How transparent should agency owners be?

During the past couple of years, we have all learned a lot more about all of our professional connections because of the challenging work conditions many have had to endure.

But should you be a completely open book with clients and employees? Or is there still such a thing as TMI?

How do you share enough to be human and to provide context for your work without crossing that line?

And is transparency really a good thing anyway? Could it cost you more than you think?It’s a challenging topic and one that Chip and Gini tackle with their usual blend of insight, anecdotes, and humor.

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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 am going to share so much about myself in episode right after this. Yeah, I was joking. I’m not actually nobody really wants a TMI start to the episode from me. So I don’t know, I kind of do. Yeah, no, it’s not gonna happen. It’s not gonna happen.

Gini Dietrich 

I share something about you. Oh, God, okay. Good. You take really great photographs.

Chip Griffin 

And by that you mean, I use my camera? Well, not. The photographs of me are very good. Just Just to be clear. For those of you in listener land, yes, the photos of me are miserable. The but I but I have gotten semi decent, I think

Gini Dietrich 

more than semi decent.

Chip Griffin 

Thank you. I’ve, in the pandemic, I’ve had more time to spend out there doing photography, and particularly sports photography. It’s my the one excuse I have to get out of the house in a safe ish fashion. So

Gini Dietrich 

well, they’re very good. And I very much enjoy seeing them.

Chip Griffin 

Thank you. I appreciate it. So but that brings us to the actual topic of today’s episode, which is, how much should we be sharing with employees? And this is something that that came up? It’s a question I get periodically from clients anyway. But it was something that was inspired by a Harvard Business Review article that essentially posed the same question and suggested that in order to inspire your team, you need to be willing to share more of yourself. So how much should we share? How do we draw the line? And I’d like to include both personal and business side of things. Let’s Let’s start with the personal. But I think that you know, how much you share about your business goes hand in hand with this, particularly when you’re a small agency, and you’re the owner.

Gini Dietrich 

Yeah, I mean, we build relationships with human beings, right? And in order to build relationships, and trust, and all those kinds of things that you need to have to have a great relationship, you have to share parts of yourself. It’s not, you can’t go into a meeting and be like, Okay, I’m going to talk about this and everybody share, like, we’re not robots, you have to actually build trust in being a human being. And you can’t do that if you’re not sharing about yourself.

Chip Griffin