Whether we like it or not, a recession is brewing. You may wish you could bury your head in the sand and wait for it to pass, but the best thing you can do as an agency owner is to take deliberate action and create a plan to protect your business now. This way even if you can’t completely shelter your agency from the impact of a recession, you can stay profitable and avoid a total wipe-out.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could be as productive as possible without causing burnout? We call it “working smarter, not harder.” Among many working professionals, working smart is a key to greater productivity. It can save you time and energy for the things that matter, like your life goals, personal growth and health, and relationships. The fact applies at work, too: Working smarter at the office keeps team members engaged and less overwhelmed.
In today’s project-driven business landscape, project managers are an indispensable part of completing projects successfully. But a closely related and equally important discipline receives much less attention: project leadership. Maybe it’s because one is a fairly standard job title and the other isn’t.
What makes a great leader? When Chris Hadfield was commanding the International Space Station, he learned that it’s not about seeking out individual greatness to make yourself look good. Instead, he found that excellent leadership is about building up the people around you: trusting them, empowering them, and ultimately, enabling them to contribute their expertise so that the team can become more than the sum of its parts.
OKRs can be a powerful tool in an organization’s arsenal for creating alignment, focusing on outcomes instead of just effort or task completions, and surfacing the right operational priorities. They’re just as powerful within departments and teams, and it’s in this latter area that project managers often start to get involved in the OKR process. But what about using OKRs within the project management discipline?
No marketer is an island. Having a great team of people on your side is one of the most important things you can do to set your business up for marketing success, but to maximize your team’s efficiency, you need to make sure everyone is on the same page. This is especially significant because today’s marketing teams have to juggle many moving parts.
Growth doesn’t happen by accident. It takes careful planning, the right opportunities, and the right goals. Growth also requires effective systems for setting those goals and tracking progress. After all, what use is a goal if you don’t know when or if you reached it?
Teams work better when they talk to each other and collaborate, but you don’t need us to tell you that. Connecting the dots between effective team communication and high-performance teams or agencies is where things get interesting. Poor team communication isn't just unproductive. It can create stress and waste valuable time — everything top performers avoid. Many teams may think they’ve got effective communication when it may not be that great.
How do you align your entire organization around specific company goals? And what’s the right way to motivate team members to improve employee performance and team cohesion? Goal-setting is an important strategy: Your company and its teams need to know the what. But as important as goal setting is, it’s only part of the equation.
