The Leadership Lever

As an agency leader, you have to move WORLDS.

As an entrepreneur, you are fighting against the entropy of the UNIVERSE to keep things moving in the right direction.

In order to win, an agency leader must leverage tools to create your vision.

If our old pal Archimedes stood somewhere close to the earth and tried to move it without leverage, he’d make no impact.

But with distance and a tool, the earth moves.

The worlds that you move are generally business functions:

• Sales & Marketing
• Client Delivery
• Finance
• HR/Admin

As you grow from a founder to a CEO, you start to realize that standing in front of any of these business functions and fixing them directly isn’t efficient. It just gives the other functions the opportunity to start to wobble. You can’t work deeply in one business function and expect that the others to be self-managing. 

You must understand the ONLY tools at your disposal:

1. Perspective (a place to stand)

2. Your team (the lever)

It is hard to ascertain what needs to be fixed or adjusted in any business function from the inside. If you are in the middle of the business function, you can only see the tasks involved in the function. With perspective you can see the inputs and the output of the business function. That is a much more effective way for you to diagnose any needed changes.

But even if you diagnose the needed changes correctly, if you jump into fixing mode, you end up working too closely inside the function and lose sight of the function (and all of the other functions that need watching).

Fixing is how your team activates lever mode:

• Give them your diagnosis.
• Have them investigate & confirm your diagnosis or create their own.
• Have them develop a plan for remediation.
• You review it, make suggestions and supply the benefit of your perspective.

This shared diagnosis and remediation plan based on an inside and external perspective gives you a robust solution set that allows you, the agency leader, to keep your eye on all the business functions.

At the same time, it gives your team authority and mastery over the intricacies of the business function so that they now have a sense of ownership.

You must find a way to create appropriate distance which gives you the perspective to see how well the business function is fulfilling its part of your agency vision. In addition, the distance allows your team the space to operate within the business with your supervision and guidance without them being your assistants. They become the operators.

That can be uncomfortable as you are emerging and changing from solo or small team of founders to an organizational leaders. It is your team that owns the work, and the process and is responsible for its output. You, my dear founder, are accountable to your vision of your agency…and accountable to the needs for growth and ownership that your team deserves.

A lever without someone to pull it is unrealized potential, and someone who needs to move worlds without a lever is ineffective.

Together, you and your team can do remarkable things, as long as you lead from a place to stand and hire a team that is a long enough lever.