Unless AI can step in here too, the human brain cannot be 128% allocated in the physical world we occupy. And yet, add up the allocations for each employee at a given agency across all the scopes of work they’re attached to and they are, without fail, over 100%.
As heads of creative and account departments, respectively, we both hovered somewhere around 145%. Silly, yes. Duplicitous, also. That doesn’t even include the time spent on internal agendas — recruiting and growing talent, building culture, winning new business, etc.
Let’s, just for giggles, say allocations for agency leadership added up to a cool 100%. How many brands were getting a share? For easy math, let’s say 10. It’s generous, but go with it. Ten brands at 10% each. Ten percent max focus from the senior folks those clients fell in love with in a pitch and trusted to to help shape the future of their brand and business.
How much impact can you have at 10% capacity? Sure, not every client problem requires senior attention. But when it does, what’s the guarantee that those brains are even available? They likely have to drop something to quickly pivot over. Erase the etch-a-sketch. Get smart on the context real fast.
Be brilliant. Go!
What if instead, you could get 100% focus from those senior brains? What if they were 100% suited for the particular task at hand? And what if they could stay 100% dedicated to that task for days, if not weeks? What percent more effective would that be?
Now, we understand that this is easier said than done. Agencies need multiple clients to keep the lights on. The hierarchy in place ensures that senior talent wins the business, makes connections and jumps in for facetime when needed, while junior staff are knee deep in execution and waiting for approvals. In this model, the people best equipped to solve a brand’s problems are the least likely to be around to solve them.
Challenging, yes.
But insurmountable? Not remotely.
It just takes a generous shaking up of the traditional model. Here are a few ways at it:
Build the right team for the context (knowing context always changes). Typically, client teams are built based on availability, title and billing rate at the start of an engagement. Inevitably, context changes — and guess what: The same team navigates it, because it’s easier than shuffling the deck chairs.
What if instead, they reset every time the problem, team or context shifted? If you work back from there and create a small yet intentional team with the right experience and enough seniority to make decisions for the current moment, creative solutions may be unveiled faster and hit the mark the first time around.
Create a problem-solving, brief-cracking, unattached-to-business swat team. The C-suite brands fall in love with during a pitch aren't always available. They’re running an agency while more junior staff are running the day-to-day, creating a hole or at minimum, a delay in solving timely problems.
This can be remedied with a small team of experts whose primary job is to jump in and crack it, without needing facetime or buy-in from the C-suite. If you involve this higher level executive, perhaps a leveldown from the C-suite, and give them the opportunity with 100% focus to do more critical problem solving, the quality and speed of output and deliverables will increase.
Part time = full focus. There is a huge amount of super-senior or even former C-suite talent that have taken a step back from traditional roles. Maybe they were let go, burnt out or looking for a new challenge. These folks can be brought in on a fractional basis to focus on a single client with little distraction, leveraging their experience to move quickly. This gives brands access to more exceptional talent and gives consultants a new way to think through creative challenges. It’s a win-win for both clients and employees.
By trying different strategies for building teams or looking outside the agency to fractional talent, it is possible to achieve close to 100% client focus. That is what clients deserve, as well as what senior brains need to get closer to true work/life balance.
Either that, or we can just wait for the robots to make it possible to give our 145%.
Eric Segal and Brett Banker are cofounders of X&O.
