Keep a collaboration rhythm

It’s easy in agency life to fall into a pattern of big spurts of activity that tail off.

You get a new idea, jump on it and want to make it happen. You bring people together, enthuse about it, set it going, and then it gradually peters out as your attention gets pulled elsewhere, usually to client work.

That leads to unpredictability.

Nobody knows what will happen, when — or even if anything will happen at all.

People lose sight of how and when to contribute.

Worse, it breeds cynicism around the agency: “Oh it’s just a load of noise about new stuff, ignore it and it’ll go away soon. Just keep your head down.”

And all of this slows an agency down to a crawl.

It’s why many founders feel it becomes harder to actually get anything done, even as their agency grows and they have more people around them to do things. They sometimes long for the ‘good old days’ when it was just ten people in a small office and things happened easily.

To make things happen in a more mature agency you need the opposite of spurts of action.

You need rhythm.

A consistent, steady drumbeat that is sustainable over time.

Like with drums, some of the beats are deep and happen less frequently as with a bass drum, and some are light and regular like a hi-hat.

So there are different depths and frequency of collaboration.

Some are quick, frequent and more about synchronisation and alignmemt.

Some are deep and booming, resonating through the development of your agency — because they deal with big issues, generate big ideas, make big progress. But they can only happen a few times a year.

Think about collaboration activities in your agency like this.

Build up layers of rhythm.

Annual events, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily.

Your role as the leader is to:

1. Design this rhythm, perhaps in collaboration with your second-in-command or your leadership team.

2. Set the culture that sustains it over time: the events will always happen at a set time in a set place, regardless of whatever else is going on and who can make it. People are expected to attend and participate actively — not doing so would be looked down on.

3. Show that it is a priority for you, by (a) properly attending any events you are supposed to be part of; and (b) checking in and asking after other events to learn how they went and what came out of them.

4. Celebrate people and teams making their parts of the rhythm happen consistently over time and making them valuable

5. Hold people to account for not maintaining their part of the rhythm.

In this section, we’ll share ideas for collaboration events that can form parts of your rhythm, as well as ideas for nurturing the culture.