It’s time to leave the ping pong tables and bullshit stipends for lunch or traveling behind. That’s not what your employees, fellow founders, or potential investors care about when it comes to your agency’s culture. What they care about is your team performance. But how do you create a culture of team performance inside your agency management strategy? That’s what we will cover in this article.
Values and Decision Making
Building a successful culture means that you have to clearly define what is important to you and your team as a unit. This is critical to your agency management strategy. What do you care about? What drives you? What are you against? What bigger problems do you hope to solve as a company through the work you do everyday. Once you know what you value, you need to always strive to make decisions that reflect those values. A team full of people doing the right thing, at the right time, based on what you have collectively said matters will build a successful culture.
Effective Training
Proper onboarding and training is imperative to building a successful culture and for your agency management. Growth means hiring and hiring means that your new recruit will need to learn how you do things. Even if they are an expert in the role you hired them for, they will still need to learn how to do their job within your organization, and to your expectations.Having a robust library of SOPs and a FAQ section full of already asked and answered questions is a great way to speed up the training process.
Build Trust
A team that trusts each other is one that plays together. And a team that plays together is one that succeeds together. A great way to bring your team together is through bonding experiences either in person or virtually. An outing to a sporting event and even just buying your team lunch in order to facilitate real, personal, and vulnerable connections is a great way to bond your team together.
Don’t be afraid to let your guard down and show your team the real you, and not just who you are today. Tell your story to your team. Where you came from and who you were at different stages of your life. What you struggled with back then and what you struggled with today. Encourage your team to do the same. This will give your team insight into the more complete picture of you and will open the door for deeper understanding and empathy about where you’re coming from behind the slack messages and video calls.
Sharing your story costs $0. But the ROI is invaluable for your agency management.
Goals
There are two types of goals that everyone on your team has, including you. Those are personal goals and professional goals. Personal goals could include paying off debt or getting a mortgage. Professional goals could involve learning a new skill, taking on more work, or earning more money. Helping your team accomplish both their personal and professional goals is critical to building a successful culture. Accomplishing your goals as a collective team should be a top priority in your agency management strategy.
Clear Standards and Expectations
A successful team culture is one where everyone is on the same page about what is expected. Everyone should know what work they are responsible for, how to do it, when to get it done, and who to go to for help should questions or problems arise. You can’t be successful in your agency management efforts without clear expectations.
We > Me
Your team has MVPs and it has rookies. Your team has coaches, and it has players. It has founders and executives and advisors, and it has tactile workers in the trenches. Everyone has a job to do and it takes a collective effort from everyone, as a unified team, to achieve success. Whether that success is achieving revenue goals, or gaining market share, or finding ways to automate your workload so your company can scale. Whatever the aspiration or destination might be – you won’t get there if individual personalities trump a collective team cohesiveness.
Hold the Line
It’s your job as the founder of your company to always hold the line. That means constantly embodying the culture you want to see from your team. You need to always hold yourself accountable, and you should have a team around you that helps you do this. No one on your team (except maybe your co-founder(s)) will care about or represent your company more than you. So you need to always be the steady example, the shining light of what your company is about. Holding the line as the founder of your company is what proper agency management looks like.
Ready to Reach 8 Figures?
If you’re serious about scaling your agency to and through that 8 figure threshold – then you’re going to need some help from someone who has been there and done that. That someone would be 8 Figure Agency. Schedule your free assessment today to kick start your growth journey.
