Company: AgencyAgile
Owner: Jack Skeels
Year Started: 2012
Employees: 11 – 25
Additional links and resources:
- Get more insights from Jack on Medium
- Purchase a discounted copy of “Unmanaged: :Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations”
- Get additional insights and resources from the book website
Dive into the heart of what makes agencies tick (or not) through the lens of the recently released book “Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations,” on this pivotal special episode from the podcast series “An Agency Story.” This episode shines a spotlight on Jack Skeels, the visionary behind Agency Agile and author of this groundbreaking book. With host Russel Dubree, a seasoned agency owner and business coach, the conversation takes an illuminating journey through the essence and intricacies of building thriving, agile organizations.
From the outset, Skeels delves into the philosophy underpinning Agency Agile – a company focused on making better companies. His narrative is not just about the challenges; it’s a testament to innovation and overcoming managerial stereotypes that have long hindered agency growth.
Listeners are treated to captivating anecdotes and insights from Skeels’ rich career trajectory – from a robotics programmer to a management skeptic, eventually becoming a beacon of change in organizational dynamics. His critique of conventional management and advocacy for a more enlightened approach to leadership is both refreshing and revolutionary.
Key themes explored include the pitfalls of traditional management, the transformative power of ‘unmanagement,’ and strategies for fostering a culture of autonomy and creativity. Skeels’ journey is a clarion call to rethink management – not as a hierarchical control but as a catalyst for unleashing potential and driving collective success.
This episode doesn’t just dissect the mechanics of creating empowered organizations; it invites listeners to reimagine leadership through the lens of innovation and empowering the team to lead the work. Whether you’re an agency owner, manager, or team member, Skeels’ narrative offers invaluable lessons on navigating the complexities of project driven organizations with grace and efficacy.
“Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations” is more than a podcast episode; it’s a blueprint for cultivating environments where creativity flourishes, and teams thrive. Tune in to this enlightening discussion and embark on a journey toward transforming your organization into a beacon of empowerment and innovation.
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Show Transcript
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story
Russel:
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I’m your host Russel. Dive into a captivating special episode of An Agency Story, featuring the recently released book”Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations by Jack Skeels, the trailblazer behind Agency Agile based out of Los Angeles, California. Discover how Agency Agile’s unique approach to dismantling traditional management structures has revolutionized the way agencies operate leading to happier teams and improved margins. Jack shares the journey from his early skepticism of management roles to pioneering, a new paradigm and organizational agility. Laugh along with a humorous anecdote about Jack’s realization that despite his initial disdain for management, he was destined to refine it. This episode is a must listen for anyone eager to scale their business without drastically increasing their management tax. Tune in to uncover the magic behind creating empowered and happy organizations. It might just change the way you think about leadership and success. Be sure to go to performancefaction.com/podcast and click on the post for this episode to purchase a discounted copy of the book. Enjoy the story. bRUH Welcome to the show today, everybody. I have Jack Skeels with Agency Agile and author of Unmanaged: Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations with us here today. Thank you so much for joining us today. Jack.
Jack:
Thanks for having me, Russel. Pretty excited about this.
Russel:
Let’s get right to it. I want to get to the book, but before we do that, talk to us a little bit. What is Agency Agile do and who do you do it for?
Jack:
Yeah. And so our name, our name implies we do a lot of agile, but we don’t, we actually make Agencies more agile, which is a lot bigger than that software agile thing, uh, improving how they work, operate, um, improved margins, happiness, uh, all that kind of thing. So we’ve been doing it for about 14 years now. And as I, as I note in the book, over 220 agencies that we’ve worked with. So that’s awesome. That’s a lot
Russel:
of agency. Now I must say. I almost was one of those agencies back when I was in the agency biz and I really wish I would have used what you guys do. I’ve, I’ve heard so many other people talk great stuff about it. So woulda, coulda, shoulda. But before we get to all the business talk, I want to know just a little bit more about your story. Tell me about young Jack and some of the highlights of how you ended up where you’re at today.
Jack:
People can’t see it cause we don’t video on this, but, uh, I’m not young anymore. So I’ll try and do the short version. I started out as a programmer coming out of college, uh, robotics programming, which was pretty rare back then. And I noticed something that led to all the things we’re going to talk about today, which is, I noticed that the managers were incredibly stupid and useless. I knew so much about this new technology and they knew nothing about it and they were trying to manage me and I thought, just get out of the way, I’ll do, I’ll do the work. And then ironically, within a couple of years, I got a, offered, um, project management and department management roles, which paid a lot more. You didn’t have to work as hard, frankly. So I took it, but it was, it was a very strange experience. All of a sudden being on the other side, playing a role that I actually didn’t believe in. And so I’ve always had this sort of skeptical view of managers, even myself as a manager, I went on and built a management technology consultancy, 90 people in the, in the 1990s. It ended up at Rand, the think tank. I sold to my partners, went to grad school and ended up at Rand corporation, the think tank. And I was actually the sort of resident MBA, business MBA there. And it was there for four years. And they had me study organizational design, organizational theory, and advise on sort of business and research matters. So it’s a very, very cool gig. But I actually learned how knowledge worker organizations are supposed to work and what the topics was, how should Rand itself work, right? I’m not, my parents were college professors. I didn’t want to be a college professor. Everyone there was kind of like a college professor. And so I went back into the real world and had some executive roles and startups, but I ended up in an agency in 2005. A shop called global gaming league that did video gaming. It was actually a pretty full service. And we had our own own ad network and we had our own sort of DJ podcast crew and all that kind of thing. But it was interest agencies were interesting. I’m like, wow, this is a really bizarre business. It’s different than other ones. And even way different than just software development, which I’d had a lot of experience with. And, uh, a couple of years later, I got recruited by Sapient, um, which is, um, so global marketing consultancy organization, I was running their LA office, 105 person office. And by the way, I love agency people. When I worked at my first agency, I was like, Oh, these are my folks. I’m sure your listeners know that there’s a totally different feel to the way people interact and, and the camaraderie and all that kind of thing. A couple of little bumps in that process and, and all of a sudden one day I was, I was thinking, Hey, what in the heck? How do you really run an agency? Because I, the other thing I realized is agencies are so crazy and chaotic and just, and people love it and they hate it. And, uh, I sort of set out on this journey. I was actually going to write a book and I did the research because I thought I was actually a superior manager at this point. And so I did the research on, on the book and, and I realized that, I In fact, people don’t understand how to manage these organizations. I came up with a huge, beautiful argument for it and everything. And then I realized I didn’t know how to either that I, that I, in fact, was a pretty bad manager in my own right, and I didn’t feel I could write the book. So I thought I’ve got to go do this. And I went out and did it at another agency and my boss at that agency and I eventually started Agency Agile. Because we got it to work and we’ve been doing it now for, like I said, 14 years.
Russel:
Obviously a lot of contributions you’ve made to the agency world and other businesses. So thank you for sharing that. Well, Let’s, let’s get into the book. I just recently read it and even preparation for today and can’t say enough about how much I really love it. So well put together and constructed and just really so many great insights. I’ve, I’ve got more highlights than I can handle. But you, you mentioned earlier in the conversation that this was been a long process and journey in the making. Just give a little insight to folks that, uh, home of what that process has been like for you.
Jack:
Well, yeah, well, thank you. You know, the thing that, that is probably the biggest thing was the doing all the work and then deciding you couldn’t write, I couldn’t write the book. Right. And then, um, you know, the. Revisiting that. So what happened is basically about five years ago, I said, okay, now it’s time to write the book and we were busy. I mean, we were still busy, but it was a, how do you squeeze this in? And how do you rethink all those things? And you, and you got to redo the research because it’s already 10 years old and there’s new stuff out there. It’s an amazing thing, writing a book, because everyone thinks how hard it is to write a book. And that’s actually not even the hard part. Yes, it is hard to put together 70, 000 words that, that are, have some sense to them and aren’t just a pile of doo doo all over the place, right? But then comes the editing process and oh my God. Some seasoned writers will say, you don’t write a book, you rewrite it. And rewrite it you do. After a while, by the way, if it’s, if it’s actually a sort of a big book, like a lot of content and stuff like that, you get sick of reading the book. I mean, it’s like the, that’s the last thing you want to do is open that manuscript because it’s like, and you know, it’s sort of like, if you listen to yourself, say a phrase over and over, it starts sounding stupid and you sound stupid kind of thing. And you run into this problem with the book you’re reading like, Oh, come on, Jack. Come on, can’t we say that better? Or, and you’d be shown to someone else and they’re like, that’s great. What are you talking about? So you eventually get this sort of hazy, you know if you’re out in the desert and you’re like getting dehydrated and you’re seeing illusions and, and it’s this very strange death march, if you will, to finally get to a point where you go. Thank goodness, the line editors are cleaning up the grammar, I can stop worrying about it. And then you find out, well, you do need to read it one more time. So really, um, really sort of brutal, um, but, but rewarding. I mean, it’s, it’s, uh, I, I had to set it down for a couple months after it first got published. I haven’t, I hadn’t cracked the book, I think for 60 days, I just I couldn’t even open the book. Well,
Russel:
I don’t know if we’ve inspired or scared away, uh, other folks out there who’ve thought about a book project, but, uh, uh, again, um, your, your work has paid off well. And in case we’ll cut to the chase for those who are listening, I highly recommend, a read on this. There’s so many great concepts that not only can apply to agency life, but even just the world of, of management and business and probably even life, if you’re really curious. Thinking about it. So, um, but I want to hear from you. How would you summarize what the book is about? Who needs to read this the most? And maybe what they should expect to get out of it.
Jack:
Yeah, I, I think it’s a book for the, the curious manager, the curious leader. Right. So the, um, I think right now there’s a, I know I talk about this a lot in the book. I’ll explain the title in a second too. I think there’s a very strong sort of belief in our business society that managing is very well understood. And you just go be a manager, like, and that’s, and that’s like the, one of the career highlights for people is to become a manager and, and then you should manage. And that’s obvious what that is. And that last part that it’s obvious what that is, is it couldn’t be farther from the truth. I call meetings, I check status reports, I whatever, that kind of thing. But that’s not actually managing and the people don’t, if I ask a manager, what’s, what’s your single most important thing that you do? They don’t have good criteria for it, much less being able to name a thing, right? It may be the meeting that the most people attend or something like that, which is a horrible thing. I go into it in the book in more detail. The reality when you dig into the research is that It is just mind blowing. And I had an idea of this early on, but then as I got into successive layers of the book and the like, it just became even more frightening if you will. The reality is the more managers you have in an organization and the more they manage is inversely proportional to how productive the organization is. And that is to say, the more you lean on management as a solution, the less productivity you get out of the organization, your workers. And in fact, the less happy workers are and the lower the quality of the work product and everything. And so this is the, Oh, I’ll just wrap this here with, this is the idea behind the title, right? And unmanaged, like it sounds like it’s a problem, right? Like my team is unmanaged. And in fact, my unmanaged team is outperforming your managed team, right? The, the idea that maybe we, as managers can all lean back a bit and, and do a couple of things great and then relax. Don’t worry. You don’t have to be, you don’t have to be mad. The more you manage, the lower productivity gets. So let’s manage only when we need
Russel:
it. It just makes me think, as you were explaining that, I mean, I think we, we’ve lived in this world where we have this most fearful term of micromanagement and that often leads to under management. But then I think that just what you’re kind of even talking to speaks to the idea of, do we even know what management is to start with? And that probably even helps people know where the difference of micromanagement under management is, but Great, great summary. And I mean, I would just, I just want to dive into, I’ve got so many highlights. There’s no way we can get into them all. Let’s do it. And, uh, let’s just, let’s talk about some of the things that or that really stood out, um, that I think will be helpful for the audience today. So you get right into kind of what you’re explaining there, this, this cost of management, I think you referenced as a management tax, and I don’t know if you’ve come across this term and I knew this was a thing and I only recently heard the, the not too long ago, the, the actual name of the term that they call it in the agency world, but the valley of death. Where agencies, once they hit a certain size that enter a very rough patch that often many don’t make it through or have to scale back, um, or worse in some cases. It seems that exactly what sizes occurs depends on a few factors, but in my observation, it starts where agencies have to start inserting management layers into the business middle management, as I like to say, is this true in your experience? And can you shed some light on this as it relates to the cost of management?
Jack:
Sure. I, I would love to hear, uh, I, this is a topic I talk about regularly at conferences and people are fascinated by it. I’m wondering what you think that average inflection point is. The point at which you go from being, Hey, this is kind of cool. Having the agency to geez, this is pretty hard. And everything we do, this seems to make it worse. What size, what people count it. Do you think that? So
Russel:
I think the main factor that I feel like I’ve observed is one, how many principles are, leaders you already naturally have in the business. A single owner business is probably going to encounter this, right. When they get past that 10 mark or something like that. If you’ve got a couple owners, I think you can get a little further. And then, um, Then generally speaking, if you’re in that 15 to 20 range, I think no matter you’re going to have 20 principles, I think you’re, you’re essentially running into it at that point. Not that any agencies really do that anyway, but, um, that, that seems to be where you’re not, you’re hitting that at that point, no matter what.
Jack:
Yeah. Yeah. So the, I’ve got a great chart and we’ve got some webinars on our, um, on demand webinars on our website on agencyagile. com where you can, uh, one, one of them is called”Why Agencies Become Crazy Places to Work.” Okay. That’s one of our premier webinars. And in it, I talk about, I have a chart where I show, um, state, you know, stages of growth by people count. And I’ll take you through it real quick. The, yeah. The five person agency is a beautiful agency, except for one thing, which is either you have zero clients, which you’re in panic, panic mode, right? Or you have just the right number of clients in which, in which case you’re in heaven, right? Or you have too many clients, which case you’re in panic mode again, right? So you’re very, very wobbly and tippy organization. And when you get up to that 15 number that you’re talking about, 15, 20, We start getting a deeper bench in every discipline And maybe we’re better at, at managing clients so we can keep the work smoother and probably 15, 20 people. You probably have 10, 10 clients or five or 10 clients at that point. I think that 15 to 25 person agency is about as good as it gets. In terms of, if you would just want that really good feel, I have some, some of the CEOs I’ve worked with. And, uh, you know, we always come in at the CEO level because you can’t change an agency unless the CEO wants to change, and so I get to make friends with them, which is fun and stay in touch. And one of my, one of my great friends, one of early clients. In fact, he and I go for sushi all the time. He had a 45 person agency, two offices, and now he has a 25 person agency, 20 to 25, one office. And he says, I’ve never been happier. We make plenty of money. Everybody loves everyone. Our clients love us. It’s everyone just works normal hours. He goes, this is the best it’s ever been. I don’t want to ever get big again. So this is that there is that number there. And then, like you said, the funny thing is. If you look at a, the doubling of a 50 person agency, you, you nailed it. One of the biggest things you see is the creation of what we call the quasi manager class. So we start getting a lot of, you know, account or client services managers. I start getting project managers. I start getting even strategy. People are often sort of managers, right? They’re sort of requirements, managers. And then I’ve got department managers too. So I have like these four categories of managers and any given person trying to get some work done has, you know, multiple projects, multiple managers, eight or 10 people that can tell them what to do on any given day. It’s like, it’s management insanity.
Russel:
This is giving me Office Space vibes. And I imagine most people in agency think like, Oh, there’s no way we’re like. That how they depict, you know, the corporate world in Office Space. But when you start to talk to it, it’s like, well, maybe you might be closer than you might think. We’re just not talking about TPS reports. Yeah. That’s really great how you put that. So one of the other things too, I think is even going back to, and being a history major, I just always love to know how we got to where we’re at in any given state of things. So you really covered that well in the historical perspective of, of why we’ve got this management conundrum today. And so, yeah, if you don’t mind, it might be hard to cover all that history, but shed some light on how we got to where we’re at here today, when you talk about management,
Jack:
It’s my favorite section actually. So, but you couldn’t read the book. No one would buy that book. Right. So I, I inserted it early on, so everyone has to read it. I think the place to start is that back before 1880 or so, Managing didn’t exist. It wasn’t that we didn’t have a relationship between less experienced workers and more experienced workers. We did. And that was sort of the master apprentice model. But that’s a different model. I mean, nominally it has some managing in it, but it’s actually a teaching model. In other words, and I have a little vignette in there, but Andreas, the saddle making master, right? And he’s teaching young saddle maker and his job is to not make saddles anymore. His job is to make saddle makers. And so this is a, the idea of the, you know, the, the master, the teacher, the, you know, the Yoda or whatever. And then when we came to industrial management, factory automation machines and all that kind of thing. This guy named Friedrich Taylor came in. He was later called the first management consultant, but he came in and he said, well, we really need to do the problem is not the machines. They work great. It’s the problem is the people and the people need to be managed. And that was the first use of the word. He started that word. The word manage existed before that moment, but it meant to handle livestock. So intrinsically, this idea of managing was really a very, I’m in charge of you. You’re too stupid to know which direction to go. Kind of. Kind of ethos, right? And his, and he was even famous for saying that sometimes workers need to be treated like oxen. And, uh, one other great quote, which is”it is the job of the manager to enforce cooperation.” And I don’t know about you, but enforced cooperation is not cooperation. Right. And so the, and this is, and largely our idea of managing came from Friedrich Taylor’s work. It was called scientific management. It lives on today. It’s insanely horrible way to run things, but it was bet, you know, the master apprentice model didn’t work for factories and the like. So we’ve learned a lot since then. It happened in Japan. It’s happened here in the US, but surprisingly, we’re still stuck with this idea that managers are better that managers are exceptional and it comes from this thing called we call the meritocracy. Which is the best person in the department gets promoted and they’re since they’re the best somehow that means that everyone else isn’t and the, and what we need is for people. And this is my hope from the book. We need for people to get back to that master apprentice model. When you become the manager, your job is really a master role. And you should, you’re trying to get everyone else as good as you not be the top of the hill, but to be pushing everyone else up the hill. And that, that essentially is a broken thing inside of the way we think about man. Yeah. Wow.
Russel:
Again, such a great job of covering what is a tremendous amount of history in such a, uh, a small snippet here, um, which, you know, kind of alludes to, and you talk a little bit about the book of just the different classifications of organizations. And I think that industrialization model or whatever works well when we’re making widgets and the same thing over and over again, and that, that can, Probably still not the best way, but it works better. But then you talk about this idea of project driven organizations, which is basically what I assume most agencies effectively fall into. And more importantly, you say, and this really, really hits home, I think for a lot of agency owners is”it’s a difficult business, the doing of new things”, uh, as is quoted from the book. Can you share why that hits home so much from, from all the agency owners out there?
Jack:
Well, I, you know, I think the one of the big things I wanted to point out there, and I point out three types of organizations, the product driven, that’s the factory, the process driven, which is like a bureaucracy, like the Department of Motor Vehicles. And the third is this project driven organization, which it does something. The definition of it is, yeah. You’re doing something new every time you do it. Look, I can call cleaning my office a project. But it’s not really a project. It’s, it’s a task I have to do or something like that. Projects as we mean them in the business sense is we’re building something or creating something that hasn’t been created before. If it had been created before, then we wouldn’t be doing the project. Maybe we’re implementing a new system or whatever. Yeah. But agencies are in this sort of bleeding edge of, we’re going to do something we’ve never done before, and we’re going to try and do it like it’s never been done before. And maybe we’re going to do it with a different group of people than we did last time, because we want to be more creative. And yeah, we did it last year for this client, but we’re going to throw all that out. God forbid we learn from it and actually do something new and completely different. And this sort of people call that, well, that’s creativity. That’s innovation. It’s creative destruction, whatever phrases you want to use. But what it means is that you’re always sort of tearing up all the plans that exist and having to figure it out as you go. So this is the, that’s the nature of those organizations. And I don’t know a single agency manager that doesn’t wish that they were a product driven organization. Can’t we make this all repetitive? Can’t we actually, why can’t we, why can’t we follow process? And the answer is you can’t follow process when it’s a process that you haven’t done before. When it’s something you haven’t built before and that you’re trying to do. Flipping the teams around. It’s a different client and they have different needs. It defies strict process definition. I’ll close with the last, the proof of that, which is every single agency has processed documents. Sometimes a huge library of them. Here’s how we operate. Okay. And nobody reads them. And even those that read them do not follow them. So it’s not a product driven organization. It’s a project driven organization.
Russel:
You know, it definitely alludes to, I mean, I’ve said that, and I think I’ve learned this even more since I’ve stepped away from the agency business. I’ve always said it’s a hard business and, uh, you know, I think a simpler way of or what I think about it, you speak to it so eloquently, but that it’s just a hard business and it’s the most people business of all people businesses. And you’re talking about, you know, humans in general, creative concepts. Not only do we have to get people on board to do the work in a certain fashion and a certain quality, but then we’ve got to bring the client along with that journey. And you’re just talking about so many darn people elements, which just, yeah, it makes it very complicated. You’re spot on. We were kind of talking about this earlier, but I think a great premise in the book is that managing without method, I think is how you refer to it. And that many agency owners maybe don’t even think about this when they’re growing, but they accidentally find themselves in a manager role. And then maybe even other people eventually in the organization accidentally also find themselves in a manager role. And then even, One, haven’t had a lot of great experiences or examples or experience doing it. I can’t count how many owners I’ve talked to that started their agency simply because of how bad their work experience was, or bad management experiences in general. So what’s the first step for recovery for the unintended manager?
Jack:
Yeah, I think the, So the conundrum that I had in this, I’ll explain a little bit about the book as well is if what I said is true about the manager tax, right, which is that be careful, you might do something. And I give a really cool example with a daily standup meeting, right, where you can actually destroy the daily standup meeting by making the wrong managerial comment at a certain point in time and everything. We’ve actually proven it empirically. And so then the thing is, well, gosh, how do I know even, because I’ve, I have this million managerial moments, right? Which is that, uh, how many decisions do I make as a manager every day? Hundreds at least, right? Every move I make is something. So how do I know what to do and how do I, as an author, you know, Give someone advice on that? And I, the thing I settled on is, you know, generally you should be doing less and thinking about it more, but there are four key managerial moments. And this is the structure of the book, really four key managerial moments in which you need to have very specific behaviors. And if you do that, if you succeed there. Then teams run a lot better. And this is what we teach. We teach the methods as part of Agency Agile. We come in and teach clients how to do it. So these are proven. It isn’t as simple as just reading three pages in a book or anything like that, but you can see from the way I described the activity and the exercise, um, that there are just, uh, there’s a pattern to some of these things. And my hope is, uh, I know from our existing clients, when they read the book, they go. Uh, yeah, I totally get why we’re doing this and it explains it. Um, the hope is that people can sort of see it and go, all right, so I need to find a different way to do that thing. And here’s that moment. I’m going to try and do it differently and the like. And I think that’s, that’s about as good as it gets as an entry point, which is, can I stop and think, what is this moment? Is this one of those moments that is important for me to act in a certain way? And if so, What is that way I should be acting literally if you just, it says the why, what go grow or the four moments. If you just got one of them, right, you’d boost productivity and you’d just go home for the day. Right. Okay. It’s just better.
Russel:
I like that. That’s someone that can get it, maybe create those little wristbands or something that has that written on it. I think that, you know, kind of in a similar note that is a core of management issues, whether accidentally intentionally, et cetera, is who’s often getting put into these positions and why, and, you know, in all kinds of organizations, right? It’s, it’s for all things, not management skills, but they’re really great at something else. And and you’re starting to hint on a little bit, but, uh, you know, what are some of the challenges that stem from someone being in that manager role that really doesn’t possess management skills and perhaps sometimes doesn’t even want to.
Jack:
Yeah, it’s a, it’s a strange conundrum that we, um, and there’s cool research on it that we promote the best people in the department to manager roles. The research says a couple of things. One is that they’re horrible managers on average. And second is that doing that actually decreases the productivity of the department. You can think of the obvious thing, which is you took your best most productive smartest person and now gave them a different job. And even if they can still do some of the old job, you’ve got to subtract the managerial time out of that. And sometimes that can be pretty significant. It also means that they can’t get deeply into work because managing is chaotic activity. I mean, it’s you. Interrupted by other managers all the time and that kind of thing. It’s this very strange thing where all of a sudden I decreased the productivity and then there are other effects like, and I think you sort of got at it. The skills that I needed to get to that promotion, right? Which are things one is. I need to have a really critical inner voice, like I, when I do something, I need to think it still looks like shit and try and figure out how to do it better. There’s a way that I have need to have a vocabulary that’s polite yet points out how everyone else is not as good as me. I need to be quite driven. Okay. And, and show the effect of, I care more than others, all those things weigh into that. And as a manager, those are horrible things. Those are, is it essentially everything that I did to get to this spot, I have to stop doing and essentially do the opposite of it with no experience in doing the opposite of. I spent, I spent 15 years to get this promotion or five years to get this promotion. And tomorrow. I have to do the exact opposite. I have no clue. We do, we do coaching of managers and leaders as well, because that’s just part of the business is people get into those spots, but it’s a, it’s a tragedy. I mean, people get, you know, people get very unhappy in those roles. He sort of indicated that. And when we do our, when we do our big transformation projects, a lot of those managers can sort of stop managing as much. And they, to your point, they love it. They love the idea that. That they can get back into the thing that they loved doing so much. And
Russel:
I mean, I love how you speak to that. Right. And, and in terms of not even just the, the hard skills that they have is why they got promoted, but the soft skills that the personality traits effectively that got them there, that No, maybe aren’t the best for management. I learned this probably the hard way eventually in the agency journey, but I made it a strong point to create paths for people that never feel like their only way for them to grow a lot of times would be, especially from a financial perspective was into a manager role so that someone wasn’t, you know, one, someone was coming to that willingly and because they liked it and was generally good about getting people to do better, not, Hey, I want to make more money. So this is the only way to do it. I’m not sure that always worked out a hundred percent of the way it was intended, but I can definitely feel a lot of the pain that comes from just having the people with the wrong skills in a role like that and where it decreases productivity.
Jack:
The research has a little thing and I forget the exact term, but they have deep specialist is the research term for the most skilled person in the organization. And then they had a, um, an adjective on, on generalist and I forget what it was. It was like the competent generalist or something like that. So you, you want to find someone who knows. Everything about the department, right? And is good enough to tell what good and bad is. But otherwise they, they don’t need to, in fact, they’re better off organizations do run better with that, with that generalist role getting promoted to manager. So the question is then, what do you do for your deep specialists? You can give them other rewards. You can give them a title change. It just doesn’t have manager in it. Give them guru or master of all, I don’t know, whatever you want. You’ll keep your productivity and hopefully keep
Russel:
your people. That’s a great lesson. Great takeaway there. So I think another big struggle that I think is indicative of these project driven organizations and right. As you mentioned, creating new things is some sense of measuring productivity. And this is why so many agencies often default to management by the hour. We know that’s not the best way, but it just seems like a lot of things times that the only answer that they can come up with is that’s how they’re going to go about doing it. So you share some great and simple ideas about what sound like metrics to focus on when it comes to management productivity. Can you share more about that?
Jack:
Yeah, so the part of the idea of a manager, I’ll, I’ll sort of go to the, what I call the first law of unmanagement. Which is this idea that the, the single most important thing that a manager can do is enable productivity in the workers. And that means all the things that they need to actually be maximally productive, and also none of the things that actually decrease their productivity. That’s my little guideline is make sure it’s going to add to their productivity and among the, the reason. So if we think about that, the, the productivity of the organization is the productivity of the workers. Managers aren’t productive. Managing isn’t productive. It’s kind of, you know, it’s contrary to productivity actually. But the, the workers are. And so if we start organizing that way, then, then it isn’t asking managers how productive everyone is. It’s actually asking the people who are productive, how productive they are, and you can start doing things like that, and the research bears this out as well. Asking quote unquote workers, if you will, the non managerial group, asking them a range of questions about the organization, you get better data. That is the data, the responses they give you actually track better across time than the managerial answers. Like if you say, How are we doing on quality? And you ask the managers and the managers are like, well, my job is quality. So we’re doing really good. And you ask the workers and you’ll actually get a good number. In fact, a lot of times we used to do this for fun. We would ask the team what they thought the quality of the work they’d produced for the client was, and then we’d ask the client and the numbers were always so close to each other. It’s like, no one’s hiding anything. But you ask the managers and they’re, it’s always like, Two points higher. Oh, it was a 9. 5 and the team’s like 7. 5. And so the use of the team is essential to get really understanding what’s going on. And you can ask things like quality. Uh, we have an eight point scorecard at agency agile, but includes things like. How productive are you? Just simple question. Are you able to be productive? How often are you getting interrupted in your work? How well do you understand the work that you’re doing? You ask a manager how well they did a briefing. I spent a lot of time on briefings in the book. You ask a manager how well they’re briefing. I can tell you from my experience, I was amazing at briefing, uh, but not. Okay. And the, the real question is you ask the team member. Did you understand, do you understand what you’re supposed to work on and what it needs to be and all that kind of thing? And you get some pretty sad answers in there. They’re like, no, not really. No, Jack talked to us for a half hour, but I still don’t know what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. So it’s the, there are a set of metrics I go, you know, and there are, like I said, there are eight of them. I think six at least are in the book. Measure from the core of the productivity of the organization, that is the worker, the maker, the team member. Love that.
Russel:
And so, yeah, if you want to look more at that, and I mean, needless to say, go read the book, folks, but because I think that is some really great insight in terms of what we should actually really be measuring when we’re going about this, this complicated work we’re doing. We kind of been highlighting and I think it’s been, it’s kind of been read between the lines and some of the conversation, but it seems very important to just be very succinct at defining what the role of a manager is and how does that, how do you define that?
Jack:
Yeah, it, it is just what I was getting at. I’m going to step back and explain why real quickly, which is back at, you could make the argument back in 1920 when factories were filled with workers that were immigrants from Europe, maybe didn’t speak English, maybe no education, um, or the farm, the rural farm poor that have come to the big city because they were starving on the farms and everything. You could argue that there was a huge gap in both both knowledge and also thinking capacity between managers and team members or workers that’s gone. I mean, that’s completely gone. That was gone 40 years ago, right? And now it’s even worse is that you’re the people you have inside your organization probably understand more about doing what they’re doing than you do as a manager or over time they will. And so this idea of what is it that you need? This is really the question that probably the best question that a manager should be asking of workers and truly asking it, not, not saying what is it that they need and I know what they need, but actually saying to the team, what is it that you need? What do you need to understand? What do I need to get for you? What do you need for time to work on this? What do you need for people getting in your way or out of your way? And it’s that essentially that’s the heart of management is is how do I make sure that only one but everything I’m doing is serving the productive function of the work. I love that.
Russel:
And it’s almost like a paradigm shift. Just hearing you talk through that, right? I think we’ve developed in this mind coming from all these things. It’s what we tell people is what makes us a good manager, but everything you said there is it’s what questions you should be asking as a manager is really going to help define success and really epitomize that role as you described it. Very cool. Well we talked about a little bit, but just specifically for the folks out there that are sitting there saying, I need to take the first step here. First step might be just recognition of the problem, but maybe the second step then is if I want to move towards this idea of unmanaging, what should I do?
Jack:
Well, of course the book might be a good place to start as well. You can find that on Amazon. Um, you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn and happy to connect with you and, and we can go back and forth a bit also, right now, agencycagile.com is my consultancy where we help companies do this step by step, bit by bit. Whether it’s coaching the managers and leaders or actually doing big transformation projects, we will also, depending on when you’re listening to this, you will probably still be able to find us that way, but we’re actually rebranding. It’s a very exciting sort of owner topic and we’ll be called better company. Uh, because we want to make yours a better company.
Russel:
It sounds like a much better fitting name. As you even said, agency agile is, can we even be misleading into what you guys already do? I can see so much just behind this book where just name the company and what you do. And, and, and you guys have nailed it there. Well, yeah, yeah. Thank you. A couple, couple more questions before we wrap up here is you’ve got a curious and captive audience of agency folks out there. What didn’t I ask does it relate to the book or in general that they need to hear?
Jack:
I think one of the topics I thought we might hit is actually this idea of what type of manager should I hire? And when should I hire a manager? And I’m going to go to the story of Ben, the CEO inside the book. And it’s a, it’s one of my favorite little vignettes and the like. And Ben had a 120 person agency with eight managers. I didn’t believe him when he told me that. And. I said, well, and he showed me an org chart and it was true. And he, I said, well, how did you do that? And Ben said, well, I never really liked agencies that much, but I wanted to have one and I decided that every time I came to make a decision, I would decide, what would an agency do? And that would do the opposite. And in many cases, that was the agency would hire a manager for it. And instead, what Ben did is he said, Can I get other people to do this? Like, would the team members do this? And the answers almost always were yes. We, well, we manage our lives, all of us, everyone in your organization. If you’re an agency owner, think of all how complex life is. Okay. Just like planning your weekend or something like that, that everyone knows how to solve problems and figure out things and deal with other people. And so there’s really nothing special about managing, except just making sure that it happens when it needs to happen. And I think Ben was such a great example of that as saying, you know, Okay. I’m going to need someone to do employee reviews. Okay. And that can’t be just your buddy, you know, that kind of thing. So I’ll need someone. And that’s what his managers largely were, was just sort of practice leaders. In other words, are we doing this craft well? But they weren’t actually in between the team and the client at all and everything. So I think that’s the, that’s one of the key ideas is that managers are an option, not a necessity. And you won’t be able to go to zero, but if you take that attitude, you’re going to minimize the number of managers you have, and you actually boost the happiness and productivity of the organization.
Russel:
I don’t think anybody can argue with wanting to do that and I, I love just kind of what you’re alluding to there is, is goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning of getting back to this apprentice model. We’re, we’re no longer doing the thing where we become teachers, uh, and when we’re in this management role and that’s really the, the key focus. Man, I wish there were 20 more things we could cover today. Uh, yeah, this is fun. And, uh, it’s been such a great conversation. So as we wrap up here, I’ll ask you the question I ask everybody on the show., Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Jack:
Oh, man. I, you know, I think every entrepreneur I know, which most of them are agency CEOs, but other folks as well are driven by some sort of itch. And you, you, um, you acknowledged it early on. I think he’d said something about one itch might be, I hated all my bosses, which was my case by the way. And, or that I, I wanted, I want to make something in. In my own style or something. And, and there’s so many variations on all of that, or, you know, or here’s a great opportunity. I’m going to run with it. I don’t know where that comes from, but I know that’s the essential part of, of being an entrepreneur. I think that the people I’d call their real entrepreneurs are people who are sort of driven by this itch to, to, to not be part of the pack. Oh,
Russel:
Beautiful. Love that. Not be part of the pack. Well, folks, uh, you, you heard step two in this whole process. Go read the book. I promise you’re going to love it. Go to the agency agile website, you won’t regret it. And so thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for writing the book, Jack. Thank you for sharing all these wonderful insights. It’s been an absolute pleasure having a conversation with you.
Jack:
Wow is all I can say. Russel. Great interview. Great questions. And, and thank you for reading the book and, and, and getting it. It’s just, it’s always, um, it is nothing, no greater gift for an author to hear someone has read the book and understands it like you do. So thank you for taking the time to do that.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Jack:
I’m going to go back to my early career. Okay. And I don’t know if I don’t think I mentioned it in the book. I dropped out of college in the middle of, you know, after you dropped out, I got thrown out. Okay. To be fair, I got thrown out and I thought, screw this stuff. My parents were college professors, but screw this. I’m just going to go, I’m going to go work at a factory and be a plumber. And I did that for three or four months as a part time, you know, as a, uh, temporary, you know, just, Um, probation, if you will, whatever. And I got to, uh, I got to September, October when I was supposed to get my, my job offer from them. And they said, no, no, we’re going to let you go. You don’t belong as a plumber. And I was like, I was heartbroken. I thought, Oh my God, what, how low is my, my career going to go? I’ll get fired as a plumber. And they, they ended it with a very sweet comment, which they said, Jack, go back to college. You belong in college. You’re going to be a horrible plumber. And so that was, that was a gift. It was a wonderful gift. I still remember the man, Chuck Hanby, who gave it to me.
Russel:
We’re glad he did. And as amazing as I’m sure you would have been as a plumber where you’ve done far better off and in your current endeavors.
