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Chip and Gini discuss the importance of being as transparent as possible with your agency team members, sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly when necessary.

Too often communicators focus so much on their clients and the external world and fail to invest properly in internal communications. Yet some of the greatest business gains will be achieved by bringing your employees into the conversation.

A well-informed group of talent can often spot things that you might miss or offer innovative suggestions. On the flip side, if you keep your team in the dark, they will make assumptions and guess about what’s really going on — and often be very wrong about it.

In this episode, Chip and Gini provide practical examples and suggestions for improving your agency’s own internal communications efforts.

Of course, Chip mentions one of his favorite techniques — Management by Walking Around — and Gini points out that this can even be done in virtual agencies (something that they discussed in more detail on a previous episode).

Quotes

• Chip: “Agency owners and executives really need to be thinking about how and what and in what manner they’re communicating with their own teams about the agency business itself.”
• Gini, on learning from personal experience: “But since then … I’ve been far more transparent about the good, the bad and the ugly, because you find that people do want to rally around and help you find solutions. And you don’t have to take that all on yourself.”
• Chip, on owners using good judgment: “You always have to figure out exactly how transparent to be because there’s a fine line between sharing enough that people can help you solve the problem and sharing so much that you create a sense of panic.”
• Gini, on how one-on-one meetings benefit in many ways: “It definitely helps with culture, it helps with retention, it helps with loyalty, it helps with all those things. So that when somebody is approached for a new position, they aren’t interested, because they really love where they are, and they love that they have access to you.”

Resources

• AIM-GET Framework
• Management by Walking Around (Wikipedia)

[read the transcript]

About Chip Griffin

Chip Griffin is the Founder & CEO of the Small Agency Growth Alliance (SAGA) and a longtime agency owner and executive. He helps PR and marketing communications agencies build better businesses. Full bio