TL;DR

• Leadership teams need to know and appreciate the work other departments do.
• This knowledge and appreciation unlock the ability to be proactive.
• Knowing what others are working on is easy, but appreciating their work is difficult.
• Acquihires are great for solving this.
• Owners should actively manage their leadership team by instituting: cross-functional workshops, leadership retreats, joint goal setting, transparent reporting, and individual check-ins.
• Another Promethean capacity update: 2024's full. LMK if you'd like help in the new year.
• For my U.S. readers, have a great Thanksgiving!

​

The Foundation of a Proactive Agency

Knowledge and appreciation are the foundation of a proactive agency.

I'm specifically focusing on leadership here since this is where it starts, but there's a ton more to the proactive conversation that I'll cover another time.

Through my agency consulting work, I do a TON of one-on-one interviews with agency leaders. A key question I ask is:

Does each leader know and appreciate the work the other leaders are doing?

Mostly, no, they don't.

This causes a ton of issues with misalignment, resentment, and the tug of resources away from functional groups based on misunderstanding.

It can cause an otherwise healthy firm to veer off course.

It's also a spot that's tough to work through once you're in it.

Let's take a deeper look at why this happens and how to solve it.

​

Knowledge & Appreciation

When leadership teams know and fully appreciate the work other leaders perform, it allows them to make better decisions for the entire organization.

Knowing is easy.

With things like leadership sync meetings, internal wikis, co-developed strategies, it’s easy to know what activities other parts of the organization are doing.

Appreciation is difficult.

Appreciation requires empathy.

To appreciate one another's work is to understand its importance and how it relates to the overall agency. Some actions are easy to misinterpret when you don’t have the full context. That misinterpretation can easily lead to a feeling of wasted resources, which snowballs into animosity.

A lack of appreciation can be seen everywhere, but it’s most prevalent in disciplines where attribution is difficult. Activities where the lines between action and result are blurry or nonexistent. Marketing tends to house a lot of these.

This is one of the reasons I love acquihires for building leadership teams. It’s tough to teach appreciation, but when someone’s tried to do everything before, they tend to develop at least a slight appreciation for other disciplines.

Beyond knowing and appreciating, we need to address incentives and management.

If leaders aren’t incentivized to act in the organization’s best interest, some won’t.

Unfortunately, it’s incredibly easy to go too far too fast with elaborate incentive structures that don’t do what they’re designed to. My best advice here is to keep the math simple and spend personal effort managing your leadership team and tracking their progress.

You absolutely don’t need to. I get a sizable chunk of client work from agency owners who don’t realize this or don’t want to.

However, shifting your mindset could save you a ton of time and about $75k in consulting fees.

​

If it's Important, Manage it Closely

My friend recently moved his family across the country.

He accepted a leadership role at a firm that needed a significant turnaround, and the stress he was under was apparent.

Move-in day came, and when the movers arrived, there was a huge misunderstanding about the services they paid for vs. what they received. My friend was understandably frustrated because he had told them one thing, but that didn’t get communicated to their people.

After commiserating about shared moving frustrations, I asked how many times he checked in on the move process to ensure what he asked for was being done.

Oof.

The thing is, I agree, he shouldn’t have to.

In an ideal world, we’d never need to repeat ourselves or check in on progress to ensure things are going as expected.

But, for something important, it’s worth it to manage closely.

​

Proactive Tactics

What's it mean to manage closely?

Here are some motions I've seen successful leadership teams employ to make sure they're all on the same page.

Cross-functional workshops - Half-day workshops where the key departments present their strategies and tactics. These should be held after the overall agency strategy is developed so each department has ample time to build out its part in it. Level these up by having each department include a "key challenges" section that serves as an open discussion on the top 1-3 challenges that department is facing. This only works when teams trust one another, so develop that first.

Leadership retreats - Offsite retreats focused on team-building and strategic planning. Please don't make these lame. They're a waste of time if they're lame. You don't want your leadership team bonding over how stupid the icebreakers were. Also, you shouldn't need icebreakers for your leadership team...

Joint goal setting - When you're developing your overall agency strategy, identify goals that require cross-functional collaboration and set shared KPIs. This can give leaders an incentive to work together on them, but be careful that it doesn't become a shift-the-blame situation when a goal isn't achieved.

Transparent reporting - Develop dashboards or reports accessible to all leaders, showing key metrics and project statuses. This increases transparency and allows leaders to see how everyone's efforts contribute to overall success. It also lets agency owners better track the progress of the whole agency.

Individual check-ins - As an agency owner, CEO, or President, have regular check-ins with your leaders individually. Ask them about their working relationships with other departments. Reward collaborative progress and remove blockers from any challenges. Regular is the keyword here.

When you integrate these activities into your agency's DNA, you create an environment where leaders not only understand each other's work but genuinely appreciate it.

This improves understanding, communication, relationships, and efficiency and makes it easier overall for teams to work together to solve challenges.

It helps build the agency's proactive muscle.

​

Build a Proactive Agency

Knowledge and appreciation allow agencies to be proactive.

It doesn’t matter what you “should” have to do. If it’s important, do what’s necessary to make it successful.

Even if that’s managing managers who shouldn’t need managing.

This is exactly the difference between being reactive vs. proactive.

Effective leaders provide guidance and support to ensure their teams succeed, even when working with experienced managers. By staying engaged and offering support when necessary, leaders can ensure their teams are aligned and empowered to deliver.

Being proactive starts at the top.

When it's done well, it helps everyone make better decisions for the whole and results in a more resilient agency.

Another Promethean capacity update: 2024's full. LMK if you'd like help in the new year.

-Nick