Why Leadership Training Is The Next Best Thing for Us.
Investing in your people truly pays off.
On a beautiful Tuesday afternoon I sat in our conference room with three of the most seasoned leaders in our agency. I felt like it was Groundhog Day. We were discussing our organization chart, our roles and who was supposed to be doing what.
I was very frustrated.
Before I continue, let’s back up a little. We are Struck — an insight-forward creative agency with offices in Salt Lake City, Portland, and Los Angeles. It’s a simple mantra Be Greater Than (b>) that drives us forward. As a part of this we operate as a flat organization, with few levels of middle management between employees and the executive team.
This was our typical ‘once-a-year’ conversation. As an outcome of one of these same conversations a few years back, we had created a multi-disciplinary structure. And it had worked. Our output for our clients had improved and had become more strategic. Our inter-office collaboration and employee satisfaction had become stronger. Our agency profitability was finally much healthier. And, last we checked, employees seemed pretty happy.
So what was the problem this time? Why were we tinkering with something that wasn’t broken?
We recently discovered that deadlines were being missed and accountability was unclear. This is when the discussion about an organizational chart occurred.
Up until this point, we had successfully promoted autonomy–creative directors “owned” the clients and worked with strategists and account managers to truly solve our clients’ problems. But, as we realized on that sunny afternoon in the conference room, we had not put enough emphasis on how they could coach and motivate others.
No one knew who they reported to–at least when it came to the creative team. In an agency with a flat organizational structure, the real problem here was that the leaders themselves didn’t know who they were meant to manage. In lieu of a traditional top-down business structure, it was necessary that we provided our leaders with the skills they would need to lead and motivate their teams.
We realized that our problem wasn’t our structure after all. Our problem was that we had not provided any leadership training to our leaders.
This realization hit home, and it carried a lot of significance because of its connection to the bottom line. If our employees do not feel satisfied with the tools they have been provided to complete the tasks at hand, they’ll become unhappy. And unhappy employees–those who do not feel autonomy, mastery and recognition–will eventually leave. Turn-over is expensive. It typically takes 6 months to get a new employee up-and-running at a full, productive speed.
I have heard more than one client express dismay when even non-key personnel had left. Clients usually do not like losing members of their team. In the bottom line, employee and client satisfaction are closely related — both lead to growth. We get more from our leaders when everyone is happy and it shows.
There is plenty of competition for our talent, from other bigger agencies to start-ups and everything in between. All we have to differentiate ourselves is our brand and the promotion of a culture of training and empowerment.
For me, this means putting more energy into training as our brand and culture are well-defined. In our efforts to provide leadership training to our leaders, we have also now found that it can be incredibly empowering to encourage our leaders to think about the best way to spend their own training budgets.
All digital agencies are intrinsically born out of the principle of innovation. The idea that we will throw away all the rules and make up our own, espouse the latest trends and then fiddle with them. And, the fundamental composition of a digital agency is not so much the ability to create a website, app or advertising campaign, as it is an ideology of experimentation.
Because of this spirit of experimentation, when it comes to the business side of our business, we believe in the idea of bottom-up leadership. We believe in this idea of a flat organization, where everyone is empowered to make the right decisions.
In order for this model to be successful, we have to continually check-in and ask ourselves: do we actually train, coach and mentor our leaders to, in turn, train and coach the next generation of leaders?
Looking for more insights, ramblings, musings and other thoughts from Struck? Follow our Greater Than collection.
