately, while you may love metrics, odds are your creative staff doesn't. At least, not yet. One reason creatives don't pay attention to company metrics is because they don't understand how they directly influence those results. Inherently, people want their work to carry significance, and they can become disheartened when a company's most important goals don't seem to correlate with the work they do each day. In the end, no one wants to feel like a member of the "B team." This is especially true for creatives, whose work is often forward-facing and publicly representative of a brand or company but disconnected from the bottom line. Part of making creative team members understand why metrics matter is helping them understand their role in achieving metrics-based goals. Follow these three tips to demonstrate how metrics are relevant to everyone in the company: Only focus on metrics that actually matter Whatever you do, do not make metrics the flavor of the month. Asking people to focus on a different metric each month is extremely demotivating. It teaches people to disregard current metrics because they're only 29 days away from a different one. Instead, identify two to four key metrics to regularly track as a core part of operational assessment. Don't bog anyone down with an overload of data that isn't important; just focus team efforts on metrics that matter and demonstrate their importance by offering incentives for achieving or exceeding these goals. Make it relevant If you want metrics to be a focus for [...]

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How To Give Every Employee A Personal Stake In Your Company

If you’re a business owner, you want your employees to feel as personally invested in the company as you do–but you probably know that isn’t likely. Still, your management strategy can have a huge impact on how deeply invested your employees feel in the work you do together. And getting everyone on your team to think and feel as passionately as you do isn’t as hard as it sounds. All Hands on Deck As an owner, your business is your baby. You watch over it obsessively. You make choices based solely on what’s best for it, even if that means pain in the short term. But I’ve been through the battles of running a business for 30 years, working with baby boomers and millennials, fax machines and iPhones. The most pervasive lesson learned through all those years was simple: Running a business is not a one-person job. You have to share the load. Teach your team that when the company does well, everyone does well. If you try to do everything, not only will you exhaust yourself, but you’ll risk your staff–either intentionally or accidentally–pulling in the other direction. If it begins to look like the boss can handle everything, no one else will feel their own work is mission-critical. They’ll feel unimportant, and your whole team’s enthusiasm and investment will flag. Instead, make it known that you all share the same objectives, and it takes every single person’s contribution in order to achieve them. Driving the Business Forward Employees often want to take more personal ownership for the companies they work for, but leaders don’t usually have the time and energy to teach their entire staff what it takes to run a successful business–let [...]

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Don’t Be Mad About Promoting Mad Men (or Women)

The expression “those who can’t do, teach” is well known for good reason. But many business leaders nevertheless assume that top-performing employees are automatically good at managing and teaching their skills to others. The consequences of this assumption can be troubling, especially in today’s advertising  or  business. It’s perfectly understandable — even desirable — to want to reward exceptional workers, but owners and managers often believe that the only way they can reward employees is by promoting them to supervisory roles. This is not only not true, it is dangerous thinking. Simply put, leadership requires a completely different skill set than most people use in performance positions. As a result, employees who perform the best aren’t automatically good at training or supervising other people in their areas. Indeed, without training, mentoring and ongoing coaching, the practice of rewarding top performers with leadership roles rarely has a happy ending. Keep in mind that promotions typically remove employees from jobs at which they thrived, while exposing the entire company to their hidden shortcomings. Someone whose strength is putting clients at ease might not be assertive enough to lead a team. Promoting this person, meanwhile, risks creating a void in client relations that others can’t fill. A poorly executed promotion also tends to drive talent away. After all, when skilled people aren’t successful in new positions, they don’t typically want to stick around. The above is true for all industries. But today’s marketing environment makes it especially treacherous to move ad agency people around without solid planning. It has always taken time for agency employees to master their craft. But the rise of tech- and data-driven strategies is constantly adding new levels of complexity to our work. These complexities [...]

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Building Loyalty Within An Agency

In May 2016, the New York attorney general filed a lawsuit against Domino’s for underpaying workers at least $565,000 at 10 of its New York stores. The pizza chain urged franchisees to use its PULSE computer system — even though executives knew the system had been under-calculating gross wages for years. Long story short, Domino’s opted not to fix the flaw, instead labeling it a low-priority issue. In doing so, Domino’s kept vital information from employees. Not only did employees lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Domino’s also lost employees’ trust. Communicate Openly for Success In today’s workforce, in which employees are motivated by company inclusivity and identifying with employer values, successful agencies are transparent with employees. They clearly define annual goals and aspirations with team members. With measurable milestones set, agencies must communicate regularly to ensure everyone stays informed, motivated, and excited about their work and the agency as a whole. It’s not enough to distribute the company Kool-Aid; getting employees to drink it requires you to authentically express — face-to-face — why you believe in your agency and what end goals it will achieve. Passion and charisma are contagious. Help your team members understand what drives you, and they will enthusiastically commit. Some issues like salaries are meant to be kept private, but others — like the financial state of your business — should be shared. When employees don’t have access to financial data, they miss out on critical facts like company profitability or loss, cash flow, and gross margin comparisons with direct competitors. Teams without this valuable information are limited, which can result in poor decision-making. Share your numbers with your employees to show that you trust and value them. Building Loyalty [...]

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Hey Agency Owner — are you mentoring for growth?

Agency owners are really good at a lot of things.  Unfortunately, mentoring employees for growth is often not one of them. I get it -- you want self starters. You don't have time to micromanage people. You want someone who can think/behave like an owner. You know how you get employees like that? You create them. You hire smart people and then you teach them how to drive your agency's growth, your client's confidence and your AGI.  None of that happens by accident. It's why you should be spending 20% of your time actively mentoring your team.  So what does that look like? Everyone on your staff should have a weekly (yes weekly) one on one meeting with their supervisor. So as an agency owner -- you'd meet with your direct reports weekly.  Here's what mentoring employees should look like: The employee owns the meeting.  They schedule it and re-schedule it if necessary.  If you're traveling -- do it by phone or Skype.  The employee is expected to come to the meeting prepared.  Use a form that outlines how the conversation should go -- and they should have it completed in advance and bring you a copy and one for themselves.  (Email me if you want to see a sample) The meeting is 20-30 minutes long and focuses on quarterly goals and big picture progress -- not a traffic meeting.  This is their opportunity to pick your brain, run ideas past you, and get your feedback.  It's your opportunity to coach, ask tough questions and encourage them. This aligned beautifully with the EOS process or any system where you as an agency, department or individual are working on quarterly goals. This is your chance to hold [...]

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5 Mistakes that cost agency owners money.

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