Leading Teams: What Agency Life Teaches You

Leading marketing teams well is one of the most commercially consequential things a senior marketer can do, and one of the least talked about with any honesty. Most writing on the subject defaults to frameworks and platitudes. What actually shapes strong teams is messier, more specific, and far more instructive than any leadership model suggests.

If you have run a team through a pitch, a turnaround, or a period of rapid growth, you already know that the gap between theory and practice is enormous. What follows is what I have learned from operating in that gap for two decades.

Why Most Team Leadership Advice Misses the Point

The leadership content industry has a productivity problem. It produces enormous volumes of material, most of which is either too abstract to apply or too specific to one context to transfer. You can read ten books on team leadership and still be completely unprepared for the moment a senior account director resigns the week before a major client review.

What I have found, across running agencies and building teams from 20 to 100 people, is that leadership is mostly a series of judgment calls made under pressure with incomplete information. The frameworks help you think. They do not make the calls for you.

There is also a structural bias in how leadership is discussed. Most of the writing assumes you are leading from a position of relative stability: a functioning team, a clear brief, a reasonable runway. In practice, many of the most important leadership moments happen in the opposite conditions. A loss-making business. A team that has lost confidence. A client relationship that is deteriorating. These are the situations that reveal what your leadership is actually made of.

If you are thinking about this in the context of broader commercial strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers how team structure, capability, and leadership connect to how businesses actually grow. Team leadership does not exist in isolation from commercial performance. The two are more tightly linked than most leadership writing acknowledges.

The Whiteboard Moment: What It Actually Tests

My first week at Cybercom, we were running a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder had to leave for a client meeting partway through and handed me the whiteboard pen on his way out the door. I had been in the building for less than five days. The room was full of people who had worked together for years and had no particular reason to follow my lead.

My internal reaction was something close to panic. I did it anyway.

What that moment taught me was not about technique. It was about the decision to step forward when stepping back would have been easier and arguably more defensible. Leadership credibility is not something you are given. It is something you earn in small, specific moments, often before you feel ready for them.

The teams I have led well have almost always started with a moment like that: a situation where I had to demonstrate something before I had earned the right to lead. The teams I have led less well have usually involved me waiting for conditions that were more comfortable before fully committing. That is a mistake I have made more than once, and it costs more than you expect.

Context Is Everything: The Benchmark Problem in Team Performance

One of the most persistent errors in team management is evaluating performance without reference to context. If your team grew revenue by 10% last year, that sounds like progress. If the market grew by 20%, you lost ground. The number looks good. The performance is not.

I have seen this pattern repeatedly in agency environments, where teams are measured against internal targets that were set without proper reference to what the market was doing. The team hits its numbers. Leadership celebrates. Meanwhile, competitors are pulling further ahead. By the time the gap becomes visible, it is significantly harder to close.

The same logic applies to team capability. A team that was strong three years ago may be operating below the market standard today, not because the individuals have declined but because the market has moved and they have not kept pace. This is not a performance management problem in the traditional sense. It is a leadership problem. Someone should have been watching the benchmark, not just the internal scorecard.

Strong team leaders set expectations against external reference points, not just internal ones. What does a high-performing team in this function look like at this stage of growth? What are the best agencies, the best in-house teams, the best operators in adjacent industries doing? These are the questions that keep a team honest about where it actually sits.

This connects directly to how market penetration strategy is framed at a commercial level. You cannot assess whether your team is performing well without knowing what the competitive environment looks like. The same principle applies whether you are measuring market share or team capability.

Clarity Is a Leadership Responsibility, Not a Personality Trait

One of the things I have had to work on as a leader is the tendency to assume that people understand what I mean when I have not been specific enough. Early in my career, I thought being clear was a function of intelligence or communication style. Over time, I have come to think it is a discipline, something you have to consciously apply, particularly when you are busy or under pressure.

Ambiguity in a team environment is not neutral. It creates anxiety, misalignment, and wasted effort. When a brief is unclear, people fill the gap with their own assumptions. When a priority is unstated, people default to whatever they were already working on. When feedback is vague, people do not know what to change. None of this is malicious. It is just what happens when leadership does not do the work of being specific.

I have found that the teams that perform most consistently are the ones where expectations are stated plainly and early. Not just what needs to be done, but why it matters, what good looks like, and what the consequences are if it does not happen. That last part is often skipped, which is a mistake. People deserve to know the stakes. Withholding that information in the name of not wanting to create pressure is a form of paternalism that tends to backfire.

This is particularly important during periods of growth or change. When I was scaling a team from 20 to 100 people at iProspect, the communication load increased faster than I anticipated. What worked when you could have a conversation with everyone in a room does not work when the team is spread across multiple offices and disciplines. You have to build systems for clarity, not just rely on your own ability to communicate well in the moment.

The Tension Between Harmony and Performance

There is a version of team leadership that prioritises harmony above most other things. The logic is understandable: happy teams are productive teams, conflict is significant, and keeping people aligned is a core leadership function. The problem is that taken too far, this produces teams that are pleasant to work in and chronically underperforming.

The best teams I have been part of, and the best teams I have built, have not been the most harmonious ones. They have been the ones where people could disagree clearly, argue about the right approach, challenge each other’s thinking, and still execute together when a decision was made. That is a different thing from a team that avoids conflict by defaulting to consensus.

Creating that environment is harder than it sounds. It requires psychological safety, which is real and important, but it also requires a culture where disagreement is treated as a contribution rather than a disruption. That culture is set by the leader. If you visibly favour agreement over challenge, your team will learn to agree. If you reward people for bringing hard questions, they will bring them.

One of the most useful things I have done in team settings is to explicitly ask for the strongest counterargument to a position before we commit to it. Not as a formal process, just as a habit. It changes the dynamic in the room. It signals that challenge is welcome. And it catches a meaningful number of bad decisions before they become expensive ones.

This kind of constructive friction is particularly important in go-to-market planning, where the cost of a flawed assumption is high. GTM execution is genuinely harder than it used to be, and teams that cannot challenge their own thinking are poorly equipped to handle that complexity.

Hiring: The Decision That Compounds in Both Directions

Hiring is the highest-leverage thing most leaders do, and it is also the thing most likely to be done under time pressure with insufficient rigour. I have made both kinds of hiring mistakes: bringing in someone technically strong who damaged the team’s culture, and hiring for culture fit without being honest about capability gaps. Both are expensive. The capability gap tends to become visible faster. The culture damage tends to be slower and harder to trace.

What I have learned is that the brief matters more than the process. If you are clear about what you actually need, not just what the job description says but what the specific team needs at this specific moment, the assessment becomes more focused and the decision becomes cleaner. Vague hiring briefs produce vague hires.

I have also learned to pay attention to what candidates do with uncertainty in interviews. How they respond when they do not know the answer, when they are challenged on something they said, when they are asked to think through a problem they have not seen before. These moments reveal more about how someone will perform under pressure than any prepared answer does.

The other thing worth saying about hiring is that the best people are rarely looking. They are already doing interesting work somewhere else. If your hiring strategy is entirely reactive, posting roles and waiting, you will consistently get the second tier of the available talent pool. Building relationships with strong people before you need them is a leadership responsibility, not just an HR function.

Managing Performance Without Losing People

Performance management is one of the areas where leadership theory and practice diverge most sharply. The frameworks suggest a clean process: set expectations, measure against them, have structured conversations, document outcomes. In practice, performance issues are almost always more complicated than the framework assumes.

The most common mistake I have seen, and made, is waiting too long to have a direct conversation. The instinct is to give people time, to see if things improve on their own, to avoid a difficult interaction. What this usually produces is a longer period of underperformance, a more entrenched problem, and a harder conversation when you eventually have it.

The earlier you address a performance issue, the more options you have. You can adjust the role. You can provide support. You can be honest about the gap and give the person a real chance to close it. None of that is possible if you wait until the situation has deteriorated to the point where the only realistic outcome is an exit.

I have also found that most people respond better to directness than leaders expect. The fear of the conversation is usually worse than the conversation itself. When you tell someone clearly and respectfully that their performance is not where it needs to be, most of the time they already know. What they need is someone to be honest with them about it, not someone to manage around it.

The teams that handle performance well are the ones where the standard is visible and consistent. People know what good looks like because they see it recognised. They know what is not acceptable because it is addressed. That consistency is what makes performance conversations feel fair rather than arbitrary.

What Turnaround Experience Teaches You About Leadership

Some of the most formative leadership experience I have had has come from working in businesses that were in trouble. A loss-making agency. A team that had lost its way. A client relationship that was close to breaking. These situations have a clarifying effect. The margin for error is small, the stakes are visible, and the team is watching closely to see how you respond.

What I have found in those situations is that the most important thing you can do early is be honest about the reality. Not catastrophising, not minimising, just being clear about where things stand and what needs to change. Teams in difficulty often already know the situation is bad. What they need from leadership is someone who will acknowledge it plainly and then focus on what can be done.

The second thing turnaround experience teaches you is the importance of early wins. Not superficial ones, not manufactured ones, but genuine small improvements that demonstrate that the direction of travel has changed. These matter disproportionately to team morale. When people have been in a declining situation, evidence that things are improving is enormously motivating, even when the overall picture is still difficult.

The third thing is that turnarounds require you to make decisions faster than feels comfortable. Waiting for more information, more certainty, more consensus is a luxury you do not have. You have to be willing to make calls on incomplete information and adjust as you learn more. That is a skill that takes practice, and the practice is uncomfortable.

BCG’s work on aligning marketing and HR functions touches on something relevant here: the teams that perform in difficult conditions are the ones where commercial strategy and people strategy are built together, not in parallel. That integration is a leadership responsibility.

The Long Game: Building Teams That Outlast You

The most useful measure of a leader is not how well the team performs while you are there. It is how well it performs after you leave. That is a harder standard to meet, and a more honest one.

Building a team that is genuinely capable and genuinely self-sustaining requires you to invest in people’s development in ways that are not always immediately commercially productive. It requires you to delegate real responsibility, not just tasks. It requires you to let people make mistakes and learn from them rather than stepping in to prevent every error. And it requires you to be honest about the ceiling of your own leadership, which is a difficult thing to sit with.

The teams I am proudest of are the ones where people went on to do things that exceeded what they were doing when they worked with me. That is not a coincidence. It is the result of deliberate investment in people’s capability and confidence over time. It is also, frankly, the most commercially sensible thing you can do. Strong teams attract strong people. The reputation compounds.

If you are working through how team structure and capability connect to commercial growth planning, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture, from market entry to scaling, with the same commercial directness you will find here.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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