Are You Using AI for $10 Tasks or $10,000 Decisions?
Groundbreaking reports from OpenAI and Anthropic reveal a "Great AI Divide," separating agencies that use AI for low-value automation from those that leverage it as a strategic thought partner for the high-stakes decisions that drive growth.
Why Your Agency's Growth Depends on Shifting from Automation to Augmentation
Artificial Intelligence is no longer a novelty; it’s a standard tool in every marketing agency's arsenal. But most are stuck in the shallow end, using these powerful tools for low-value $10 tasks like writing social media posts. This is the equivalent of using a supercomputer to run a calculator. You're busy, but you're not growing. The real opportunity—the one that separates thriving agencies from future relics—lies in using AI for the $10,000 decisions that shape client success and your bottom line.
Groundbreaking new reports from AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic confirm a "Great AI Divide" between those who use AI to do and those who use it to decide. This article is your blueprint for crossing that divide. We’ll provide an actionable framework to shift your agency’s AI focus from simple automation to high-value strategic augmentation, helping you unlock real, sustainable growth.
Table of Contents
The AI Productivity Paradox in Your Agency
If you run a small marketing agency, your days are a blur of controlled chaos. You're juggling client reports, brainstorming campaign ideas, putting out fires, and somehow trying to find time for new business development. When generative AI exploded onto the scene, it felt like a lifeline.
Suddenly, you had a junior copywriter, a graphic design intern, and a research assistant on call 24/7. You’re probably using it to:
Draft social media calendars in minutes.
Generate ten different blog post titles in seconds.
Summarize competitor articles to "stay informed."
The productivity gains feel real. You’re saving time, and time is money. But is it?
While you're busy saving $10 on a blog post, your competitors are using AI to make $10,000 decisions. They’re not just asking it to write; they’re asking it to think. They're using it to analyze market data, stress-test client strategies, and uncover revenue opportunities you're too busy to see.
This isn't just a theory. Two of the most important reports on AI usage ever published have just confirmed this massive gap in application. The findings are a wake-up call for every agency owner who believes their subscription to ChatGPT or Claude is a sufficient AI strategy. It's not. Your agency’s survival depends on evolving from an AI-assisted content farm into an AI-augmented strategic partner.
The Great AI Divide: What the Research Actually Says
An insightful analysis published by The Neuron breaks down two landmark reports from OpenAI and Anthropic and the results paint a picture of two parallel AI revolutions happening at once. The divide between them is where your agency's future will be decided.
The OpenAI Report: Your AI as a Personal Advisor
OpenAI’s research on ChatGPT usage delivered a stunning revelation: a massive 73% of all use is for personal, non-work-related tasks. This figure has jumped from 53% in just one year, showing that as people get more comfortable with AI, they integrate it into their lives as a thinking tool, not just a workhorse.
The study introduced a powerful framework for understanding user intent: "Asking" vs. "Doing."
"Doing" (40% of use) is when a user delegates a task, like "write an email" or "create a table". This is pure automation.
"Asking" (49% of use) is when a user seeks advice, clarification, or a second opinion to inform their own decisions. This is decision support, or augmentation.
Crucially, users report higher satisfaction from "Asking" interactions. The most telling insight for agencies, however, was this:
Highly educated professionals are significantly more likely to use ChatGPT for "Asking.". They leverage AI not to replace their work, but to enhance their judgment—to act as a co-pilot and a strategic sounding board.
Your Agency Takeaway: Your clients pay for your expertise and strategic judgment, not just your ability to execute tasks. The most valuable professionals are already using AI to sharpen that exact skill. Are you?
The Anthropic Report: Your AI as an Automation Engine
While individuals are using AI to think better, the business world is sprinting in the opposite direction. Anthropic’s first-ever analysis of its enterprise API data shows that a staggering 77% of business use is for pure automation—delegating a complete task to its AI, Claude.
This trend is creating what the report calls the "Great AI Divide". This divide isn't just between personal and business use; it's a rapidly widening gap between prepared and unprepared companies, and between wealthy, tech-savvy nations and emerging economies. Small marketing agencies, often operating with limited resources and technical expertise, are at serious risk of being left behind.
The big players are building ruthless automation engines. They are integrating AI as a system to execute tasks, stripping away the conversational layer to get to the economically efficient core: the output.
Your Agency Takeaway: You cannot win a war of scale against large companies building pure automation pipelines. Your competitive advantage lies in the one area they are ignoring: bespoke, high-touch, strategically augmented thinking.
PS. Here’s the links to the actual research:
Are You Stuck in the $10 AI Trap? A Quick Diagnosis
The lure of low-value automation is strong because it provides immediate, visible results. But it’s a trap that leads to the commoditization of your services. If your primary value-add can be replicated by a simple prompt, your agency is on borrowed time.
Ask yourself honestly if this sounds like your agency’s current AI strategy:
Your main use for AI is generating first drafts of content like social media captions, ad copy, or blog posts.
You measure the ROI of your AI tools primarily in "hours saved" on production tasks.
The most complex document you've ever given your AI is a transcript to summarize. You've never uploaded a client's performance marketing spreadsheet or sales data.
When preparing for a client meeting, you use AI as a glorified search engine ("what are marketing trends in the CPG industry?") rather than a strategy partner ("critique our proposed Q4 strategy for our CPG client").
You view AI as a way to do more work, faster, not as a way to make smarter decisions.
If you checked more than one of these boxes, you are likely operating in the $10 task zone. You're stuck in the "Doing" model that OpenAI’s research identified, without leveraging the high-value "Asking" that top professionals prioritize. This isn’t just inefficient; it’s dangerous. You're training your team—and your clients—to see AI as a content machine, devaluing the strategic thinking that truly justifies your fees.
The Blueprint for $10,000 AI Decisions
Shifting from a task-doer to a strategic operator doesn't require a bigger budget or a new suite of tools. It requires a new methodology. The key to unlocking high-value AI work lies in solving what the Anthropic report calls the "context bottleneck."
The report's crucial insight is that a company's ability to deploy AI for high-impact tasks is constrained not by the AI's intelligence, but by its own ability to collect, digitize, and feed the model the right information. Simply put: high-quality outputs require high-quality inputs. This is where small, nimble agencies have a massive advantage.
The report states that a company's ability to deploy AI for high-impact tasks is constrained not by the AI's intelligence, but by its own ability to collect, digitize, and feed the model the right information. This is where small, nimble agencies have a massive advantage. Your deep, nuanced understanding of your clients is your unique context—your secret weapon. Here’s how to wield it.
Step 1: Become a Master of Context Curation
Your agency's most valuable asset isn't your creative team; it's the trove of client-specific data and insights you possess. It’s time to treat it like one.
For each client, create a centralized "Client Brain." This can be a dedicated folder in Google Drive, a Notion database, or a similar system. It should be a living repository containing:
Foundational Documents: Brand guidelines, mission/vision statements, voice and tone documents.
Audience Insights: Customer personas, interview transcripts, survey results.
Performance Data: Exported spreadsheets from Google Analytics, social media platforms, ad managers, and sales CRMs.
Past Work & Results: Your most successful (and unsuccessful) campaigns, with commentary on why they worked or didn't.
This curated context is the fuel for your $10,000 AI engine. Without it, you’re just getting generic advice. With it, you're getting a personalized strategic analysis.
Step 2: Master the $10,000 Prompt
Stop asking AI to simply create. Start directing it to analyze, synthesize, and strategize. A high-value prompt gives the AI a role, provides rich context (by referencing your Client Brain), and asks for an output that informs a major decision.
Here are three examples of prompts that can lead to $10,000 decisions:
New Business Pitch Prompt:
"Act as our agency's Chief Strategy Officer. I have uploaded two documents: [1] the full RFP from a prospective client, ProspectX, and [2] a summary of our three most successful client case studies in the B2B SaaS industry. Analyze these documents. Based on ProspectX's stated goals and our proven strengths, identify the single biggest strategic opportunity they are overlooking. Then, draft three penetrating questions we can ask in our pitch meeting that will expose this gap and position our agency as the only logical partner to fill it."
Quarterly Client Strategy Prompt:
"You are a senior marketing analyst preparing for a Quarterly Business Review with our client, ClientY. I've uploaded a spreadsheet with their performance data from the last six months, including website traffic, lead sources, conversion rates, and customer LTV. Their primary goal for the next six months is to increase marketing-qualified leads by 30% without increasing their ad budget. Analyze the data for patterns and anomalies. Identify the top-performing marketing channel and audience segment we should double down on. More importantly, identify the biggest drain on their budget—the channel or campaign with the worst ROI—and build a data-backed case for reallocating those funds to the winning initiatives."
Market Expansion Prompt:
"Act as a market expansion consultant. Our client, ClientZ, is a successful DTC e-commerce brand in the US. They are considering expanding to the UK and Germany. I have uploaded a market research report detailing consumer behavior and competitive landscapes in both regions. Analyze the report and provide a recommendation. Create a table comparing the pros and cons of launching in each market first. Conclude with a definitive recommendation and outline a three-step pilot marketing plan for the chosen market, including key messaging pillars that will resonate with the local culture."
Step 3: Use AI for Augmentation, Not Just Answers
The most powerful application of AI in a strategic setting is as a collaborator. Don't just accept its first output. Use it to refine your own thinking. This is the essence of the "thought partner" dynamic described in the OpenAI report.
Generate your own strategy first, then ask the AI to critique it. "Here is our proposed campaign plan. Act as a skeptical CFO and identify the three weakest assumptions in this plan and the metrics you'd need to see to approve the budget."
Use it for role-playing. "We're about to negotiate our retainer with a difficult client. Act as that client, who is focused on cutting costs, and give me three arguments you would make against our proposed fee increase. Then, provide a strong, data-driven counter-argument for each."
Conclusion: Your Agency's Next Evolution
The AI revolution isn't about replacing you; it's about augmenting you. But that requires a conscious choice. You can continue to use AI for the $10 tasks that keep you busy, or you can start leveraging it for the $10,000 decisions that will make you indispensable.
The research is clear: a "Great AI Divide" is forming, separating task-based automators from strategy-focused augmentors. For small marketing agencies, the path to survival and prosperity is to firmly plant your flag on the side of augmentation. By curating your unique client context and mastering the art of the strategic prompt, you can transform AI from a simple assistant into a powerful partner for growth. Don't just get more efficient. Get smarter.
Ready to Make the Leap from $10 Tasks to $10,000 Decisions?
You have the client knowledge. You have the ambition. But bridging the gap to become a true AI-powered strategic agency can be daunting. You don't have to do it alone. Let's spend 30 minutes building a custom AI roadmap for your agency. We'll identify your biggest opportunities for strategic augmentation and outline the first three steps you can take to start delivering more value to your clients and your bottom line.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q1: We're a small team with limited time. Isn't it better to focus on using AI for time-saving on content creation?
A: Focusing on efficiency is a great starting point, but it's a short-term win that can lead to long-term commoditization. The research clearly shows that the most sustainable value lies in decision support and augmentation. While your competitors spend an hour using AI to save $10 on copy, you could be spending that same hour using AI to uncover an insight that lands a six-figure client. It’s about focusing on leverage, not just efficiency.
Q2: My client data is a complete mess across a dozen different platforms. Where do I even start with creating a "Client Brain"?
A: You've just identified the "context bottleneck" that the Anthropic report correctly flags as the biggest barrier to high-value AI work. Don't try to boil the ocean. Start small. Pick one key client. Create a single Google Doc. In it, paste their brand mission, their target audience persona, and the topline results from their last major campaign. The simple act of starting this curation process will immediately put you ahead of 90% of other agencies.
Q3: Is there a specific AI tool—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—that is best for this kind of strategic work?
A: The specific tool is less important than the methodology. The principles of providing deep, curated context and asking open-ended, strategic questions apply to any of the leading large language models. The key is shifting your team's mindset and your agency's workflows away from using AI as a "content generator" and toward using it as a "strategy collaborator." Every major frontier lab- OpenAI, Anthropic, Google- as of 2025 is more than adequate for this work.
Q4: I'm worried clients will just learn to do this themselves and cut out agencies entirely. Is that a risk?
A: Clients will absolutely learn to use AI for the $10 tasks—and you should encourage them to! It frees up their budget for what really matters. They will not, however, replace you for the $10,000 decisions. A client does not have your cross-industry perspective, your experience with hundreds of campaigns, or the curated, objective view of their own data. Your value is in providing that unique context and asking the right questions—using AI to supercharge your expertise, not to replace it.
Your value isn't just knowing the map; it's in being the expert guide who helps the client navigate it. AI is the tool that just gave you a satellite view.
Is Team Building a Waste of Time? How to Measure the Real Impact on Your Work
Stop treating team building as a fluffy expense and start proving its value by focusing on one key metric, calculating the cost of your biggest bottleneck, and measuring the real financial return on your investment.
When you hear "mandatory team building," you probably don't jump for joy. More often, you picture a day of awkward games, forced small talk, and the nagging feeling that you could be spending this time on your actual work.
Most of us have been through team-building events that felt disconnected from our daily jobs. They might be fun for an afternoon, but on Monday, everything goes back to exactly how it was before. The same communication gaps, the same project delays, the same frustrations.
But what if team development could be different? What if it was designed not just for "fun," but to solve the real, tangible problems that slow your team down? And what if you could actually prove it worked?
You can. By focusing on one key metric that matters to your team, you can measure the real impact of team development and find solutions that stick.
How to Measure Team Building ROI in 4 Steps:
Pinpoint a Bottleneck: Identify a single, measurable KPI to improve (e.g., Rework Rate).
Calculate the Cost: Put a dollar value on the problem by tracking its impact.
Introduce a Solution & Measure Again: After team development, track the KPI again to see the change.
Calculate the Return: Use a simple formula to prove the financial ROI of your investment.
Step 1: Pinpoint Your Team's Biggest Bottleneck
Before you can measure improvement, you have to know what you’re trying to fix. Instead of focusing on vague goals like "better morale," pick one specific, measurable Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that reflects your team's biggest operational headache.
For most marketing agencies, the pain points are pretty common. Which of these sounds most familiar?
The Rework Rate: How much time does your team spend redoing work because of miscommunications, unclear briefs, or mixed signals? This is a huge, often hidden, drain on time and energy.
Project Delays: Are your projects constantly blowing past their deadlines? Are you waiting on approvals or feedback, causing a traffic jam for everyone else?
Excessive Client Revision Cycles: Do you find yourselves in a seemingly endless loop of client feedback? This can be a sign that the team isn't aligned internally before presenting work externally.
These bottlenecks appear in every department. For other teams, it might look like:
For Sales Teams: High Sales Cycle Length or a low Lead-to-Conversion Rate.
For Engineering Teams: A high Bug Re-open Rate or long Code Cycle Times.
For Customer Support Teams: Low First-Contact Resolution Rate or high Average Handle Time.
Your task: Talk with your team. Identify the single biggest bottleneck that, if you could fix it, would make the biggest difference in your daily work. This will be the KPI you measure.
Step 2: Calculate the "Cost of the Problem"
Now it's time to attach a number to that bottleneck. This turns a frustration into a business case.
Let's use Rework Rate as our example.
First, you need a baseline. For the next two weeks, have each team member roughly track the time they spend on “rework” for a specific project. A simple spreadsheet will do.
Here’s some tasks that would qualify as “rework work”:
Updating a client brief with new, previously undisclosed, or revised target outcomes
Replacing target keywords with different long-tail variations
Reconfiguring attribution tracking to include a new lead source
Revising a graphic, or copy, or formatting for a content piece
Revisiting Contact records in your CRM to update specific properties that weren’t correct
At the end of the two weeks, add it all up. For a little fun, the person who logged the most rework time gets a surprise gift card for a free coffee.
Let's say your 5-person team spent a combined 20 hours on rework over two weeks.
Next, find a rough average hourly cost for your team. You don't need exact salaries; a blended average is fine. Let's say it's $50/hour.
Now, do the math:
20 hours of rework x $50/hour = $1,000
In just two weeks, that bottleneck cost the agency $1,000 in lost productivity. Annually, that’s a $26,000 problem. Now you have a powerful number.
Step 3: Introduce a Solution and Measure Again
This is where a targeted team development program comes in. Instead of a generic trust fall, a program like the Team Strengths Accelerator focuses on the root causes of these issues—like improving communication, clarifying roles, and helping team members understand how to collaborate more effectively.
After the team participates in the program, you repeat the measurement process. For the next two weeks, you track the hours spent on reworks again.
If teambuilding “worked,” then the team’s improved shared language and clearer processes should show that the rework time has dropped. Let’s say your new measurement shows the team only spent 5 hours on rework.
The new "cost of the problem" is:
5 hours of rework x $50/hour = $250
Your team’s improvement saved the agency $750 in just two weeks. This translates to an annualized savings of $19,500.
Step 4: Show Your Work: Calculating the Return
You now have everything you need to see if the investment was worth it. Here's the simple formula:
(Value of Improvement - Program Cost) / Program Cost = Return on Investment (ROI)
Let's say the teambuilding program costs $2,999. To calculate the annual value of your improvement:
Bi-Weekly Savings: $750
Annual Savings (Value of Improvement): $750 x 26 = $19,500
Program Cost: $2,999
Now, let's plug it into the formula:
($19,500 - $2,999) / $2,999 = 5.5
To get a percentage, multiply by 100. That’s an ROI of 550%.
For every dollar the agency invested in team development, it got $5.50 back in the first year. That’s a powerful argument to make to any manager or owner.
You Have the Data. Now What?
Measuring the impact of team development isn't about pinching pennies. It’s about making smart investments in your team’s success and sanity. It empowers you to move away from frustrating, ineffective activities and advocate for programs that solve the real-world problems you face every day.
Feeling stuck on which KPI your team should track? Or not sure how to establish that first baseline measurement? That's a common challenge, and getting the starting point right is critical.
A free consultation with Learn to Scale is a great way to test your hypothesis and get an expert perspective. In a brief call, we can help you validate your chosen KPI and outline a simple measurement plan. Book a quick call today, and let's figure out your team's starting point together.
6 Ways to Supercharge Your Marketing Agency’s Team Collaboration
Is your marketing team struggling with miscommunication and inefficiency? Discover how understanding your team's unique strengths can unlock peak performance and client satisfaction.
In a small marketing agency, collaboration isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s what keeps the work moving and the clients happy. However, if your team is consistently dropping the ball, miscommunicating, or working twice as hard to achieve half the results, something deeper needs to change.
To improve marketing team collaboration, it starts with understanding how your team members naturally work best, and together.
That’s where strengths-based collaboration comes in. Using a framework like CliftonStrengths, especially when integrated through a tool like the Team Strengths Accelerator, can completely transform how your agency communicates, delegates, and performs.
Here’s how to get started:
1. Lay the Groundwork: Understand Your Team's Unique Styles & Strengths
Before you can optimize how your team works together, you need a clearer picture of who they are as individuals – their natural talents, preferred working styles, communication nuances, and what motivates them. Keen observation and open conversations can reveal a lot about these individual strengths. Some people thrive on data and detail, others excel in big-picture thinking and idea generation. Some are natural organizers, while others are gifted connectors.
Recognizing how people are unique helps you appreciate the diverse ways people approach tasks and solve problems. It’s not about boxing people in, but about understanding the raw materials you’re working with. When you have a sense of these individual aptitudes, you can start to see how they might complement each other or where potential friction points might arise. This initial understanding is less about rigid labels and more about fostering an awareness that everyone brings a unique value to the table, understanding that unlocking the potential within your team through strengths-based development is directly linked to overall agency success.
For agencies looking to formalize this discovery process and gain deeper insights into their team's collective dynamics, programs like our Team Strengths Accelerator can provide a structured approach to uncovering and applying these foundational insights for better collaboration and performance.
2. Foster Crystal-Clear Communication Channels & Practices
Effective communication is the lifeblood of any collaborative team, and in a marketing agency, where ideas, feedback, and project updates flow rapidly, it's absolutely paramount. To improve marketing team collaboration, you need to establish clear channels and promote best practices.
Establish Clear Channels: Define which tools are used for what types of communication (e.g., Slack for quick updates, email for formal documentation, project management software for task-specific conversations). This reduces confusion and ensures messages are seen by the right people.
Promote Active Listening: Encourage team members to truly listen to understand, not just to respond. This means paying attention, asking clarifying questions, and paraphrasing to ensure comprehension.
Encourage Clarity and Conciseness: Especially in written communication, teach your team to be clear, concise, and to the point. Ambiguity is a collaboration killer.
Adapt to Preferences: Understanding if a team member prefers detailed written briefs, quick verbal check-ins, or visual aids can make communication more effective. For example, a highly visual thinker might grasp a concept better from a quick sketch than a long email.
Regular Team Huddles: Short daily or weekly huddles can keep everyone aligned, address immediate roadblocks, and foster a sense of connection.
Clear communication minimizes misunderstandings, streamlines workflows, and ensures everyone is on the same page, thereby dramatically boosting collaborative efforts.
3. Define Clear Roles, Responsibilities, and Accountabilities
"I thought they were doing that!" is a phrase that signals a breakdown in collaboration. Ambiguity around roles and responsibilities is a major source of friction, duplicated effort, and dropped balls. Supercharged collaboration requires clarity.
Document Roles and Responsibilities: Clearly define who is responsible for what in ongoing roles and specific projects. This doesn’t mean creating rigid silos, but rather ensuring every critical task has an owner.
Use RACI Charts (or similar): For complex projects, a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) matrix can be invaluable for clarifying expectations.
Empower Ownership: When someone is given clear ownership of a task or area that aligns with their capabilities, they are more likely to be proactive and see it through. This sense of ownership can be enhanced when the role taps into their natural way of working effectively.
Set Clear Boundaries: Helping team members understand their scope and, as we've explored before, realize that learning to set clear boundaries is crucial for agency success, which also supports collaborative capacity.
Regular Review: Roles can evolve. Periodically review if the current distribution of responsibilities still makes sense and if everyone feels their contributions are being effectively utilized.
When everyone knows what's expected of them and who to turn to for specific needs, the team can operate with greater efficiency and less frustration.
4. Cultivate a Culture of Trust and Psychological Safety
Collaboration thrives in an environment where team members trust each other and feel psychologically safe – safe to voice opinions, share nascent ideas, admit mistakes, and even disagree respectfully. Building such a culture is an ongoing effort.
Lead by Example: Leaders must demonstrate vulnerability, admit their own mistakes, and show respect for all team members.
Encourage Openness: Create forums where people feel comfortable sharing different perspectives without fear of judgment. This is where understanding that people have different communication and thinking styles (their "strengths") can help build tolerance and appreciation for diverse viewpoints.
Celebrate Efforts and Learning from Failures: Don't just reward successes; acknowledge the effort and learning that comes from experiments, even if they don't pan out. This encourages risk-taking, which is vital for innovation.
Promote Authenticity: Allow people to bring their whole selves to work, because as we've previously detailed, building an authentic company culture goes far beyond superficial perks and is founded on genuine connections and shared values.
Assume Positive Intent: Encourage team members to assume their colleagues are acting with good intentions, which can diffuse defensiveness and promote more open dialogue.
A high-trust environment allows for the free flow of ideas and constructive feedback, which are essential components of dynamic collaboration.
5. Optimize Meetings and Collaborative Workflows
Meetings and established workflows can either be powerful collaboration enhancers or major drains on time and energy. Optimizing these is key to improving team efficiency.
Purposeful Meetings: Ensure every meeting has a clear purpose, a concise agenda, and defined desired outcomes. If it doesn't, question if the meeting is necessary at all.
Right People, Right Time: Only invite those who genuinely need to be there. Respect everyone's time.
Active Facilitation: Guide discussions, ensure all relevant voices are heard (especially from those whose natural style might be quieter but who have valuable insights), and keep the meeting on track.
Visual Collaboration Tools: Utilize whiteboards (physical or virtual), shared documents, and other tools that allow for real-time co-creation and idea visualization.
Streamline Workflows: Map out common agency processes (e.g., content creation, campaign launch, client reporting). Identify bottlenecks or areas of friction and collaboratively redesign them for smoother handoffs and clearer steps. This is where understanding individual preferences for structuring work can be beneficial.
Iterate and Improve: Regularly ask the team for feedback on meetings and workflows. What’s working? What’s frustrating? Be willing to adapt.
Efficient, well-run meetings and streamlined workflows reduce wasted time and ensure that collaborative efforts are focused and productive.
6. Implement Effective Feedback Loops and Conflict Resolution Strategies
No team, no matter how collaborative, will agree on everything all the time. Differing opinions are natural and can even be healthy if managed constructively. Similarly, regular, constructive feedback is vital for growth and alignment.
Normalize Feedback: Make giving and receiving feedback a regular, expected part of your agency culture. It shouldn’t be reserved just for annual reviews.
Focus on Behavior and Impact, Not Personality: Train your team to provide specific, actionable feedback that addresses the work or behavior, not the person.
Establish a Conflict Resolution Process: Develop a clear and straightforward process for addressing disagreements. This might involve direct conversation, mediation by a team lead, or a structured discussion focused on finding common ground.
Encourage Diverse Solutions: When conflict arises from different approaches, remind the team that often various paths can lead to success. Understanding that team members might approach a problem based on their unique problem-solving strengths can be helpful here.
Learn and Move Forward: The goal of conflict resolution should be to find the best path forward for the project and the team, and to learn from the experience. Avoid a "winner takes all" mentality.
Robust feedback mechanisms and effective conflict resolution strategies ensure that issues are addressed constructively, preventing resentment and maintaining strong collaborative relationships.
Conclusion: Building Your Collaborative Powerhouse
Supercharging your marketing agency's team collaboration is an intentional act, not an accident. While it truly does start with an appreciation for the individuals on your team – understanding their working styles, preferences, and general strengths – it extends into fostering clear communication, defining roles with precision, building a culture of deep trust, optimizing your operational rhythms, and navigating feedback and conflict with grace.
By consistently working on these six areas, you’ll not only improve marketing team collaboration but also create a more resilient, innovative, and engaged agency where people feel empowered to do their best work together. Pick one area to focus on this week, and start building the collaborative synergy that will set your agency apart, because true marketing agency growth isn't an accident but the result of purposeful strategies.
Ready to build a team that doesn’t just work—but works together?
👉Explore the Team Strengths Accelerator and see how your agency can collaborate smarter, scale faster, and grow stronger.
Teambuilding: Empowering Leaders to Transform Your Business
Is your team truly working with you, or just working for you? Teambuilding offers a powerful solution.
It’s Time To For YOU to Take Back Control of Your Growth
As a CEO, it can feel like you are singlehandedly weathering a whirlwind of tasks, deadlines, and unexpected fires. Despite some success, do you wrestle with sleepless nights, wondering if the growth you envision is truly attainable? Do miscommunications and friction feel like the norm rather than the exception?
You. Are. Not. Alone.
Outsmart Challenges, Together
It's easy to get caught up in tactical problem-solving, but often the most impactful changes require stepping back and addressing the root causes hindering your business. Effective teambuilding helps you identify and solve those core issues, empowering you to unlock new growth potential without adding more to your already busy schedule. A study by Gallup found that highly engaged teams boast 41% lower absenteeism and 17% higher productivity. Imagine a workplace where employees are motivated, proactive problem-solvers who feel genuinely supported in contributing to overall success. That's the power of investing in your team.
Transform Your Leadership. Transform Your Business.
The difference between frustration and smooth operations often lies in how you, as a leader, communicate your vision and create the framework for success. When we’ve partnered with CEOs to provide effective teambuilding experiences, we often simply pinpoint areas where a few small leadership shifts can make a huge impact on their team, efficiency, and bottom line.
With one client, her leadership team meetings felt like she was running the whole show and getting her team to contribute was like drilling root canals. She was frustrated that they didn’t contribute to a shared agenda in advance, they didn’t share information willingly, and she found herself micromanaging them to get the answers she needed.
The deeper problem she was grappling with, however, was existential, “How do I transform this team culture from being dependent on me to relying on each other?” She knew that if her organization was going to scale, she needed her management team to take agency and ownership.
The simple change? Instead of starting the meeting with her updates, we suggested she share her updates last. That’s it. Change the order of sharing.
What that simple shift did was to change the culture in this one meeting from “We listen to the boss” to “We all share.” Team members started to contribute to the shared agenda because they didn’t want to be seen as a slacker. The first person to share in this reworked meeting increasingly came in prepared with talking points and questions. Rotating the first person to share in each meeting then allowed each team member to kick off the meeting with their own flair. It became a mini competition to start their weekly meeting with panache.
TL;DR - A team improved their ownership and accountability by shuffling the sharing order, and in doing so, started to personalize and deepen their relationships and engagement.
Who said it’s wrong to be high-impact and wicked fun?
Collaboration + Teambuilding = Far Better Collaboration
We understand you don't have time for fluffy exercises or concepts without concrete results. Teambuilding may feel like a 'nice-to-have,' but with the right approach, it's a catalyst for solving the core issues holding back your growth.
In one engagement, we worked with a management team that was cordial to each other but rarely dug into difficult issues. What this caused was a fear of saying what was on everyone’s mind…but nobody felt safe in speaking their truth, so major issues went unmentioned. If asked, team members said they were fine, but in reality, they were stuck.
Through 1-1 conversations between the leaders and Learn to Scale, team members were able to say the things that were going unsaid. It was safe to vent to the consultant! After hearing the same problems time and time again, Learn to Scale was able to design a thoughtful teambuilding experience that unveiled the unspeakable: unspoken conflict.
Since it was Learn to Scale sharing the bad news as a neutral third party, everyone was able to sigh a big sigh of relief, “I’m so glad I’m not the only one that felt this way!” This sharing did lead the team into some difficult- but necessary!- conversations, but after ironing out the problems in the open, the team felt far more confident, communicative, and productive.
This team just needed a safe place to share their thoughts. This is the power of teambuilding.
Why Team Experts Elevate Your Results (Beyond a DIY Workshop)
We know you're capable and resourceful, but sometimes an outside perspective is critical to seeing the full picture. Here's what a skilled teambuilding facilitator offers:
Customization: Your team isn't like everyone else's, and your challenges are unique. Activities built around your specific company culture get to the heart of things faster.
Uncovering Root Causes: A good facilitator helps you see the patterns behind the problems, leading to lasting solutions instead of superficial fixes.
Results Measurement: We go beyond smiles and track the true impact on communication, collaboration, and those all-important success metrics you care about.
Ready to take your business to the next level? Get in touch for a customized exploration of how to accelerate your growth as a leader and business owner.
Further Reading
Harvard Business Review: "Why Every Team Needs Psychological Safety" (https://hbr.org/2023/02/what-is-psychological-safety)
Deloitte: "Global Human Capital Trends 2020" (https://www2.deloitte.com/cn/en/pages/human-capital/articles/global-human-capital-trends-2020.html)
Gallup: "State of the American Workplace Report" (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/285818/state-american-workplace-report.aspx)
Building or Outsourcing Learning & Development: Weighing the Options
Weigh the pros and cons of building or buying your organization’s next learning and development initiative.
What Learning and Development Can Do For Organizations
Leaders are constantly thinking: how do we upskill employees to solve business challenges without breaking the bank? Do we build our own Learning and Development (L&D) program, or do we bring a shiny external consultant, hoping their expertise will be the secret sauce?
It’s so many factors to balance. Cost. Time. Impact. Will our employees even like it?
Learning is a core function in every business, showing up at all levels and at all points in the employee lifecycle. A few places you expect to see L&D in action-
New hire onboarding and training
Manager training
Sales enablement
-and a few other places you may not expect-
Implementing a new business strategy, aka Change Management
Integrating competitive intelligence into a sales cycle
Executive coaching for a senior leader who’s “not that great with people”
Whenever an organization starts to consider how they can do things better, it’s always with the stipulation: How can we get better quickly and cheaply?
Which brings us to why we’re here: Build It or Buy It?
As organizations grow, they begin to staff full-time roles in L&D to solve these kinds of problems, though unfortunately most organizations lag behind on L&D hiring until after the pain has been felt throughout the organization. No matter the size or maturity of their L&D department, there’s clear pros and cons to building in-house vs outsourcing.
Let's break down some of the factors that go into deciding whether to build a homegrown L&D program or outsource part or all of the work.
Building an In-House L&D Program
You discover that employees on one team don’t understand what their counterparts on another team are doing. Friction between teams continues to grow, which causes the organization to lose a big customer through a series of (what seems to be) avoidable fumbles.
You bring the leaders from both teams into your office to give a very clear mandate: solve this problem.
At a small organization without any dedicated L&D resources, problems like this tend to be solved internally by adding new L&D responsibilities to a team’s plate. At larger organizations, there may be a dedicated L&D team designed to help navigate the learning design process and/or implementation, but your business need may not be the L&D team’s top priority.
Here’s what you can reasonably expect when building L&D programs internally:
Pros:
Employee Engagement: When you craft things internally, there's a magic touch of "made here". It means courses and programs are tailored to your company culture, brand, and values.
Cost: Although there’s an initial investment in creating the program, once established, you'll be saving money in the long run. No need to pay an outsider's fee for every training session or updating training materials.
Exclusivity & Uniqueness: You can challenge the norm! Create programs that no other company has. This not only provides a competitive edge but is a great PR move. "Look at how unique we are!"
Cons:
Time: Especially if you don’t have a dedicated L&D specialist on staff, it’s going to consume a lot of person-hours to get this program off the ground.
Effectiveness: Are you really sure that the finance manager is the best person to teach Excel just because they're good at it? There's a stark difference between knowing and teaching.
Negative Business Impact: Every minute an employee is making training materials and not doing their core job, the less productive they are in their assigned role. For example, taking your best sales rep off the line to write standard operating procedures will decrease overall revenue or burn out your top rep.
Hiring an Outside Consultant
Instead of pulling team members away from their core roles, an outside L&D consulting firm is brought in to assess and design a solution to the communications breakdown. Over the next three months, a brand new Internal Communication program is integrated into every employee’s yearly professional development roadmap.
No matter the organization’s size, bringing in outside L&D expertise can quickly and efficiently solve a problem. Oftentimes, a neutral outside perspective is what’s needed to untangle conflict, especially when HR and People teams are perceived to be part of the problem.
Great L&D consultants are rarely cheap, though their short-term costs may far outweigh the long-term negative impacts of trying to solve things internally.
Here’s what you can reasonably expect when outsourcing L&D programs to a consultant or training provider:
Pros:
Expertise: These folks live and breathe L&D. They’ve seen what works across industries, and what doesn’t. They can bring in best practices, cutting down the trial and error phase.
Time: They will most likely get your program up and running faster than an internal team. Less "who's doing what" and more "here's how you do it."
Employee Engagement: Sometimes, an outsider’s perspective can provide a source of novelty and creativity. Employees might pay more attention simply because an organization’s leadership team is spending top dollar for outside help.
Cons:
Cost: Consultants don't come cheap. Especially the good ones. You’ll be shelling out not just for their expertise, but their brand.
Exclusivity: While consultants will tailor their approach to your needs, there might be elements that feel less exciting or novel. Remember, you are buying tried and true solutions.
Dependency: If you don’t have internal L&D staff, you may become overly dependent on consultants. Every time there's a training need, you'll have to call them up and, of course, pay up.
Factors to Consider When Deciding To Build vs. Buy
When thinking about whether to invest internally or hire externally, reflect on past experiences. Remember the last time your team took on a massive project without prior experience? Did it feel like the blind leading the blind or a journey of discovery?
The how for learning programs is inextricably linked with the culture of your organization. You want to keep your brand and values at the core: if you bring in a consultant, can they align their service delivery with who you are and who you aim to be? If you decide to build internally, is that added responsibility part of what we expect from our employees? Will you include L&D deliverables in employee performance reviews?
And of course, whether you’re a giant like McDonalds or a start-up in a garage, the focus should always be on connection, growth, and community. How will learning deliverables- outsourced or built at home- connect people in meaningful ways to learn and grow?
It's worth noting that there's also a third way: a blend of both. Start small with an in-house program for niche company-specific topics and hire consultants for general topics or unusually complex topics. Most L&D consultants or firms are happy to break up a comprehensive solution into phases, either for budget reasons or to apply learnings from one phase to the next one.
Whatever path you choose, ensure it's the best for your company's growth, your employees' development, and your pocket. Make those decisions candidly, inclusively, and always with an eye on the bigger picture. And remember, challenge the norms, because in the world of L&D, differentiation is key.
Knowledge Gaps in Middle Management Are Killing Your Corporate Magic
In the business world, middle managers play a pivotal role, turning visions into reality. Their true power? Self-reflection, understanding both strengths and flaws. But when disengagement strikes, the consequences are vast.
The Magical Mirror: Revealing Knowledge Gaps in Middle Management
In the realm of businesses, where strategies intermingle with day-to-day tactics, there lies a bridge: middle management. These are the people who possess the alchemy to transform executive vision into tangible outcomes. However, like any magician, they too need to be equipped with the right incantations, potions, and most importantly, the foresight to gaze into the magical mirror of self-reflection.
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Socrates may not have been a corporate magician, but his words hold truth for modern-day middle managers.
The Enchanting Power of Self-Reflection
A middle manager is the wand-wielder, guiding the intent of a leadership team to realize the company's larger objectives. But for this energy to be directed to where it needs to go, the wand itself needs to be attuned. This is where the power of self-reflection emerges.
Self-reflection is akin to peering into a magical mirror, revealing one's strengths and the shadows of one's weaknesses. By diving into this introspection, middle managers can:
Magnify Their Strengths: Recognizing what you excel at allows you to lead with confidence, galvanizing teams with your inherent magical strengths.
Compensate for Weaknesses: The magic is not just in being aware of your vulnerabilities but in conjuring strategies to address them, ensuring that executive strategy gets translated into management decisions without excessive executive oversight.
👉Learn more: the Johari Window
Unmasking Team Knowledge Gaps
With the mirror revealing a manager's own strengths and weaknesses, the next act of magic is to turn this lens onto the team. The act of identifying knowledge gaps in a team is like weaving an enchantment that identifies roadblocks that prevent a team from working in harmony towards a collective vision.
The key in this unmasking lies in:
Constant Dialogue: Engage in conversations, not just about tasks and deadlines, but about skills, aspirations, and areas of growth.
Training & Workshops: Organize elixirs of knowledge, ensuring that the team not only identifies but actively works on bridging their gaps.
Fostering a Culture of Growth: A magical ecosystem where learning is celebrated ensures that every team member feels motivated to constantly evolve.
👉Read more: New Manager Training for Small Companies
The Curse of Disengagement and Its Impact
A magician without passion is like a wand without magic. Similarly, middle managers who find themselves disengaged at work wield their roles without that essential spark, turning a magic wand into a club. Such disengagement is perilous, not just for the manager but for the entire kingdom they oversee.
The ripples of such disengagement are vast:
Diminishing Team Effectiveness: Disengaged middle managers are less likely to self-reflect and in turn, they tend to inflict their weaknesses on the teams they manage. For go-to-market teams, this clouded vision can spell a decline in revenue and an increase in customer churn.
Stalled Productivity: For internal teams, a poor-performing middle manager adds friction everywhere. Tasks get delayed, projects lose their focus, and toxic work cultures start to ferment.
The Costly Hex of Turnover: In the most extreme scenarios, a business faces a greater threat. Disengagement can lead to increased turnover, invoking the twin monsters of disrupted work and escalating hiring costs.
To protect the kingdom from these challenges, it's crucial for organizations to routinely conjure the potion of employee engagement, ensuring that their magicians (managers) remain enchanted with their roles.
👉Read more: 20 Ways COVID Made Me A Better Boss
The Enchanted Path Forward
Even if your organization has some bad magic, in many cases, this can be fixed. Starting with simple acts of self-reflection and measuring team dynamics, middle managers can get back on track and even begin to excel.
Remember, every middle manager holds within them a potent magic. The trick lies in recognizing it, harnessing it, and then magnifying it across the team…or bringing in someone who’s halfway there already.
In the words of another wise magician of his time, Albus Dumbledore said, “Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic.” For middle managers, words of self-reflection, engagement, and continuous growth can truly be their most powerful spell.
To start learning some magic words of your own, how about a free consultation about management effectiveness?
Visual Auditory Kinesthetic Nonsense
Visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles are the biggest myth in learning. Don't get caught advocating for a practice that has been statistically significantly debunked.
Visual Auditory and Kinesthetic Learning Styles are a Learning Myth
Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic. You’ve heard these terms before, referred to as learning styles. You might even have one that you prefer!
And they’re false.
It annoys me when an average person claims that they’re a particular kind of learner. However, it really grinds my gears when an educator talks about auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning. It’s still being used in educator certifications.
It’s an intuitive concept, for sure. It seems so reasonable that certain people learn differently and that having a preference to learn through your eyes vs. ears vs. doing seems reasonable. It’s seductive.
It’s pseudoscience.
Whether you are a professional educator, a manager of a team, or a leader transforming a growing business, you can drive more effective change by purging this myth and replacing it with a simple (and scientifically proven!) approach: More, More Often, and Over More Time.
The Proof That Learning Styles Are False
Other Neuromyths About Learning
There’s a magnificent study that not only breaks down Learning Styles, but also many other commonly-held learning beliefs. Classical music, dyslexia, and sugary drinks get debunked in the 2017 study Training in Education on Neuroscience Decreases but Does Not Eliminate Beliefs in Neuromyths
The study that’s most often cited as the nail in the coffin for learning styles is the Journal of Educational Psychology’s Matching Learning Style to Instructional Method: Effects on Comprehension published by Rogowsky, Calhoun, and Tallal. In that study, subjects were allowed to choose their preferred learning style and then were taught in that particular style. The researchers also tested to see if people who studied in their preferred style performed better.
The last sentence sums it up:
“In the current study, we failed to find any statistically significant, empirical support for tailoring instructional methods to an individual’s learning style.”
Here, read it for yourself. Or, if you prefer the more readable digests:
The Problem with “Learning Styles”, from the Scientific American
Learning Styles Debunked: There is No Evidence Supporting Auditory and Visual Learning, Psychologists Say, from the Association for Psychological Science:
‘Neuromyth’ or Helpful Model?, from Inside Higher Ed
Or, if you’re a fan of moving pictures and you LOVE education jokes, you’ll dig this video:
Sending "Learning Styles" Out of Style - explains how education research debunks the myth that teaching students in their preferred styles (e.g. "visual learners," "auditory learners") is an effective classroom practice. Explore the research: http://s.si.edu/1IwH5zS Credits: http://s.si.edu/1SGMX0J
Bonus points if you catch the Myers-Briggs reference.
How To Teach If Learning Styles Aren’t True
The actual science underneath the pseudoscience is that the human brain is equipped to intake a lot of stimuli, process it, and use it to keep you from being eaten by tigers. Data collected by your eyes, ears, taste, touch, and more all come in to your head and build neural connections.
The lie behind visual auditory kinesthetic learning styles is that your brain is specialized for one type of data.
The truth behind learning styles is that your brain is designed to synthesize data from lots of sources.
Here’s the key point: people learn better when they get to experience something multiple times in multiple formats over a period of time. There’s three ways to do this:
1. MORE
The more ways that someone can practice- private practice, 1-1 coaching, written reflections, gamification, etc.- the more likely they’ll improve.
“To get better at cold calling, let’s do a practice cold call, then write out a script, then have your peers give feedback, then cold call ten people and we’ll walk through the recordings together.”
2. MORE OFTEN
The more “at-bats” that someone can have to practice a skill, the more likely they’ll synthesize the information and learn how to do it better.
“To get better at cold calling, make more cold calls.”
3. Over More Time
The longer someone demonstrates a skill, such as spending months doing a job versus weeks, the more likely they’ll develop optimizations that deliver better outcomes.
“To get better at cold calling, you have one month to do 1,000 cold calls. That’s 200-300 calls a week. That’s 40-60 calls a day. It’s a lot, but by the end of the month, you’ll be a far better cold caller than today.”
Doesn’t that look/sound/feel like a better way of learning?
How Business Leaders Can Apply These Insights
With this new knowledge in hand, there’s a few changes that a leader can make to help their team be more successful. Most of them, though, stem from being empathetic. A business needs to accept that whenever someone is learning or changing a skill or behavior that they will get it wrong a few times before getting it right and that true change will happen over time, not overnight.
A business leader, though, CAN make a few quick tweaks that will set up a much better long-term trajectory of success:
Onboarding: Add practice time and a variety of practice-focused activities to a new hire’s schedule.
Performance Management: For anyone underperforming, identify three different forms of practice that the employee can attempt to improve performance (or ask the employee to read this article and come up with a few ideas!)
Strategic Goal-Setting: Assume that your business will fail at your next strategic goal. What learning-driven interventions would help reach that goal if you tried again? Implement those interventions now.
Hiring: Every business makes bad hires, but great businesses learn from those bad hires. Include multiple forms of debriefing when there’s regrettable attrition (i.e. someone leaves that you wished would stay)
Change Management: Every time you launch a new tool, system, or process, identify at least three ways that your team can learn the change. Popular options:
An on-demand video walkthrough
A live training session
Weekly check-ins
Office hours to work through issues
Train someone to be a local expert (“Train the Trainer”)
Tired of Business Nonsense?
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The Recipe To A Perfect Brainstorming Session
Your organization will be amazed at how easily you pulled off such a high-impact and delicious brainstorming session!
Brainstorming 101
Why Brainstorm Better?
Organizations are always going out of date. Markets shift, teams change, and technology advances, constantly introducing new challenges and forcing organizations to rethink how they’ve always done business.
An organization that fails to engage in regular brainstorming and innovation will find themselves losing customers, decreasing profits, and over time, be out of business. This slide to obscurity is often invisible until it’s too late, so it’s better to build innovation habits to stay ahead.
“Innovate or die.”
Innovation begins in the brainstorming room. This recipe is sure to generate the raw materials you need to stay innovative, creative, and growing. Let’s get cooking!
Overview of the Recipe
This dish is perfect for organizations that want to be innovative, creative, and pragmatic! We recommend making this Perfect Brainstorming Session every quarter to address changing market conditions, to keep your team engaged and motivated, and to capitalize on your organization’s growth.
The secret ingredient in this recipe is to introduce data at just the right time. Too early and you risk deflating the innovation process, keeping ideas too realistic and backwards facing. Too late and you risk chasing fun-but-irrelevant ideas that ultimately won’t grow your business.
Let us know how your Perfect Brainstorming Session turns out by leaving a comment at the end of the recipe!
A Perfect Brainstorming Session Ingredient List
Note: Many of these ingredients can be generated in advance given the right prompts and preparation, but for teams short on time, you can create them right on the spot.
3-5 different perspectives
Impossible ideas
Risky ideas
Dumb ideas
1 desired future state
Instructions
1. Add 3-5 Perspectives
Before anything else, a variety of perspectives is essential to a productive brainstorming session. Everyone has unique experiences and beliefs but the greater the variety, the more likely an innovative or creative idea will be generated.
A brainstorming session is a process: one idea inspires someone else, who in turn inspires someone else, and so on. Drawing new connections requires a breadth of experiences that typically don’t get to interact. You would be shocked by what a Chief Sales Officer, a Customer Success Manager, and a Receptionist could achieve!
2. Clean Your Work Surface of Distrust
Psychological safety rests on a foundation of trust. For a brainstorming session, participants need to trust that:
Any and all ideas are fair game in the brainstorming room
At the end of the process, action will actually be taken
There are meaningful stakes: there’s an urgency and need that this brainstorming is ultimately going to address
Nobody will be shamed, sidelined, or ridiculed during the process
It’s helpful to make these points explicit at the start of a brainstorming session, either by reading the above bullets out loud or generating a mandate for the brainstorming session.
3. Make Culture of Quiet Impossible
A brainstorming session goes nowhere if nobody speaks. It can take courage to propose the first idea, as well as the first creative idea. For organizations that don’t regularly innovate or ideate, there can be a Culture of Quiet that inhibits creativity. Habits are learned through constant practice: keeping quiet can be a bad habit learned through countless unproductive meetings!
A Perfect Brainstorming Session eliminates the need for courage by running activities that require creative participation. If everyone is expected to participate in a non-threatening way, you jump start the creative process. Here are five activities that can make contributing ideas easy and fun!
4. Mix
Through activities, discussion, and debate, a Perfect Brainstorming Session should generate three types of ideas:
Impossible Ideas: Suggestions that are so detached from the present day reality that they seem utterly impossible
Risky Ideas: A suggestion that depends on so many factors that it would be considered “risky,” either in terms of an organization’s ability to execute or that the impact would directly benefit the organization
Dumb Ideas: Something so simple, counterintuitive, or banal that outside the boundaries of the brainstorming session it may be considered dumb
At this stage of the brainstorming session, impossible, risky, and dumb ideas should be elevated. Innovation needs to be unshackled from realistic, safe, and formal mindsets. All the work you put in to include multiple perspectives, lay a foundation of trust, and foster an expectation to participate has set the stage for something truly unexpected, creative, and inspired: let it soar!
It’s also possible to bring in data points that help expand the pool or intensity of these impossible, risky, and dumb ideas, but be careful that real world data doesn’t inhibit creativity. For example, market data such as a Total Addressable Market (TAM) Analysis can help focus wild ideas into a particular industry segment. However, an organization’s prior sales numbers will anchor creativity to the organization’s previous performance.
5. Shape And Place Into A Baking Dish of Your Desired Future State
We recommend crafting the Desired Future State midway through the Perfect Brainstorming Process because it takes a bit of time for teams to warm up their creativity. The risk of crafting a Desired Future State early on is that the goalposts will be placed only a bit further along the current organizational course of action, rather than ask whether a new direction would serve the organization better.
Bringing in many perspectives early on also helps influence exactly what problem or outcome the brainstorming session is due to achieve. Including your dreamers and achievers early on can strongly influence where the goalposts for your brainstorming session will be erected.
Now that you have a pile of truly creative ideas, it’s time to gently rein them back into the real world. The first step is that a Desired Future State needs to be defined. This future state should be aligned with the organization’s mission, purpose, and strategic goals. Here are some possible future states:
An employer brand that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion
A new product that addresses an emerging problem for our existing customer base
Guardrails designed to promote internal work/life balance
With this Desired Future State, hold up your most exciting ideas and ask, “Can this get us there? Can a part of this get us there? Is it likely that this idea will actually work?” Prioritize, remix, and narrow down to 2-3 possible ideas.
6. Bake in the Iron Triangle
The Iron Triangle, also known as the “triple constraint,” is a project management model that address three linked factors:
Scope- how big is the project?
Cost- how expensive is the project?
Time- how much time can we give to the project?
Or more simply,
““Good, Fast, Cheap.
Choose two.””
With your 2-3 possible ideas, sketch out how big, expensive, and time-intensive the project would be to deliver the Desired Future State without compromising the outcome. By applying these pragmatic questions while holding the Desired Future State holy, you introduce a new level of creativity in terms of execution. Repurposing budgets, considering new hires, and challenging how your organization has worked in the past all help a brainstorming session approach old problems in new ways.
It’s likely, though, that there will need to be tradeoffs in order for your organization to realistically innovate. The debate around those tradeoffs can be tough, but they’re absolutely critical to a Perfect Brainstorming Session to generate something both innovative and practical. You may even have to compromise the Desired Future State by slicing it into phases or addressing a smaller scope, but be careful of mortgaging a dream because nobody wants to challenge the status quo.
At the end of this step, you should have a single innovative and practical idea…but it’s not ready to be served until it’s been checked for doneness.
7. Check for Doneness With Data
This step is where many brainstorming sessions fall short: the evidence. A solid idea means little unless there’s proof that backs it up.
Your idea needs to be vetted with data, ideally from a wide range of sources that are both objective and subjective. This evidence is designed to confirm two assumptions:
The problem that you’re trying to solve is a real and important problem worth solving
The solution that you’re proposing is a realistic and well-matched solution to that problem
Data sources that can help you confirm these two assumptions can include market research, customer interviews, employee surveys, cost projections, government research, and focus groups.
Beware: Confirmation Bias is a real risk! It is extremely tempting for a brainstorming team to find the data that supports their idea, rather than objectively collecting and weighing evidence. It’s strongly encouraged that unbiased people outside of the brainstorming process research and vet the proposal. If you don’t have that internal resource, consider hiring a third-party consultant to collect, analyze, and validate the data against your proposal.
Serving Suggestions
If you faithfully followed the recipe, you should have done the following:
Included a wide range of perspectives
Cultivated a space where those perspective can shine
Generated many impossible, risky, and dumb ideas
Refined those ideas into something possible, plausible, and powerful
Assessed the practicality of actually pursuing an innovative idea
Validated the idea using external evidence
Now what? We suggest two courses of action.
Sell The Story
Throughout time, great ideas have been dismissed. A Perfect Brainstorming Session can be an exercise in futility if the idea dies on the vine. The art of merchandising, selling, and getting buy-in on an idea is a whole other guide, but it needs to be given the same care and attention that you invested in the brainstorming process.
Send It Back To The Kitchen
Be willing to admit that you could be wrong about any assumptions you made throughout the brainstorming process. A Perfect Brainstorming Session is designed to invite innovation into your organization, but you may misjudge the right amount of innovation for your organization. Building in feedback loops and planning for multiple kinds of objections can improve your likelihood of nailing that perfect serving size of innovation.
Start Brainstorming Today!
Anyone can arrange a Perfect Brainstorming Session! Try it out with a small team or project and assess for yourself how innovative you can be. If you identify a scenario or suggestion that improves the Perfect Brainstorming Session’s taste, let us know in the comments.
3 Key Elements for An Executive Offsite
An executive offsite that doesn’t include these three fundamental components is going to be a waste of time, at best.
Key Questions And How To Answer Them About Running An Executive Offsite
Your executive offsite can't afford to fail. Statistics show that 61% of senior executives struggle to execute their strategy, and 44% have experienced failed strategic initiatives.
This is what a doomed offsite looks like:
They wander from topic to topic without a clear focus
New ideas don’t get generated and good decisions don’t get made
Interpersonal conflict (or fear of conflict) cause teams to avoid tough- but necessary- conversations
The offsite ultimately doesn’t grow the business
Teams often organize an executive offsite for their leaders. This allows them to focus on the bigger picture and prioritize long-term strategies. It also provides an opportunity to solve large problems.
A well-structured and efficient offsite can provide clarity on core issues. It can also boost confidence in the strategies to address them. Additionally, it can set motivating targets to help the business advance.
Small teams, large teams, and everyone in between benefits by having a time and space to zoom out of the day-to-day and reset, but few teams have the expertise to organize an effective offsite.
They miss the basics.
There are three components to a killer executive offsite and they’re easy to implement, even for a team conducting their first offsite.
But, if you want an offsite that's highly effective, there is a key..
The key is to have one unified mission guiding all the components. This mission provides a frame for the experience and dials up the synergy between all three elements.
Here are a few examples of a singular overarching mission:
As a shorthand, a simple offsite mission will contain a single verb and a single noun.
Develop a talent strategy for the upcoming year
Improve our leadership team’s day-to-day effectiveness and trust
Navigate the big change that’s happening soon
Once you’ve identified your big-picture mission, it’s time to start with the first of the three components: Offsite Structure.
“How will we run this offsite?”
Offsite Structure
Part of the offsite magic is that it’s different from day-to-day work. If your leadership team stays in the same chairs, with the same schedule of meetings, with the same work output expectations, it’s hard to disentangle and zoom out.
In order for leaders to think differently, they need to work differently.
We recommend starting with thinking through Offsite Structure because it’s usually the most tangible and familiar to first-time offsite planners.
When people enter a new headspace, they can be more innovative, make new connections, talk about conflict in a new way, and change how they think and behave. As an offsite organizer, you can curate the experience to provide the room for those positive outcomes to happen.
Some simple ways to break from the day-to-day work:
Go to a new physical location
Bring the team together for a longer period of time than a typical meeting
Bring in a facilitator to change how the experience is managed
Talk about topics that aren’t often discussed
Remove expectations to produce work/manage work while at the offsite
These design factors help create the headspace for leaders to step into, but it also requires that leaders are equipped to step into this new headspace. Beyond the logistical elements for an offsite, there needs to be the ingredient most teams miss when making big decisions: the data.
2. “How can we be accurate throughout this offsite?”
Offsite Data
Have you ever been in a meeting where a lot of hypotheses to a problem were suggested but later discovered that there was no evidence to support any of them?
Offsites are notorious for chasing shadows.
Since leadership teams are removed from the front lines of customers and individual contributors, their natural data set of experiences are outdated or filtered by middle management. Decisions by executives are highly at risk of being myopic, based on false pretenses, and out-of-touch with the staff and customers.
Leaders who are aware of these risks equip themselves with the best facts and perspectives before making high-impact decisions:
Provide a report of relevant data points for participants to read before the offsite takes place
Invite an archetypal customer or employee to present directly to the leadership team
Start the offsite with a simple show-and-tell from each leader containing their division’s data that is relevant to the overarching mission
Plan for the offsite’s output to be reviewed by a panel of customers/employees and then amended with their feedback
The data and evidence like those listed above helps guide strategic decisions as well as justify the outcomes, generating far more buy-in from employees and customers.
While offsite design and preparedness are the first two failure points for teams running offsites, the final component to an effective offsite is usually the easiest to identify but the hardest to do well.
3. “How do we make sure this offsite ultimately works?”
Offsite Mandate
The cost of an executive offsite is nothing to sneeze at - leadership time, travel and expenses, facilitators, etc. - but the cost of bad outcomes from an offsite can kill a business.
It’s easy to imagine an avalanche that’s caused by a leadership team that doesn’t trust each other, bases decisions on a flawed understanding of the bigger picture, plays politics for their own self-interest, and fails to produce anything useful out of an offsite.
It’s also easy to imagine the potential of a leadership team that makes the best decisions possible to catapult a business to the next level with clear calls-to-action and a unified narrative from all participants.
Researchers found that most executive strategies deliver only 63% of their potential financial performance, and more than one-third of the surveyed executives placed the figure at less than 50%.
You can’t afford for this offsite to fail and you shouldn’t accept for it to fall short.
There are two related pieces to this final critical component to executive offsites: a mindset and an outcome.
Just like how logistics need to be intentionally designed to curate space for a killer offsite, the mindset carried by participants needs to be intentionally framed as well. Without setting the mindset beforehand, participants may come in with the wrong expectations or are unwilling to commit to the decisions that need to be made.
A well-communicated mindset should be sourced from the overarching mission but humanizes and makes it relevant to the participants:
MISSION - Develop a talent strategy for the upcoming year
MINDSET - “This offsite will set a new direction for our business”
MISSION - Improve our leadership team’s day-to-day effectiveness and trust
MINDSET - “We need to better communicate and collaborate as a team”
MISSION -Navigate the big change that’s happening soon
MINDSET - “If we don’t have a plan for this upcoming problem, our business may not survive it”
If there is a CEO or designated leader for the executive team, this expectation needs to be clearly communicated and endorsed by that individual. If the top person isn’t fully on-board with what needs to happen as a leadership team, it’s unlikely the rest of the business will follow suit.
The other half of an offsite’s mandate is a clear outcome that the offsite is due to produce. It’s an answer to the question asked at any well-run meeting, “Now what?”
Target outcomes don’t always have to be a decision, but they tend to be the mirror of the initial mindset expectation:
MISSION - Develop a talent strategy for the upcoming year
MINDSET - “This offsite will set a new direction for our business”
OUTCOME - A clear and singular set of priorities to guide our business’s talent strategy
MISSION - Improve our leadership team’s day-to-day effectiveness and trust
MINDSET - “We need to better communicate and collaborate as a team”
OUTCOME - A firm break from how we communicated and collaborated as a team with clear guidelines around our potential points of conflict going forward
MISSION - Navigate the big change that’s happening soon
MINDSET - “If we don’t have a plan for this upcoming problem, our business may not survive it”
OUTCOME - A strategic and tactical plan for handling an upcoming business threat
These two halves- a transparent mindset and a target outcome- can be the X-factor that changes your benign offsite into a transformational offsite.
A Better Executive Offsite
To recap, the ingredients for a high-quality executive offsite must include:
An intentional departure from day-to-day work by curating a logistical space- physical and temporal- for your offsite
Equipping participants with data and evidence to make accurate decisions
A clear expectation of why the team is conducting an offsite and what will happen because of it
Underneath all of that is a singular mission to guide the momentum of your well-planned and run offsite.
If you’d like more insights on how to better navigate the internal challenges for growing teams, subscribe to our biweekly newsletter, the TL;DR.
The Great Resignation, or Reshuffle, or Reclamation Is Just A 🌶 Job Market
The summer of 2021 brings economic upheaval. Are you resigning, reshuffling, or reclaiming your relationship with work? We explore three perspectives on this spicy job market.
What Do Changes In The Job Market Mean For Your Business? Opportunity!
Let’s be clear: there’s been a series of economic shifts in the summer of 2021 that’s changing supply and demand for labor. Depending on who you are, that could be awesome or terrible.
Does the prediction that turnover is looking to be up to 40% scare you or motivate you?
Millennials are undergoing career shifts before their midlife crisis: is this a generational trait or response to the market?
COVID federal funding and rent moratoriums are ending: is it a great time to buy property and find a job, or a great time to use that saved cash to travel and move to a lower cost-of-living location and work remotely?
What’s more important than blaming millennials is how to be a winner in this economic climate. Let’s break it into three buckets.
“The Great Resignation”
From the perspective of business owners, there’s both an increased demand for labor as well as broader remote options which means competition for talent is higher. If your organization hasn’t figured out remote work, is under-compensating in this new climate, has a crappy culture, or isn’t doing enough to promote diverse hires: someone’s coming to eat your lunch. Your talent is ready to walk away unless you give them a reason to stay.
How would you know that you are about to hemorrhage employees? An individual contributor mentions something offhand to their manager about not being recognized. Everyone turns their video off for meetings and social events (though some research says that selective video-off meetings is good, especially for women or new hires). Your internal satisfaction numbers are dropping on culture surveys.
If you’re a manager or business leader, you need to interview your team, conduct surveys, and shift relevant resources towards employee engagement NOW. Unless you want to sufferfest your way into acquiring new talent in a competitive talent market, make the investments and changes now.
Recommended To-Dos for Business Owners are at the end of this post.
Where are all the great candidates? Oh, they’re going to workplaces that pay them more and allow them to work from home if they want.
“The Great Reshuffle”
From the perspective of unemployed, underemployed, or employed-but-disengaged employees, the winds are in your favor. It’s a candidate market and geographic boundaries are disappearing as progressive organizations (sorry brick-and-mortars) fight to compete for top talent.
There’s unfortunately also plenty of competition for jobs, too: federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits end in the US on September 4th, international competition are taking advantage of job openings, and the “Easy Apply” button on LinkedIn is making it frictionless to apply to lots of jobs.
And you’re here reading an article that’s trying to motivate you to take action.
Carpe fucking diem, friends.
If you’re looking for a new job, seriously consider hiring a career coach and start conducting informational interviews. You have the luxury of choice, but for how long? A coach can make your search more efficient. Talking to people at jobs that you want to have are going to help give you the data and insight to help you choose…and they might even know about a new opening that’s in the pipeline.
You can’t wait on this: organizations are going to tinker with their hiring budgets for 2022 while they’re sitting on job openings and a hot market. Your next dream job is looking for you, but not forever.
Recommended To-Dos for Job Seekers are at the end of this post.
What could life be like if you spent your working hours doing something that makes you feel alive?
“The Great Reclamation”
Kudos to Marissa for her piece on the Great Reclamation and specifically this passage:
“What we’re seeing is more of a “Great Reclamation,” with human beings deliberately choosing themselves and working to reclaim their time, energy, identities, autonomy, and passions.
We’re seeing people reimagine work-life integration and prioritize physical and mental health over money and “the grind.”
We’re seeing workers who are feeling empowered to seek purpose, happiness, and flexibility in their roles.
And we’re seeing a rejection of the status quo that could cripple employers, but absolutely doesn’t have to.”
What Marissa did in her piece was to attempt reframe the relationship between employers and employees. I want to take it one step further:
Start your own thing.
The time is ripe to indulge your fantasy of becoming an entrepreneur. Consumers have spending power, businesses are looking to grow, and the technology is available to start a business cheaply and effectively.
If you’re currently employed and performing at expectations, employers are in no position to fire talent that isn’t underperforming. You can keep your current job and begin researching and sending out feelers for your dream career. It’s so much easier to explore if you’re remote, too. You can keep your life security, invest your motivation into discovering entrepreneurship, and see what being your own boss feels like.
Now’s a chance to reclaim your purpose, whether you’ve lost it at a soulsucking job or discovered it during the pandemic. You can have the things that Marissa detailed in her original post: “Time. Space. Growth. Autonomy. Leadership. Wellness. Work-life integration. Money. Safety. Engagement. Equity.”
The best part of being your own boss?
You tell me.
What To Do If You Are A Business Owner:
Write/ReWrite a Remote Work Policy that promote flexibility.
Create/Review your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives and fund them generously.
Update your employer-brand materials, including your LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Comparably, and other social outlets.
What To Do if You Are Job Searching:
Research 10 LinkedIn profiles of people who have jobs you want and mimic what resonates with you in how they present themselves. Look for how they describe their experiences, skill tags, and headline images and text.
Set a schedule for job discovery. Book time on your own calendar to research, conduct informational interviews, and reflect on what matters most.
Apply! Even if you’re not sure you want to leave your current role, apply anyway and see what happens. You might be surprised.
What To Do If You Are Entrepreneur Curious
Write down every reason that your imposter syndrome would throw at you why you can’t/shouldn’t start a business or side hustle. Then, methodically prove them wrong. Here’s a few examples:
“I’m not qualified to start a business.”
Response: There is no universal qualification to start a business. You are more qualified than someone who knows nothing. You probably underestimate your expertise.
“I don’t know how to start.”
Response: Google it. Sign up for a program. Ask a friend. Visit SCORE.
“I can’t handle the risk.”
Response: Start small. Ask how other people figured it out. Quantify the risk/opportunity cost of not trying.
Daydream about what kind of life you want to live. Be descriptive. Use lots of feelings-imagery.
Get involved in local entrepreneurship-curious organizations like Startup Boston
I can’t wait to see what hustle you dream up!
These aren’t your masters anymore.
Racism and Referrals: Part Two
Dismantle institutional racism by changing traditions in how you hire. Explore the balancing act around under-represented minority bonuses as a possible way to encourage broader intellectual diversity.
Challenge Toxic Traditions With Underrepresented Minority Bonuses
This series was written as a collaboration between Learn to Scale, an organization specializing in employee retention and engagement, and Drafted, the leader in optimizing company networks to leverage referrals. Please note: some perspectives may not reflect each organization's particular beliefs when it comes to referrals but in the spirit of transparency and accountability both parties feel it’s appropriate to share all view points.
Learn to Scale and Drafted have teamed up to help talent acquisition and HR professionals be more nuanced in how they develop their referral programs. With thousands of referrals flowing through the Drafted platform every month, the Drafted team has real data on how referral programs influence diverse hiring practices. Learn to Scale has over a decade of experience engaging and retaining talent, especially with hires from nontraditional educational backgrounds in smaller organizations. Together, a power duo for DEI.
Let's talk about referral programs for hiring: effective or racist?
Drafted and Learn to Scale have joined forces to do something about inequality by promoting an overlooked framework to build a more inclusive and equitable workplace: Preferences, Traditions, and Requirements (PTR). We have Dr. R Roosevelt Thomas Jr. to thank for this framework and shame on the internet for not picking it up and sharing it. It’s so practical: Preferences are biased choices by individuals, Traditions are entrenched biased choices by an organization, and Requirements are the only thing that should matter when hiring people. Apply this test to your organization and you can start silencing the noise that prevents diverse voices from joining your team.
In part one, we explored Preferences in the context of referral programs. Head here to read how Talent Acquisition Tina developed an innovative referral program designed to source diverse talent. In part two, we are going to use the second prong of PTR to address Traditions and how underrepresented minority (URM) bonuses can help do that.
Let’s get traditional.
Traditions are powerful tools for business but often are left to the unconscious mind. It's good business sense to replicate what works, but if what works reaffirms institutional racism, well, that's not great.
We'll start taking a step back from your numbers and assumptions by dialing up your sensitivity to your subconscious traditions. Have you ever answered questions like this 👇:
At first glance, these questions are excellent analytic avenues to inform how you can recruit great talent. You can probably find data points to answer these questions and that’s where most people stop. But, take each question and go one level deeper 🔽:
Still pretty egalitarian, right? Well, let's get even deep and peek inside your subconscious ⏬:
👆Hint: the answer to number 3 is probably white men. It's uncomfortable but it's true. Traditions have this power to bury psychological-yet-discriminatory reasons underneath what on the surface look like compelling data models. Relying just "numbers" that could be dated or constructed with with intentional bias is a dangerous game to play. Take an outside look at your hiring practices and don't be afraid to ask tough questions. The PTR model challenges you to take a step back from the numbers to examine these assumptions from a human behavioral aspect so you can design conscious interventions. Once you know it’s there, it’s hard to un-know it.
Under Represented Minority Bonuses
Under Represented Minority (URM) bonuses are sometimes a touchy topic but can be a tactic to intercept subconscious defaults. Set up a system to build a new tradition that has more equality and intentional diversity measures on autopilot. A URM bonus assumes that there is a diversity problem and the organization wants to incentivize behavior to address and change it. People tend to think of URM bonuses in extremes - you can't put a bounty on a certain profile of a person! However, it does not have to be that explicit. Set up a sliding scale for candidates with more diverse backgrounds i.e. if a candidate ticks a certain number of boxes with any number of determined criteria the higher the referral bonus for employees.
This is a practical and a political decision. Affirmative action, reparations, reverse discrimination...these are loaded topics and there’s real risk to do it in a way that makes people less-than, tokenized, and marginalized. However, doing it right is more than morals: organizations with diversity make more money.
Get everyone involved in solving your diversity problem. Leveraging your whole organization to participate and provide feedback on your URM program increases the likelihood that you do it right, rather than stumble into a public relations disaster. To get you started, here’s some best practices to follow when planning a URM bonus model:
1) Use modern definitions and continually revise
Language shapes thought. In the identity and inclusion space, definitions are hard to agree on and nuance keeps being added as culture shifts. Queer used to be pejorative but now embodies pride and is used as a socially acceptable term when describing sexuality. When preparing public-facing terms, you want the terms to capture people who self-identify as that term, not what you label them.
Ask people from a target demographic how they like to be addressed. Offer training to employees on how to navigate the language around identity i.e. diversity and inclusion training. Invest time learning about diversity, equity, and inclusion thought leadership. Consider it market research: candidates are a market and you want to speak their language.
2) Keep a rigorous interview process
Meeting one certain demographic criteria shouldn't automatically put a candidate to the front of the pack if they are not qualified. That is just silly. Superficial markers, i.e. protected classes, are not a prerequisite for the intellectual diversity you intend to foster. Bringing people from diverse backgrounds to contribute to a business is why intentionally diverse companies are the most successful but if you are only focused on ticking boxes you will miss the mark.
When a URM bonus is described and evaluated, it should focus on the true requirement: the intellectual diversity. The superficial markers - skin color, nationality, educational background, etc. - should always be seen as just a marker whereas the interview process is the true test for the diversity you seek. A URM bonus with a weak interview process won’t guarantee the results you want: diverse experiences and innovative thought.
3) Don’t collect people
“I have Asian friends, so I can’t be racist” is a pretty good sign that someone might be racist. Associating with diverse groups does not confer authority to you on their experience and value. An organization that institutes URM bonuses needs to be wary of slipping into this mindset, especially when there are early positive results. You should celebrate diversity but be careful of tokenizing people in that spirit - we are all humans, not trophies.
Setting a target percentage of hired candidates that fit certain demographic criteria is practical but you can’t hang up the victory banner when that target has been hit. This is not a set it and forget it, one and done type deal. There’s always an evolution in the workforce, so use your diversity metrics as starting points for conversations, not as finish lines. Calibrating your URM bonuses to these conversations is a great way to stay aligned with what the organization needs and to ensure that what started as a good tradition doesn’t start to sour.
4) Shut up and let them talk
To empower your organization to pursue URM talent, the voices of these demographics need to be heard and respected. Allyship is complicated and requires deft emotional intelligence, but the best way to promote allyship is to curate space for diverse thoughts to be heard. Get out of the way. Non-majority perspectives need less noise from the establishment so they can earn their authentic authority.
When creating referral and recruitment marketing materials, don’t script the messaging. In fact, work with your under-represented minority employee resource group to create the positioning to draw in people just like them. What matters to you might not matter to them.
Conclusion
Diversity, equity, and inclusion is a place where mistakes will happen. It's tricky and makes people touchy. Identity, parity, legacy, language...these are all messy things that are hard and most organizations avoid it because it is hard. But if you’ve read this far, you know that the hard thing is the right thing.
If you would like help unearthing traditions, do your research or have a third party to challenge assumptions from an outside perspective. There are marvelous organizations, individuals, and resources dedicated to diversity and inclusion that can help ask the touchy questions, “Why are you doing THAT like THAT?”
There is nothing wrong with encouraging employees to make diverse referrals by providing incentives. Frankly, saying employee referrals is bad for diversity and inclusion is a cop out for not doing the work to make your organization intentionally diverse. Some traditions that have been passed down are in some cases designed to be intentionally racist, classist, or sexist - there is nothing wrong with dismantling those systems for a better workforce. According to Forbes, referrals are the leading source of the best candidates for 88% of employers with the highest ROI - it just makes sense to marry your diversity and inclusion initiatives to your employee referral program.
About Learn to Scale
Learn to Scale was founded with the belief that talent development programs like an engaging on-boarding, a career path that motivates you, and a well-trained great manager should be every employee’s experience, no matter the size of the organization. Companies that want to retain their best talent can partner with Learn to Scale to get the value of an in-house Learning and Development Team at a fraction of the cost of even one regrettable turnover. Learn more
About Drafted
At Drafted, we believe that your company network is your single biggest competitive advantage when it comes to hiring. Our mission is to make it easy for you to leverage your network in the hiring process to find the best candidates. Your network is already powerful, it’s just too much work to make it a priority over the day-to-day of recruiting. Companies that use Drafted see their employee referral numbers go up by 2x, their time to hire drop by 30% and their overall hiring efficiency increase significantly within just a few months. Learn More
Racism and Referrals: Part One
Are referral programs for hiring effective or racist? Explore how preferences embodied in referral programs can be mitigated so you can build a talent pool that is more diverse and set up the best job applicants to join your startup.
Make Employee Referrals More Equitable
This series was written as a collaboration between Learn to Scale, an organization specializing in employee retention and engagement, and Drafted, the leader in optimizing company networks to leverage referrals. Please note: some perspectives may not reflect each organization's particular beliefs when it comes to referrals but in the spirit of transparency and accountability both parties feel it’s appropriate to share all view points.
Learn to Scale and Drafted have teamed up to help talent acquisition and HR professionals be more nuanced in how they develop their referral programs. With thousands of referrals flowing through the Drafted platform every month, the Drafted team has real data on how referral programs influence diverse hiring practices. Learn to Scale has over a decade of experience engaging and retaining talent, especially with hires from nontraditional educational backgrounds in smaller organizations. Together, a power duo for DEI.
Let's talk about referral programs for hiring: effective or racist?
In one corner, we have evidence that employers who have referral programs tend to hire faster, the referred employees stay longer, and referral programs ultimately cut costs. There's also evidence that employees tend to source higher quality leads and support them when they're there because they have skin in the game.
In the other corner, the evidence that companies tend to source people who look like themselves. There's also evidence that people tend to inhabit racially homogenous circles, which solidifies, rather than dismantles, corporate racial homogeneity. When sourced from new avenues, candidates have less built-in support structures (i.e. an inside person who wants to see you succeed or an employee resource group because they're "the first"), running the risk of shedding outsider talent faster than insider talent.
Where’s the middle ground?
“Preferences, Traditions, and Requirements” (PTR) is the framework you have been looking for to root out inequality in your organization. Originally coined by Dr. R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. in his article “A Diversity Framework” in Diversity in Organization: New Perspectives for a Changing Workplace, it was a shockingly pragmatic way to hone in on true need-to-haves in a workplace and how to reasonably question the norms and assumptions that build up over the years.
Systemic racism has been calcified in the workplace for too long and thanks to the renewed Black Lives Matter movement, organizations are finally taking actual steps to crack the deep-seated deposits of inequality...but many are struggling to figure out how to go about it. The PTR framework is a pickaxe that can dig out assumptions and categorize them by Preferences (a desire, perhaps by a decisionmaker), Traditions (a desire that historically has been checked off enough times that it feels like a default choice), and Requirements (a necessary condition for competence).
In this series, we’re going to explore the PTR framework in the context of referral programs. Many organizations have some kind of incentive structure to bring in outside talent vouched for by internal employees. It’s a common tactic to recruit talent and research shows that it works. But for many organizations, their referral program that “works” either allows embedded assumptions to linger or- at worst- widens the gap by over incentivizing typical candidates to crowd out qualified non-traditional candidates.
In Part One: explore how preferences embodied in referral programs can be mitigated by a five question litmus test.
In Part Two: dismantle traditions by approaching the job description creation process in a more collaborative manner.
In Part Three: how a harmonized career framework can provide the guidance for discerning candidate requirements.
Part One: Your Referral Preferences Might Be Racist
Tina is sweating the numbers.
As the head of Talent Acquisition, Tina has a quota of new hires she’s trying to close to meet her organization’s aggressive revenue targets. She’s racing to source candidates for a wide range of unrelated roles while trying to keep a standard of quality up for every department...but she can see the writing on the wall.
She’s not going to hit her numbers on her own.
After two glasses of wine and a long talk with her mentor, Tina decided it was time to set up a referral program at her organization - she realized that referrals tend to perform better and will be a great asset to her existing talent pipeline. To do this she needed to leverage the team to help source all the talent that she cannot do on her own. Now the question she needs to answer:
“How do I structure a program that brings in quality diverse talent?”
In Part One, we’re going to look at the Preferences portion of the PTR framework and address ways to scrub preferences out of referral program design.
Many talent acquisition leaders start by designing the same kind of referral program. At its core, the referral program du jour is something simple: a cash bounty for employees who refer a candidate that gets hired and stays at the organization for a period of time. Tried and true. Occam’s Razor of Referrals.
However, this leaves a lot up to employees. 35 % of employees refer to help their friends, 32% do it to help their company, 26% do it to be seen as a valuable colleague. Only 6% do it for money and recognition. Simple referral programs cede control, rather than pursue an organizational strategic priority. You can’t Occam’s Razor systemic racism. While we hope that people are not intentionally racist, it’s worth noting that if you want to instill anti-racist values on an organizational level, it starts by creating a consciously diverse hiring pool.
The Tinas who want to design referral programs that recruit diverse talent need a few more pieces of scaffolding to help guide the larger organization to examine their network with a more critical eye. For this scaffolding to be successful, Tina needs to be more focused on curating how referrals are communicated and endorsed, rather than explicitly saying, “We’re only paying referral bonuses for people of color.” While ethically questionable in some instances if not done right, it is possible to intentionally structure your hiring process to intentionally focus on more diverse hires and those in underrepresented minority groups. Intel strategically increased diverse hires as a part of a multi-pronged effort to increase diverse hires: in the first quarter alone, 17% of senior executives hired were from minority groups, compared to just 6% the previous year. But Intel is big. Intel made it a strategic priority beyond Tina’s office. The Tinas of the world don’t have the same leverage that Intel has to address a systemic problem.
Below are five questions to keep in mind during the referral program design process to find ways to mitigate preferences in the sourcing process:
1. Who describes the job opening to employees and how do they describe “the kind of person they are looking for?”
Context matters. When a senior leader is using culturally appropriate language, promotes inclusivity and respect in their environment, and actively solicits feedback on how they’re perceived, then it sets a model for how employees should behave in kind. When a leader is self-aware, it encourages others to be self-aware. Self-aware teams think twice about their personal assumptions and preferences.
This question has incredible influence on how employees approach their mental selection process. Being intentional with who and how a job opening is presented, you ensure that employee expectations are calibrated to the requirements of the role, rather than the preferences of whomever is explaining their interpretation of the role.
2. How are jobs shared internally?
Intellectual diversity is one of the desired outcomes of a diverse hiring process. Intellectual diversity is a breadth of various perspectives, bodies of knowledge, and methods of thinking that produces superior results - it’s a net-good thing. It is important that the benefits of intellectual diversity are conveyed to employees when asking them to make referrals - changing the way employees think about referrals is 10x more important than changing the program itself. When sharing open positions internally, encourage employees to go beyond the top of mind referrals of a good friend or former colleague and ask them to consider what perspectives the hiring team is currently missing or could benefit from.
Organizations tend to generate this intellectual diversity organically (a sales rep, an engineer, and a marketer walk into a bar…), but can easily be forgotten during the referral process. Intentionally educating adjacent departments about newly opened roles is a way of increasing the likelihood of intellectual diversity as people tap into their niche networks to dredge up non-traditional referral candidates. Besides, LinkedIn’s 2020 Talent Trends identifies the increase in internal hiring as one of the year’s biggest trends and simply communicating job openings increases the likelihood of making an internal hire. With this in mind, it’s important to consider a cadence for sharing newly open positions with your entire organization on a regular basis. An internal ‘job board’ with regular notifications or pings about open roles across all departments will help to generate a stream of cross-departmental referrals.
3. Does your company incentivize for a certain type of referrals?
Money has this curious ability to drive people to rank importance. The assumption is that the more you are paid, the more important you are. The more you pay out in referral bonuses, the more important the role seems. When a referral program is reflective of market conditions, it will breed unintentional consequences.
When deciding how to structure incentives, think beyond the job qualifications to the impact on the organization’s self-image. Typically, specialized roles that are harder to source, higher cost, and more scarce tend to drive higher referral bonuses, so there’s an economic argument for better incentives for competitive roles. However, the qualifications to actually submit a referral - “I think this person would be a great fit for this organization”- is the same for any role. If an employee knows someone great, then they should make a referral...but incentivizing based on job description means that quality candidates that would be great fits for less-incentivized roles are ignored in lieu of the big payout roles. Any time you allow employees to ignore quality candidates is an opportunity that a non-traditional candidate slips through the cracks.
To that point, companies should not discount Under Represented Minority (URM) bonuses as something to try when experimenting with different referral bonus structures. While monetary incentives for specific groups of people can be tricky to navigate, it is worth exploring an extra incentive to bring someone of a diverse or different background into the organization. For inspiration check out these six companies that are doing URM bonuses right.
Some organizations have pursued incentive programs that are not simple cash payouts. Need inspiration to think beyond the dollar?
4. Who are your best internal company brand advocates?
I once worked at an organization where the person staffing the front desk has been there longer than 90% of the rest of the organization. She loved working there and her pleasure in her work was infectious. Kim knew everyone, knew everything, and had influencer power that senior leaders couldn’t ignore. You listened to Kim and you respected her or else there would be hell to pay. When new hires started, they all had a positive memory of Kim.
Internal brand advocates are the kinds of people you want sourcing that next great hire, not only for their ability to close quality candidates but because they see a deeper meaning in bringing in new talent. They’re custodians of a culture that is close to their heart and they will find people who they feel safe staking their influence on. Intentionally educating internal brand advocates on the referral process and strategic hires is a great way of ignoring superficial preferences and honing in on core cultural values.
There’s also a correlation between referrers and increased employee retention: perhaps your best brand advocates are being retained because they give referrals! Consider how to empower more employees to be a brand advocate and- even better- how to get them to be repeat-referrers. Creating a strong connection to the company culture, brand, and referrals will strengthen the relationship the employee has with the company and encourage them to make more referrals.
5. What kind of treatment do you give new hires that were referral hires? What messages does that send to the organization?
Finally, the feedback loop on how referral hires are perceived in the organization feeds the dynamo of future referrals, as well as the transition point of where a Preference starts to be fixed as a Tradition (which we will explore more in Part 2). If a referral program is seen as a necessary evil to meet hiring quota requirements, then referral hires start their first day one step behind. On the other hand, extensively lauding referral hires has an adverse impact on non-referral hires, as well as granting status simply because they knew someone on the inside. The scent of oligarchy follows referral overpromotion.
One balanced approach to appreciating referral hires is individualized praise with publicly shared aggregate data. Encouraging employees to make referrals is critical to the health of your referral system, so privately praising your referrers encourages them to continue. However, just like a leader should be honest and transparent and self-reflective, an organization should be transparent with their sourcing and hiring practices. Accountability to the organization builds trust. Accountability also allows the broader employee base to share feedback on how well the organization is doing in achieving their diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.
So what can Tina do in response to these five preference-dispelling questions?
To make referrals less intimidating, she develops a distilled version for every job description that is a more casual internal description. Tina wants different departments to conceptualize the overall role, even if they aren’t familiar with the actual job requirements.
Tina plans to present a Bounty Board at company town halls. She also leverages an internal job board to not only push Slack notifications to employees at random but highlight referral best practices such as accounting for intellectual diversity. This will ensure that all employees hear about hot jobs as well as provide additional reminders to employees about what makes a good referral. Plus, the randomness in the Slackbot will capture employees that Tina may not personally know as well, opening up a broader referrer pool.
Tina plans to offer a $3000 bonus to employees that refer candidates that ultimately get hired. To encourage fresh engagement and capitalize on market trends, Tina plans to temporarily increase the referral bonus by $1500 quarterly for different department job roles.
She personally plans to meet regularly with her Head of Sales and Head of Engineering, two strong brand advocates that tend to close new hires at a higher rate than other managers. When a hot job is posted, she personally briefs these two advocates and answers their questions. This empowers them to share open positions with their respective teams to encourage repeat-referrals.
For every employee that successfully refers a candidate that gets hired, Tina handwrites a thank you note. The time to make a genuine and unique piece of recognition more than makes up the time sourcing and phone screening.
Conclusion
Referral programs often get a bad reputation for being homogeneous and rightfully so, if not done correctly. Expecting your referral program to do all the hard work for you is simply just not going to cut it if you are intentionally trying to build a diverse company. Step one starts with setting the intention for what you want to achieve and educating your organization appropriately. While it is true that referrals ‘tend to’ perform better, you should not go into the interview with the assumption that the referred candidate is better. A strong referral program should be considered as just another source in your talent pipeline - in other words don’t expect your referral program to do all the hard work for you.
About Drafted
At Drafted, we believe that your company network is your single biggest competitive advantage when it comes to hiring. Our mission is to make it easy for you to leverage your network in the hiring process to find the best candidates. Your network is already powerful, it’s just too much work to make it a priority over the day-to-day of recruiting. Companies that use Drafted see their employee referral numbers go up by 2x, their time to hire drop by 30% and their overall hiring efficiency increase significantly within just a few months.
About Learn to Scale
Learn to Scale was founded with the belief that talent development programs like an engaging on-boarding, a career path that motivates you, and a well-trained great manager should be every employee’s experience, no matter the size of the organization. Companies that want to retain their best talent can partner with Learn to Scale to get the value of an in-house Learning and Development Team at a fraction of the cost of even one regrettable turnover.