What do you want your team to feel?

Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from the heart of New York City. So we are staying right in Times Square. I love it, I love the energy. I love the chaos. I love all the people watching. But I was noticing today all of the messaging that happens in Times Square. And it's really hard when you are just it's just this cacophony of billboards and messages and people shouting and holding signs and a lot of signage in the stores. It's really hard to find the message because there are so many messages.

And I was thinking that it's not unlike some of our state of the agency meetings or some of our all-team meetings that we have so much to say to the team because we don't get them together all that often. We have so much to say and we go through our agenda, but we don't really stop and think about, all right, when this is over, what's the one big takeaway I want my team to take? Do I want them to think, boy, we gotta push hard because it's the fourth quarter and we have a gap between where we're at and our final goal. Do I want them to feel gratitude that I feel for them and the way they're taking care of our clients? Do I want them to be excited because we've landed a bunch of new business, and the next year is going to be crazy good? Do I want them to feel like we are in a learning moment with AI and all the other things, and that we're proud of how people are digging in and learning and teaching each other. Like what, what's the big takeaway that I want them to feel – not to know but to feel. I want them to walk away feeling what? Confident, excited, fired up, inspired, a kick in the pants. Like, what do I want them to walk away with?

And then how do I bookend all the stuff we have to do. We have to celebrate the birthdays, and we have to give an update about somebody who's going on maternity leave, or we have to talk about what's happening on the biz dev front. Whatever it is, think about how do you want to bookend the facts? How do you bookend the facts with feelings so that you are really clear about, hey, before we get into the nitty gritty, here's the message. Whatever it is. Again, gratitude or kick in the pants or whatever it may be. And then at the end, now that we've gone through the nitty gritty, I just want to remind you gratitude, kick in the pants. Again whatever it is.

We are, as agency owners and leaders, we are the messenger. We are the ones who set the tone and the tenor of how people are feeling about working in the agency. And I don't think we spend enough time thinking about how we want to sort of kick off those kind of meetings and how we want them to walk away from those meetings. What do we want them to know? And more importantly, what do we want them to feel?So before your next all-team meeting, think carefully about, in all the chaos of all the messages you have to deliver because you got 30 minutes or an hour or 90 minutes of stuff to tell them. But how do you bookend that with how you want them to feel?

All right? Give that some thought.

I'll see you next week.