Building trust and letting your team shine

You trust your team, right? In this episode, Chip and Gini discuss the importance of agency owners letting go of micromanaging, trusting their team, and focusing on building a scalable business. They emphasize the need for owners to delegate tasks and avoid being bottlenecks.

They also touch on the challenges and benefits of transitioning from being deeply involved in all aspects of the business to taking on a more strategic role. The conversation underscores the significance of balancing involvement while ensuring clients feel supported and valued.

Key takeaways

* Gini Dietrich: “As agency owners, we think that clients expect us, expect our process, and we don’t want to admit that the people that we’ve hired can be better at our job than we are. And so we should let them do their jobs.”

* Chip Griffin: “It’s not logically consistent to be growing a scalable business where you are still in the weeds with every client.”

* Gini Dietrich: “Put yourself in their shoes. If you were a senior level person at an agency and your boss, the agency owner, wanted to review everything that you produced, at your level of experience, how frustrating would that be?”

* Chip Griffin: “You can’t say, well, yes, of course I trust my team, and then demonstrate that you don’t by doing things like insisting on reading every piece of content that goes out to a client or sitting in on every conversation with a client.”

Related

* Letting go as an agency owner

* Micromanage your way to agency failure

* Managing Gen Z agency employees (and anyone else with less experience than you)

* Managing employees in a small agency (webinar)

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 Gini, you know, sometimes I feel like we’re not really successful in communicating essential messages to listeners and one topic seems to be something that we cover annually, right around this time, as we discovered just before we started recording this as we were discussing our topics and we said, have we talked about that before?

And, and it turns out we did. We’ve discussed this in May of 2023 in May in 2022, and probably other times as well, but…

May have 21.

Yeah, probably. So this is, this is an annual reminder to agency owners today.

Gini Dietrich: So actually I had breakfast with Martin Waxman, a couple of days ago and he was in town for the Reagan conference.

And he said to me, I’ve been thinking a lot about running an agency. He owned, he ran an agency for a while and then he sold to another agency where he was partners with somebody. And then he ended up leaving that agency.