As a founder of a small business, you will have gone through a lot to get to where you are now. Scaling your business, ensuring you take things in the right direction whilst establishing the right creative agency culture is not easy. You may have started with just a couple of people cooking up some great ideas but now have a fabulous team that all need to pull together to work at scale.
Growing pains are real. What applied when you were doing everything, making all the decisions and inputting into everything, is very different when you have to hand over some of that responsibility. Maybe you have a senior leadership team, maybe you have a whole management structure. Or maybe you are a couple of directors with a lot of people working around you to create your products or deliver your services.
Whatever the shape of your business, prizing your fingers off some of the things you hold dearly to create the team culture you need might be posing a few problems.
What are some of the key challenges in developing that creative agency culture?
Alignment whilst remaining just the right amount of flexibility. You need everyone facing the same direction and working together in a cohesive, synchronised and united way. But you don’t want to create a rigid environment where people are afraid to share new ideas in case they are not “on plan”. Getting the balance right is tricky.
Embedding a creative agency culture that echoes the company identity and fits with your vision, but doesn’t become that something toxic and immovable. That diversity of thinking and space to be yourself is important to retain and encourage. But you also want people to be team players and step into the culture of the uniqueness of your business.
Establishing ways of working that actually make things more streamlined. One system will not work for all, but dipping in and out of too many different ways of doing things will end in tears. Finding something that is a good enough fit is not that easy, especially if your team members all have strong preferences.
Communicating in a way that everyone understands. What kinds of systems and processes will allow you to communicate best? How do you make sure everyone is actually using these systems and not just defaulting to Whatsapp?
Change and allowing space for things to move away from what was probably your baby. It’s hard to be objective when you have locked in on your small business to get it to where it needs to be. But being open to doing things differently requires a bit of a leap of faith.
A clear sense of direction that everyone knows about. This is harder if you are frequently making those little changes without involving the right people. Just running with that new idea you had might actually take things far off course as there is a whole team of people it might affect. Your business might still be quite agile, but too many twists and turns can be hard to keep in line.
What can you do to to develop the culture your business needs?
You may have a very clear idea of your company purpose and where you want to take your business. Bringing your team along with you is key to that happening. Involving people in conversations that make them a part of the company will help to create a shared, intentional culture. This will shape what the team looks and feels like, what their identity is and how they will work together.
Help everyone to not just understand but really live the company values.
Part of this will be about defining the behaviours that underpin these values. Taking the time for people to feel a part of these and explore what they actually mean rather than just being told what to do is the best way of making sure this happens.
Get to know your team better in the first place, and help them to know each other.
For one thing this builds trust which means working together will be a whole lot easier. Find out more about those valuable skills and pockets of knowledge that everyone has even if it’s not in their job description. We are all more than just our job description!
Bring people together to share their ideas for how they want to work together.
This will help people to learn more about each others different styles and preferences and help shape something people can sign up to. Part of defining your ways of working will be about how you all come together. It’s unlikely you will be able to avoid meetings, but you can make them richer and sharper.
Do things differently and create some pockets for disruption in a way that you can harness for your own good. This may be about carving out some workshop time for those “what if?” moments. These ware far more engaging then a standard check in or ideation session.
Outline your own remit and that of others in your team you you don’t end up trying to do everything.
Share your expectations. Craft some decision making processes outlining who is responsible, who needs to be consulted or just informed and who makes the final decisions. There may still be a space where the messy middle of uncertainty resides and things overlap. Working out what you do with these in between things as they come up is all part of that process.
If you need help to craft the culture you need, get in touch! We will help you work out what you need and involve the right people in those conversations so you shape it just right . Talk to us about how we can help.
Image by Maike und Björn Bröskamp from Pixabay
