There are five words you need to truly understand to operate your agency effectively.
They are: leadership, management, accountability, responsibility, and authority.
I’ll explain why each of these matters and how you can integrate that knowledge into running your own firm a bit later in this week’s newsletter, but first let’s look at what Jen has rounded up for us this week.
— Chip Griffin, SAGA Founder
Weekly Roundup
Below are some articles, blog posts, podcasts, and videos that we came across during the past week or so that provide useful perspective and information for PR and marketing agency owners. While we don’t necessarily endorse all of the views expressed in these links, we think they are worth your time.
— Jen Griffin, SAGA Community Manager
Articles & Blog Posts
- We’re Better than this Value Washing (Punctuation)
- What’s the true cost of waiting to become your ‘Future CEO’ self? (Anchor Advisors)
Podcast Episodes
- How to Prepare for a Bot-Created Crisis (Spin Sucks)
- Navigating the Noise: A PR Pro’s Guide to Combating Misinformation (Solo PR Pro)
- Scaling Up Without Burnout, with Jesse Gilmore (The Innovative Agency)
- More Than New: Unlocking Growth From Your Agency’s Existing Assets (The Digital Agency Growth Podcast)
- Leah Leaves, Alderaan Operations Solutions – Break the Bottleneck: How Operators Reduce Burnout and Unlock Scale (Agency Bytes)
Video
AI in focus
- Is Olivia Brown the Tilly Norwood of PR? (For Immediate Release)
- Building Trust at Scale in the Age of AI, with Stephen Woessner (The Agency Profit Podcast)
5 words critical to agency management success (part 1)
If you want to step up your game and get the most from your agency, there are five words that I suggest you get to know well.
More than words, they are concepts that you need to understand to improve your effectiveness and that of your team members.
This week I’m going to cover the first two: leadership and management.
Next week I’ll conclude with the other three: accountability, responsibility, and authority.
Leadership
I often get asked by agency owners why employees don’t care enough about the job they do or the overall success of the agency.
Part of this is because owners and employees are fundamentally different, and it isn’t reasonable to expect that they have the same level of commitment as you do.
But you can get closer to that ideal with good leadership.
That’s different from management — which we will touch on next — because it is more about creating the atmosphere and culture for success rather than individual processes.
To be an successful leader, you need to communicate effectively to your team and help them understand where you are trying to go and what you are trying to accomplish.
Your team needs to want to support you and the agency. The fact that you sign their paychecks isn’t nearly enough.
They need to trust you and believe in the goals that you set.
It also means you need to be willing and able to explain the why behind what you’re doing (and this is a lesson I have learned the hard way over the years, including after one team meeting in my early years when a business partner pulled me aside to chastise me after I answered “because I said so” to a team member who asked why we were doing something).
The best leaders aren’t authoritarians who demand results from their teams. The best leaders inspire their teams to want to be successful, both individually and as a group.
Management
Now for the word that perhaps gets misused and misunderstood the most: management.
New managers — including the younger version of me — thought that being a manager meant telling people what to do, setting deadlines, and demanding to know what’s overdue or incomplete.
The truth is that describes a to-do app better than a manager.
Good managers benefit from being leaders, but the two are not as intertwined as you might imagine.
Where leadership focuses on the 30,000 foot view, management necessarily gets more into the weeds.
Effective management relies on understanding the needs of the organization and the resources available to get the best possible results.
In an agency, managers must produce results for both the firm and its clients — neglect one or the other and it will come back to bite you.
As an owner, you need to practice good management yourself, but you also need to help your team members become better managers.
You need to set reasonable goals, prioritize activity effectively, and learn how (and when) to intervene versus giving team members the latitude to accomplish the objectives you have set in their own way.
Next week, I will explore the three words that fuel better management: accountability, responsibility, and authority.
Once you understand all five of these words, you’ll be well positioned to elevate the success of your own agency and get the most from your team.
