The very first issue of The Agency Overhaul Newsletter was about people.
People are the 1st pillar of running a successful marketing agency and the pillar that differentiates a marketing agency from a freelancer or solopreneur.
“People” can refer to the owner or the client, but when speaking about people I’m generally referring to an agency’s employees.
I’ve written before about how to hire great talent, but while that’s probably about 60-75% of the battle, the rest of the battle is a combination of putting the right processes in place and getting your employees to actually follow them.
While there’s no way to guarantee 100% loyalty, productivity, and dedication to their role, there are lots of ways to improve all of these aspects to increase the overall value of each of your employees.
While there are many ways to improve, we’ll cover some over the next few weeks that tend to get more of a response from your team.
Empathize
When we hire a new employee, they are usually excited about their new role.
The best employees are focused on delivering as much value as possible to your agency and proving themselves as a good hire.
These employees are often met with very high expectations because they start off on such a good note.
They’re talented, experienced, and they communicate well, so we treat them as if they should have it all down without making mistakes.
The truth is, though, that they aren’t perfect.
They can have a decade of experience working in agencies, but they’re still new to your agency. They don’t know how you want things done. They don’t know your processes.
Every agency is different, every team operates differently, every person communicates differently, and every leader has different expectations.
When a new employee starts with an agency, most agency owners are reasonable enough to expect a ramp up period of learning and training.
Everyone makes mistakes, after all.
However, as stakes increase and things get busy, that grace starts to fade. We see the mistakes and get frustrated at the person making them.
Sometimes the person is being lazy or inattentive. Sometimes they’re not following the processes you’ve set up or they’re ignoring the policies you designed to consistently deliver a great client experience.
This isn’t always the case. What tends to be the case is that we hire people who talk and act like us.
We set up processes based on how we work.
We expect our employees to think like us and know what we know.
What’s even worse is that, if we hire someone we think is like us, we often expect them to be better than us.
Many of us are very hard on ourselves and we hold people who are like us (and many who aren’t) to the same standards to which we hold ourselves.
The obvious problem there is that we usually fall short of our own standards and get mad at ourselves.
If you see in someone else the same shortcomings you struggle with, the most common reaction is to be mad because if they can’t figure it out it might mean you can’t either. That’s a scary thought, so maybe we should push them harder.
Do you see how all this can cause problems?
Viewing everything through the lens of our own experiences or perspective prevents us from understanding the real problems.
If we instead seek to understand the true cause of the problems our employees are experiencing – to have empathy – we can often avoid firing great talent that just needed better processes, structure, communication of expectations, support, etc.
Even those times when an employee is lazy, distracted, or thoughtless, they are often that way for a reason.
If we seek to learn that reason, we can coach our employee through the difficult time that is causing them to flounder, rather than firing them for not being good enough.
On The Other Hand
Empathy is powerful and coaching employees to show you care breeds a kind of loyalty you can’t get from anywhere else.
But it’s not all smiles and rainbows.
You do have a business to run and if you coach every employee who doesn’t do their job well, you’ll lose a fortune.
There are some scenarios in which no amount of empathy will help you.
Here are a few:
- You hired someone who doesn’t have the skill to do the work you hired them to do.
- Your employee has a toxic attitude toward you and is bad-mouthing you to your team.
- Your employee is intentionally lying to you, your employees, and/or your clients.
- Your employee consistently blames you or others for their shortcomings.
Major moral or ethical shortcomings are not worth meeting with empathy, and training an employee with no experience enough for them to competently deliver a service to your standards is not fair to them and it’s a waste of your time and money.
Your clients aren’t paying you to run a school or a halfway house. They’re paying you to make money for them.
The blame-passing employee is a tough one.
If you confront an employee about dropping the ball on a project and they cite poor processes, communication, expectations, or teamwork as the cause, they may be right.
This can be a good opportunity to use that empathy we mentioned earlier and take responsibility for your own shortcomings.
However, if this employee consistently makes mistakes and blames you or others, you’re not going to see them trying harder to improve.
While the root of this behavior may be a thing you could help them uncover and work through, that’s better left to a therapist and this employee is better off somewhere where they can do less harm.
Summary
In most cases, employees can benefit from empathy.
If you’re willing to slow down and genuinely pursue an understanding of what they’re going through that caused them to perform beneath expectations, your employees will often meet that empathy with a renewed sense of loyalty and a drive to do better for the leader who cared enough to listen and help.
This isn’t to say you should make light of mistakes that put your client relationships at risk or that hurt the business in other ways, but a little empathy can help you address the root of the issue instead of asking an employee to stop a behavior that will only crop up again a few weeks later.
For those employees who have shown themselves to be immensely valuable in the past, but have seen a long and steady decline (or a quick drop off a cliff), consider a performance improvement plan that expresses your gratitude and appreciation for their past performance and your belief in their ability to perform at this level again.
Lay out your expectations clearly and walk your employee through the plan in a meeting. Use this meeting to inquire about the cause of this decline in performance and if you can provide anything to help (only if you’ll actually help).
You can’t save every employee relationship, and not all are worth the effort, but for those that matter, it’s worth employing some empathy to recognize the human who has been helping you and the very human things going on in their lives.
You may just inspire them to a new level of greatness that transforms your whole agency.
If you’re curious about how I work with agencies or if you’re frustrated with your agency’s profitability or retention of clients or employees, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll see how I can help. I never charge for the first consultation and if I can solve it in 30-minutes, there’s no reason to pay for my services and you walk away happy.
If you know of someone who may benefit from this newsletter, please don’t hesitate to send them to https://kinglyconsulting.com/newsletter so they can start receiving them.
Also, you can now catch up on past issues you may have missed by visiting https://kinglyconsulting.com/archive/