You will need to learn how to change your energy and leave your personal problems at home so that you can be present and ready for the people on your team to talk and interact with you. Tell others about your story of how you started the business - be real. You should make a video and put it on your agency YouTube channel to attract good fit candidates and clients. In the next chapter, we will discuss how to shape your agency’s vision and mission statement.
Most people today want to feel they belong to companies that are helping clients grow and achieve their business goals. When you write your value proposition and create your agency values, it will become clear why your team is choosing to work with you rather than for another company or for themselves.
Here are a couple of strategies to help you:-
1. Transparency with your team about your numbers and what you need to achieve every month, every quarter, or every year in revenue and profit is also necessary. Make sure they know their direct connection to the profitability of the agency. This is where the value of time tracking comes in. Creating a company scorecard where everyone has a number is vital.
2. Teaching your team to business commercials. When you go through agency financials, it is important to share as much information as possible. In spite of this, you would still want to keep some things confidential. Salaries are preferably kept confidential so group figures together when sharing reports. Helping your team understand how you generate revenue, what your expenses are, the things that contribute to the agency’s profits and their role in generating profits for your business is vital. We will discuss this more in detail later.
3. Be friendly but do not be their friend. You are the leader so you need to act as such. You want them to talk to you about important things, not for gossip.
The relationship you have with your employees is similar to that of a parent/child, you need to set boundaries, be approachable so that they feel comfortable sharing their problems with you that are related to the agency job or perhaps they have personal challenges that are impacting their work but you don’t want to be the go-to person for gossip. They will need to talk and get advice to help them get unstuck and over time when your team grows your team leader will be the person to hold weekly one-to-one meetings where the agenda will be to discuss their work and anything they need help with completing their tasks and contribute to the team.
People in your team like to have office perks and parties; however, they may either have complaints about time tracking or be inconsistent in tracking the hours they log. As a professional services business, your goal is to provide high value work that generates results for your clients in a profitable way.
Have you any tips to share about how you have a healthy working relationship with your team?
Chat soon,
Clodagh
This is an excerpt from my book that is available on Amazon - Kindle or Paperback.