How Poor Scoping & Handoffs Fuel Agency Burnout
Agencies create their own misery, often despite their best intentions. Agency life feels like an endless struggle to deliver, with angry deadlines shouting from every direction. Some will argue that this is just the way things will always be. In reality, a hidden fear of failure drives irrational moves by agencies that make things worse, much worse. We’ve uncovered a critical set of “broken assumptions” that befuddle agency managers and leaders both, deepening burnout and squandering budgets.
In this 45-minute informative, interactive webinar, Jack Skeels, CEO of AgencyAgile, will use learnings from more than 200 agencies and other chaotic organizations to inform:
- The broken assumptions behind scope-driven burnout
- Who should really own scope, why and when
- Three reasons why and how scope conversations and briefs typically fail
- Why traditional project and scope management techniques make things worse
Why Agencies Become Crazy Places to Work
Feel like your agency is borderline crazy, with people flying back and forth, priorities changing, work never done well enough, and clients never happy enough?
And do you, at the same time, almost improbably, find yourself loving the continuous challenge, juggling, and innovation required to keep the lights on, even though it’s hard to get home at a reasonable hour and the stress is wearing on your teams?
As paradoxical as that sounds, you’re not crazy, and you’re in good company. In working closely with hundreds of creativity- or innovation-driven agencies, all of them would say “That’s us!” Agencies are fascinating organizations, where chaos is king, and naturally occurs as a result of the style of business, the processes, the work products, the types of customers.
In this 45-minute informative, interactive webinar, Jack Skeels, CEO of AgencyAgile, will use learnings from more than 200 agencies and other chaotic organizations to inform:
- The three types of natural organizational chaos that agencies experience
- How creativity and chaos are connected
- Why project management can seem futile in an agency
- Who has the hardest job in an agency
Are You Overmanaging your Agency?
Agencies are a special type of organization in which managerial costs grow rapidly. And as these costs go up, they accelerate with growth. They can account for 20%-plus losses in productivity and team satisfaction, creating a chaos that destroys work quality and delivery velocity. We’ll explore the origins of the Manager Tax – why it grows so quickly, and concepts and solutions that have helped other executives make better decisions.
You’ll also learn how to assess your manager tax and understand better its impact upon your organization’s success and misery.
In this 45-minute informative, interactive webinar, Jack Skeels, CEO of AgencyAgile, will use learnings from more than 200 agencies and other chaotic organizations to inform:
• The mechanisms that drive the growth of managing
• The three different types of managing and how they create additional need for managing
• The differences between full-time and part-time managers
• Why you probably choose the wrong people to manage, further increasing costs
• How to calculate and understand your agency’s Manager Tax
Taming The Chaos of Your Agency
Agencies are chaotic. That is a key part of their “business model.” Agencies typically lose 30-50% of their productivity to mis-managing, or responding poorly to, this chaos. We’ll explore the origins of this chaos – why it is unavoidable – and also why most ways you will try to fix it don’t work, or even make things worse.
In this 45-minute informative, interactive webinar, Jack Skeels, CEO of AgencyAgile, will use learnings from more than 200 agencies and other chaotic organizations to inform:
• The Five Key Sources of Agency Chaos
• Business choices you can make that affect the Five Key Sources
• Why common solutions often fail to lessen the chaos (or even make it worse)
• How Pod-style structures and Agile often help
• The keys to successful transformation
End the Meeting Madness
Everyone knows that meetings can suck…Meetings destroy our productive time and focus — often containing up to 80% non-value add time... that's a scary stat for agency leaders looking to find efficiency any place they can find. Not to mention the boost in team morale when your people get to focus on the innovation they love.
Get started making your meetings better today with tips we'll share that you can start using immediately. We'll also uncover insights into how the AgencyAgile’s Evaporative Meeting technique and Day Structure methods work to enable massive improvements in productivity, team satisfaction and quality of work.
As a preview into Jack Skeel’s, CEO of AgencyAgile, new book Unmanaged, gain invaluable insight into the proven way to make your organization’s meetings valuable and time well spent. These insights have been applied to over 200 organizations trained by AgencyAgile.
You’ll gain key insights and learn practical methods to end this perpetual agency problem:
- Why your meetings are so ineffective
- How to measure your meeting effectiveness
- Techniques you can implement immediately
- Understand Day Structure and how it impacts meeting effectiveness
- How to improve meeting effectiveness using the Evaporative Meeting model
Understanding Scope: Who Owns it, Why it is Challenging, and Separating Value Versus Cost.
Agencies create their own misery, despite their best intentions. Agency life feels like an endless struggle to deliver, with angry deadlines shouting from every direction. Some argue that this is just the way things will always be. In reality, hidden fear of failure drives irrational moves by agencies that make things worse, much worse.
As a preview into Jack Skeel’s, CEO of AgencyAgile, new book Unmanaged, gain invaluable insights applied to over 200 organizations trained by AgencyAgile.
We'll uncover a critical set of “broken assumptions” that befuddle agency managers and leaders, deepening burnout and squandering budgets.
In this fast-moving 30-minute webinar, we'll uncover and discuss:
- The broken assumptions behind scope-driven burnout
- Who should really own scope, why and when
- Why the way you sell should not drive the way you deliver
- Three reasons why scope conversations and briefs often fail
- Why traditional project and scope management techniques make things worse
The Unfair Agency Culture
It may be that your best people are your worst problem. Crises and Chaos can destroy agency productivity, but the greatest challenges are often self-inflicted, through a culture of rewards and personal exceptionalism. It has been said that agencies live and die by their talent, and in some cases, both are true: the talent that they have keeps them alive, but also they drive the organization into crisis and lower productivity. At the heart of this is the Firefighter Meritocracy, an organization structure populated by talented “rescuers,” that ends up working at cross- purposes with the need for talent development, productivity, and inclusion.
Drawing on the vignettes, research and insights in his upcoming book, “The Art of (un-)Management”, Jack Skeels, CEO of AgencyAgile, will explore how agencies and other skill-driven organizations inadvertently create a management (and organizational) culture that exhibits some of the worst management practices known – driving down productivity, quality, and morale – while also destroying cultural cohesion and belonging within the organization.
In this 45-minute informative, interactive webinar, you’ll learn:
The origins of the Firefighter Meritocracy
- How it creates a basic self-reinforcing loop, distorting motivations and behaviors
- How it is amplified by several types of natural human bias
- How it creates a partitioned culture within the organization
- How it tragically affects worker development, engagement and productivity
