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Tech disruptions, market uncertainty, shifting competitor space, emerging growth opportunities — these conditions could describe any one of the last several years.
We know we’re not alone in feeling like the work of adaptation and reinvention is never really done. But the real challenge is how to react, adapt, reinvent, or rebuild, without making heads spin and without losing the things that make your agency special.
It requires bending and flexing, and doing so without breaking. The sweet spot for Column Five in recent years has been anchoring to something we call our “Most Important Things” (MITs): those constant, most essential things that we need in order to be successful and stay a regular focus, so that we can adapt and bend in new ways.
The Most Important Things
So, what are the most essential things your organization needs in order to be successful? Not the ones that will change next quarter or next year under different conditions, but the truly foundational elements of a successful organization, for you. They’re evergreen, not time-bound.
For Column Five, it’s satisfied clients, a fulfilled team, and healthy finances. Our clients’ satisfaction indicates to us that we’re delivering good work and building trusting relationships that can grow. A fulfilled team of people is essential for us to do good work and maintain the kind of interesting, challenging, inclusive, and fun culture we strive for. And financial stability and success is perhaps the no-brainer essential here.
These MITs are constant; we talk about them with staff, and we aim to hold them in balance. We call back to our MITs regularly so that people can orient to them in times of chaos. Instead of constant goal-post shifting, this clarity provides certainty, consistency, and transparency to our team about what really matters. During times of uncertainty, anchoring to something essential helps us be adaptable and resilient through change in other areas.
Bending in new ways
With our MITs in place we are able to manage the unexpected, as well as undergo experiments, without losing our way. We’ve begun testing new talent models and engagement structures to meet the needs of clients who are trying to balance their priorities with financial constraints — and the MITs give us different lenses to understand and evaluate the impact of these experiments.
As one example, we’ve introduced new embedded talent and creative pod structures into certain client engagements which are departures from our previously established staffing models. Having clients work directly with a single embedded designer or copywriter rather than a full multidisciplinary team was new territory for us. As we navigated several embedded roles at once, we were able to check in at the leadership level and evaluate how they impacted our clients’ satisfaction, fulfillment of those assigned team members, and the financial health of those deals.
We’ve also tried shifting some roles to hourly while we wait for our pipeline volume to resume full capacity. Previously, we assumed we needed certain client-facing roles as full-time. However, we have sought out experienced talent who were seeking part-time positions to fit their availability. Typically, that means balancing parenting duties, another consulting role, or a partial pause to pursue other passions. This flexible talent pool comes with the expertise our clients expect, without the full-time overhead. We found we can hit all three MITs through this path and have continued it as a common practice.
In both of these cases, we’ve needed flexibility and a bit of fearlessness to depart from our time-tested models and beliefs. In each instance, we’ve been able to look back to our MITs to understand their impact and help us course correct where needed.
Adapting with honest feedback and action
As we trial modern engagement models, role structures, and operating rhythms to meet changing client needs, a regular practice of listening, reflecting, and taking action becomes business-critical as another layer to our MITs.
We would not be where we are today without the insights gained from our training partners, particularly LifeLabs Learning and their exquisite CAMPS Model (Certainty, Autonomy, Meaning, Progress, Social Inclusion/Belonging), which we have used for the past three years as our quarterly pulse survey. We have even experimented using CAMPS within our longer-standing client accounts to understand how the client’s working style impacts team ratings (and how we might make improvements). We see it as another POV into our complex and uncertain work world.
At the partner and director level, we then use the viewpoint of our MITs to assess the CAMPS results and understand how we might be over-indexing in one area due to stress or other biases. It’s a health check-up on the agency and by having a language that we all understand, we can apply a little curiosity and get some honest feedback in areas that may feel sensitive, yet still require us to learn about a blind spot in order to improve.
These moments of consistent listening and action help us understand and respond to the impact of change on the team while also boosting our feelings of certainty and progress amid it.
Looking ahead and leading through change
Let’s be clear: this is more than change management, it’s change leadership. It’s the work we must constantly do to be adaptive — improve ourselves, enhance our processes, scale systems, and evolve. But bending and flexing without breaking proves harder. At Column Five, we’ve found the sweet spot for us is calling out those Most Important Things and anchoring to them regularly so that our team can have the resilience to endure, and even thrive, during change. As we embark on a new year sure to be filled with more change and unknowns, we’d ask: do you know what your Most Important Things are?
