Be smart about titles at your agency

Have you ever given serious thought to the structure of the titles at your agency? Or have you dealt with them simply as one-off decisions with individual employees?

In this episode, Chip and Gini explore how — and why — you should be more thoughtful about how you hand out titles to employees. More important, they discuss how a mindful approach to titles can help you to retain your best employees.

Of course, there’s also discussion around the problems that come from title inflation that can be quite common in small agencies.

Key takeaways

* Chip Griffin: “You need to create some uniformity, some salary bands across the business so that you don’t have two different account managers making wildly different salaries. Because they’ll eventually figure it out.”

* Gini Dietrich: “Throwing titles out at somebody just because that’s what they want is probably not the most effective way to run your business.”

* Chip Griffin: “If you’ve got someone who’s being overpaid for the role that they’re in, or they’re over titled for the position that they’re in, it creates tension with the rest of the team as you grow.”

* Gini Dietrich: “Probably one of the easier things you can do as an agency owner is create that spreadsheet, understand what those titles are, what the salary bands are, and how quickly you think people might move.”

Related

* Setting expectations for raises and promotions at your agency

* Transparency (and context) for agency teams

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: Gini I, I need to figure out, you know, what, what should my title be? I don’t, I don’t really, I feel like I need to progress some here, and I feel like Host just isn’t enough. I, I need

Gini Dietrich: Okay. We can, we can discuss that. Sure.

Chip Griffin: Okay. Right after this.

So we all know that it’s really, really hard to retain people in agencies and it’s, yeah, and we want to keep our best talent around. I don’t know about you, but I found employees really are pressing more and more these days to feel like they’re continuing to progress. And that means, financially, title wise, bonuses, all that kind of stuff.

And the conversations that I’m having with agency owners indicate that they’re kind of struggling with figuring out how to do this in a meaningful way without just throwing money at the problem or making everybody a vice president or that kind of thing. So I, I thought that would make for an interesting discussion today.

How can we set up some real structure? Behind the career paths that we give our teams and the, the, the way that we compensate them both in title and in money.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah. And I think at the same time, you know, I’ve had a couple of situations where I’ve been in the negotiation process with a new employee.