Don't tell your team too early

So you need to make a change - and it feels like a big one.

Maybe (probably) you’ve outgrown the project management system you’re using and it’s time to upgrade.

Perhaps bringing some serious firepower into one of your departments is long overdue: it needs a six-figure leader and you’re excited about the future.

Or, possibly, you’ve resolved to hire someone to help you solve the LLM problem, or to tackle that new social network.

It could be that you’ve made the decision: you’re doing the maths and assessing how you could afford it…

…or maybe, at this stage, it’s an idea you’ve had: you’re trying it on for size and it’s still just one of the things you might do.

Either way, it’s very, very, very important that you do not tell the team.

But we run our agency with an open book

I share a reasonable amount in my agencies:

• Company performance up to and including the P&L
• Salary bands (you won’t know exactly what a colleague is being paid, but you’ll know it’s within a range of X to Y)
• Client losses and feedback.

This has been mostly positive, although I’ve learned to spend time explaining what profit is and why most of the money the agency makes doesn’t go into my bank account.

(Bonus tip: tell the team, with pride, how much tax the agency pays. EBITDA is a useful measure for many purposes, but it doesn’t convey the full extent of your contributions to HMRC - your people want to know that you’re paying your way. A quick search tells me that, during my time there, Rise at Seven paid more in taxes than Google did - a fact I would have shouted from the rooftops if I’d known it at the time).

I’ve worked in (and owned) agencies where statements like these have been made frequently, in some cases to the entire team, repeatedly:

• We’re going to hire someone to do this thing/own this thing
• We’re going to move from Asana/Float/Monday/Workflow Max etc. to ClickUp/Kantata/something else
• We’re looking for a big hitter to lead that team.

I’ve been guilty of this myself - and by guilty, I mean that I thought this was perfectly fine to do, not that I accidentally let it slip once or twice and I feel bad - which is why I can speak with some authority on what happens next.

The team immediately washes their hands of it

If there’s a new project management system coming in, the team no longer needs to make an effort with the current setup. Process optimisation stops completely. Innovation, like new reporting, ceases. Complaints become louder. You’ve unknowingly lit the fuse on a bomb that’s going to blow up in your face, so now you need to move much more quickly than you really want to (or are able to).

If there’s a new senior leader coming in, your most ambitious staff might ask if they’re in line for the job: it’s generally fine to casually mention a big job opening up if you want someone internal to take it, but it turns off high performers if you don’t.

If you’re making a hire to understand the cool, new platform, that tells your people that it’s fine for them to ignore the platform and wait to be told what to do with it (and one of those people might have been the one to figure out this whole AI thing because, believe me, there aren’t many people you could hire who actually have).

So when do I tell my team?

Here are some general rules of thumb:

• Tell a couple of people you trust implicitly that you’re considering a change if you’re looking for feedback (maybe consider telling a mentor or non-executive director)
• Tell as few people as possible until you’re ready to move
• Tell your senior people when you need their help to make the move
• Tell your whole team when you have to
• Tell your whole team after you’ve told your senior team and collectively prepared for the wider team’s questions (and after you’ve told your clients if it affects them)

I feel like there’s an entirely separate (and equally long) post about how to tell the team, so let’s hang on to that. I’ll tell you when I have to.