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Chip and Gini discuss how agency leaders can better engage junior employees and provide them with the training, resources, and guidance needed to succeed.
From simple things like taking junior employees to client meetings to more formal training programs, a range of options exist to build better employees and future managers.
This is an episode that agency leaders will want to share with the rest of their teams because it offers lots of good advice for junior employees on how to find that training and guidance they’re hungry to get.
QUOTES
- Gini: ” I thought Kathryn Mason’s response on this was probably one of the most valuable. She said …I always take my junior employees with me to media interviews, radio interviews, press interviews, because they need to see what goes on after they’ve pitched and how it all comes together. “
- Chip: If you help your junior employees advance, “not only are you going to have better luck with having them as future middle managers, you will actually be able to retain your juniors at a much higher rate. If they see that path to progress, if they see colleagues moving up, if they see that previous people in their position have moved up.”
- Gini: “One of the things that I always say is, I don’t want to hear about a problem unless you have three solutions.”
- Gini: “Look for reasons to have conversations with the people you’re not talking to every day that don’t directly report to you. Because they’re going to learn a ton, but you are too.”
- Chip: “if you can teach them the way that that you want to do things, if you teach them the way that you look at things, you will be able to mold someone [and] you will end up with that more senior employee down the road who really is part of your culture, who thinks about things in a way similar to you, and carries out the mission of the agency in a consistent way.”
This was such a good podcast! I can completely relate to it – both positively and (unfortunately) negatively. When I was working in some companies, a few of my seniors would drag me to meetings just so that I could learn how it all comes together. I did not quite understand the need for my presence in those meetings earlier but I 100% get it now. I consider this as positive experience that has since shaped my understanding of business altogether.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of times when managers do not explicitly state as to why something needs to be done. You’ve spoken about it in the podcast and I realize that many managers do not feel the need to explain things to their juniors perhaps because they feel they are not required to. I think it’s a huge flaw in that thinking and as you rightly said that it helps juniors get a cohesive picture of why they’re handed the task in the first place and why it’s important.
I’m bookmarking your site because there’s some really good advice being dished out here! Looking forward to hearing more of such excellent management nuggets.