For greater accountability in your agency, throw out your job descriptions. The average job description is prescriptive and emphasizes activities over outcomes. When we prescribe specific activities to a role, we set an expectation for our people to keep to those activities. This can restrict their sense of freedom to evolve how they work, which […]
Why Your Agency Creatives Hate Your Deadlines
Some agencies tell me they have an accountability problem– that creatives don’t complete their work by the deadline a PM assigned. What these agencies are really describing is … … a management-style problem. The example I see most often is when traffic or project managers instruct creatives on what to work on down to the […]
4 Causes of Bad Meetings, and How to Fix Them
“Too many meetings! No time to get any actual work done.” I hear this from agency staff quite often. This typically points back to 4 causes… 1. Project-based team assignments. When you assign people to projects, each project will have its own series of duplicative meetings. If you instead assign projects to cross-functional fixed teams, […]
Why and How to Redesign Your Agency’s Organizational Structure
Every agency’s organizational structure and operating model are currently being stress tested. Over this past year, agencies quickly learned how to work in a remote or hybrid model. Many have also had to change their business model or adjust their core services to remain relevant in our current environment. And now, with new business coming […]
Five Hybrid Work Models and The Challenges and Implications For Agencies
What do we mean when we say a hybrid work model? As a simple definition, hybrid work is where employees of an organization can choose to do their job from different locations: home, the office, or anywhere. However, there are many ways to operationalize a hybrid model. If you were to ask ten agency principals what […]
Begin to Unlock the Strategic Value of Your Agency’s Organizational Structure
As a leader of a growth-focused agency, you should always be looking for new ways to improve performance — and even more so in the current economic climate. One impactful way to do this is by rethinking your organizational structure. In a year defined by unprecedented change, the agencies that have moved away from traditional […]
