Many of you know that I don’t love annual performance reviews. I prefer when managers provide ongoing feedback to their team members throughout the year rather than bottling it all up for a formal session.
But there’s a fine line between providing that regular feedback and coaching that can easily cross over into micromanagement — and that’s something I don’t like to see either.
Striking that balance comes, in part, with experience. I can tell you that I wasn’t very good at it myself in the beginning.
Of course, the worst is when you micromanage without providing actionable feedback so an employee can improve for the future.
Later in this week’s newsletter, I’ll talk about some ways that you can become a better manager and mentor without doing (or redoing) the job of one of your employees.
But first let’s take a look at what resources Jen unearthed for you this week.
— Chip Griffin, SAGA Founder
Upcoming Events
- Roundtable: Growing your agency as a reluctant self-promoter (June 6)
- Webinar: Don’t repeat my biggest mistakes as an agency owner (June 12)
- Open Office Hours for Agency Owners (June 25)
Latest podcasts from SAGA
- Setting honest expectations for your agency employees from the start (Agency Leadership Podcast)
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
- An Agency Guide to New Employee Onboarding (+ Checklist) (AgencyAnalytics)
- It’s Scary at the Top | Overcoming Fear as a Leader (Bureau of Digital)
- So You Want To Write A Book? (Punctuation)
- The Enduring Value of Recognition In Creative Industries (Spin Sucks)
Podcast Episodes
- Finding Balance And Minimizing Burnout In A Chaotic World (That Solo Life)
- How to Design the Perfect Client Experience with Joey Tackett (The Agency Profit Podcast)
- How to Craft Visual Narrative, with Rubi Zetino (The Personal Brand Business Show)
- How to Build a Repeatable New Business Process for your Agency Without Spam or Burnout (The Digital Agency Growth Podcast)
- Disruption, leadership, and how to let go and delegate – with Charlene Li (The Digital Agency Show)
- Empowering Teams by Leading With Impact, with Atiba de Souza (The Innovative Agency)
Videos
- How Do You Qualify If You Asked For The Meeting? (Win Without Pitching)
- 3 More Reasons Biz Dev Efforts Fail In Small And Mid-Sized Ad Agencies (RSW/US)
AI in Focus
- Optimizing Content for Generative Search, AI, and SEO (Spin Sucks)
- AI is changing how managers manage (For Immediate Release)
Providing regular feedback without micromanaging
If you take my advice to provide ongoing feedback to your team members, how do you do that without micromanaging (or at least appearing to micromanage)?
First, of course, you need to buy into my notion that annual performance reviews shouldn’t generally raise any new issues. Instead, you should communicate what’s working and what’s not during your weekly 1:1 meetings with your direct reports.
You need to remember that your role as a manager isn’t to be a taskmaster, handing out assignments and demanding accountability.
Your most important role as a manager is to coach and mentor your team members to get the most out of them. You need to remove obstacles and help them to grow.
Assuming you’re still with me, how can you do that without hovering and getting so deep into the weeds with an employee that you are essentially just duplicating their effort?
It starts with always asking yourself the question “does it really matter?” before you provide feedback to a team member.
I don’t mean this as some broad philosophical examination, but rather a practical one. If you didn’t provide a specific piece of feedback or make a particular edit would the outcome be measurably different?
As managers, we should listen more and speak less. When we do speak, it carries greater weight if we aren’t spewing out a constant stream of corrections, revisions, and admonitions.
Sometimes an accumulation of small things that don’t matter on their own may rise to the level that needs addressing. That’s fine, but do it in a big picture frame rather than itemizing each error and omission.
Even with individual items that do matter, consider how you communicate the need for a different approach. Think of yourself in this moment as a coach who is providing guidance rather than a substitute player who is actually participating.
For example, if you are reviewing a draft press release or proposal, you should strongly consider providing comments rather than marking up the document directly. Too often I see managers with a heavy editing hand get worse results from employees since they figure if there’s going to be a lot of red ink anyway they might as well put in less effort to get to that point.
That’s why it is just as important to look at the totality of your feedback and how it comes together in addition to the merits of each individual piece.
If you have an employee who has a lot that they need to work on, you’re probably better off prioritizing the list in your head rather than presenting a laundry list that can demoralize and confuse many individuals.
I used to train new umpires for high school baseball, and one of the things we always did was to try to pick 1 or 2 things that the apprentices should focus on at any given time. As an umpire myself, I went into most games with one single thing in mind that I wanted to improve — often even very small things. I saw far greater improvement when I did that than when I made a long list of my faults and tried to keep them all in mind for 2 hours.
Finally, think about how you would hear the feedback that you want to give if you were on the receiving end. Be realistic about it and consider yourself at the same stage in your own career as your direct report.
The best feedback from managers doesn’t put down an employee’s performance but rather seeks to uplift it.
Commit to ongoing feedback for your agency’s employees to help them grow in their careers and their contributions to your business, but be careful to avoid lapsing into micromanagement in the process.
Roundtable: Growing your agency as a reluctant self-promoter
If you find self-promotion feels a bit icky and you have a hard time tooting your own horn, you may wonder how to grow your agency most effectively.
In this SAGA Roundtable with Kami Huyse of Zoetica Media, we will tap into her experience and have an interactive conversation about how she has succeeded as a reluctant self-promoter.
Kami has been writing and speaking about personal branding for nearly 20 years, and she explains why you may be thinking about self-promotion in the wrong way. By flipping it around to see it as serving your community, you can overcome your own reluctance and establish yourself and your agency as the experts that you are.
Come to this Roundtable prepared to engage directly with Kami, asking questions and sharing your own experiences.
This event will be on Thursday June 6 from 12-1 PM ET, and you can register here.
