Unpopular opinions about promoting staff to management roles

More and more agencies are creating new “tracks” for staff who don’t want to (or can’t) manage people.

Paraphrasing Peter Drucker, a manager has to take responsibility for the results of the business, not for the workloads of others*.

If agencyland reframed the concept of “manager” as “someone who gets results out of other people”, rather than “someone who helps other people with their workloads”, we’d see this trend as more problematic.

Agencies only really have people. We don’t have a physical product. It’s why so many agencies hinge their pitch on “our people are the best” - it’s all they’ve got (and no, it isn’t a good differentiator, I can help you do better than that) and salary is absolutely the biggest item on the P&L. So, when we’re thinking about progression for our people, we must think about how we’re going to get the best from the team as a whole. People who don’t lead, or want to lead, their peers are not going to help you do that.

Someone has to manage the team…meaning someone has to make more junior staff members able to contribute to the agency’s overall performance.

If your agency has an abundance of top talent who don’t manage anyone more junior than themselves, then several things usually happen:

• You will need to find an extra (presumably substantial) salary, for each of these people, to give to someone who will manage the team. In reality, this means that neither of these two top talents will be paid all the money they could be, because you need to split the money you have available between two people. You’re doing both a disservice
• The salary will need to be high enough for those people managers to manage the top individual contributors, or there’ll be mutiny. The “people manager” will know that the person they’re managing (who has fewer skills, because they don’t or can’t manage), is paid more money than they are, so they’ll ask for more money. Do not presume you can hide the information from them (because they need the information to be able to manage the person)
• Alternatively, you (or your senior leadership) will have to manage these top individual contributors yourself and you probably do not have the time.

The highly paid individual who doesn’t manage people in a marketing agency should be the exception (and, ideally, you wouldn’t have any of them). As the saying goes, if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. The value an agency should bring over and above a freelancer is the distance it can go, with its deeper bench, wider skillset, bigger tools budget and general economies of scale.

There are a few reasons why this trend has been growing:

• Social media has normalised it. Agency leaders get likes for saying it because lots of people wish it was true
• A skills shortage has meant that agencies have been prepared to do less-than-ideal things in order to hold on to the (too few) talented individuals who are available
• Agencies, almost universally, don’t train people to manage others (mostly because agency owners never had this training themselves)
• Agencies equate “people management” with “workload management” (and, to a degree, administration), so the job of “manager” is a bit of HR and a bit of project management - two functions which agencies generally underinvest in
• It’s not a time of plenty in agencyland and promotions are being given out more freely in lieu of salary increases
• The people who generally make it to agency leadership positions are generally willing to step in and have the difficult conversations (rescuing their teams, to use Stephen Karpman’s terminology). Effectively, it’s possible for staff to progress without managing people because agencies have senior team members who will step down and do it for them (until they burn out, of course).

Fast tracking your staff through an individual contributor track equates to you doing your part to feed the pipeline of tomorrow’s freelancers.

So, what should you do about it?

As the title suggests, I don’t imagine all of these recommendations will be popular:

1. Decide early on (ideally before you hire your first employee) whether your senior leaders should be people managers, then focus on the progression of the ones who are. Repeat this for each role you’re planning for your agency. If you’re already a well established agency, do this exercise anyway. Imagine every role in your agency was open: which roles should be people managers?
2. Tell people early on which roles need them to develop management skills and keep working with them to develop those skills (constantly reminding them that they don’t get the next job unless they get good at managing)
3. You get more of what you celebrate (to paraphrase Kim Scott), so celebrate people getting the best out of the teams they’re part of. Celebrate the bravery of the manager who let their team take a chance on something that failed
4. Stop celebrating promotions so much: the emphasis should always be on the job itself, rather than the next job. Otherwise, promotions can come so rapidly that being promoted becomes the accepted reward for doing a decent job
5. Hire seasoned outsiders above your staff when you have a hole in the business. Otherwise, you’ll create expectations among your newer managers which ultimately you’ll have to frustrate in a few years’ time. The role is the role and you shouldn’t be twisting and turning each open position to fit the exact skillset that the people you happen to employ have already got - there’s give and take here.

What’s happening to make me say this now?

There are two trends which are likely to spell disaster for agencies within the next 2-5 years:

1. The time an individual spends in any role in an agency is getting shorter and staff are getting promoted faster, often without skills, like people management, which the agency will need. An individual contributor can often reach their terminal position before the age of 30…meaning there is nowhere else for that person to go within the agency (or any other). As a result, more staff who are strong practitioners are going freelance, with agencies struggling to retain talent past a certain age and level of experience, because agencies aren’t seen as offering them anything once they feel like they’ve mastered their craft (which, of course, they haven’t really mastered by age 30). Agency top brass has always left to start up on their own shops, or work for themselves, but not in such numbers; and
2. Agencies are attempting to replace their junior staff with AI, so the pipeline of future talent isn’t getting filled. If staff increasingly leave at the top - and no new staff join at the bottom - what’s left for agencies?

Agencies need to take responsibility for training their staff to see that having colleagues is a superpower; that they can achieve incredible things when they’re part of a team and not an “individual contributor”; and that aiding the development of the next generation of marketers is a privilege.

* In his 1966 book The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker said that “the man who focuses on effort and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, “top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.”