Assigning and communicating roles for agency team members

Clients often want to know who at the agency does what. It might be because they want to understand the work that they’re getting, but it also might be because they want to go directly to individuals for certain things.

Chip and Gini tackle this important topic in this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast.

You need to be clear with your team about what their individual roles are so that there isn’t confusion. There needs to be a single person responsible for the completion of each task (even if they need to work with others to accomplish it). 

But how do you handle clients who want this level of detail? It’s fine to communicate the expertise that you have, but be careful about locking yourself in to specific team members doing work for that client. Sometimes the agency’s needs change and as long as you continue to deliver a quality product, it shouldn’t matter to your clients.

Chip and Gini also argue that it is important to have a primary point of contact for each client with your agency so that they aren’t asking for lots of individual items from team members that could get lost in the cracks and not done — or completed but not properly recorded as work done for that client.

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin,

Gini Dietrich 

and I’m Gini Dietrich,

Chip Griffin 

and I’m going to talk about what your role should be on this podcast and what my role should be

Gini Dietrich 

awesome podcasts can’t wait right after this.

Chip Griffin 

So I think we’re going to put you in charge of video editing and all the technical side of things. How does that sound to

Gini Dietrich 

you? Great. No problem.

Chip Griffin 

All right, cool. What should I do?

Gini Dietrich 

Oh, you should do promotion and distribution?

Chip Griffin 

Oh, okay. All right. Sure. Anyway, people don’t really care what our roles are in this podcast. Because really, a it’s not that difficult and be not that interesting. But what, what is interesting is the roles on your agency team. And when you’re working with clients, how do you define the roles of your team? How do you communicate those roles to the client? And how do you set yourself up for success? So we’re going to talk about roles in the client context? In today’s episode?

Gini Dietrich 

Yeah, I think it’s really like anything else, right? It’s setting expectations, it’s communicating correctly, it’s it always makes me laugh, that communicators are not particularly great communicators sometimes. And making sure that your client understands, like, I go to this person for this, or this person for this, otherwise, you get wrapped into the same thing that many of us get wrapped into, which is they come to you for everything. And that should not

Chip Griffin 

happen. Well, and the first thing, you know, like everything else that we talked about on the show is you need to figure out what your role is, right?