Getting organised, Managing a small team needs careful thought but a light touch

His name is Janusz Stabik, and he is a managing partner at GYDA, which means Grow Your Digital Agency.

Managing a small agency team of fewer than 15 employees is where many agencies operate within the broader landscape. It’s also where many tend to hit a plateau. At this stage, leadership and management often present the biggest challenges, requiring focus and finesse to navigate effectively.

Why is this important? As a service-based business, our success relies on time arbitrage—the skills, time, and behaviours of our team members. In essence, they’re a people-centric business. As founders, they wear many hats—CFO, CMO, COO, managing director, accountant, and more. With so much on our plate, getting the best out of their team is essential. However, without MBAs, management degrees, or formal business backgrounds, navigating the complexities of team management can sometimes be challenging.

They can then start to empower and manage people within that context, and because of the other work they’ve done, their management piece is significantly reduced. They don’t need to micromanage, they don’t need to react, they don’t need to pull strings. They’ve created, again, the context and the framework from within which their teams can thrive, and then they can focus on it and rinse, repeat, and continue to grow with rigour and vigour.

But in other words, it’s impossible to do it the other way. It’s impossible to manage teams of junior people without a vision strategy or systems in place, with no defined culture, and with people who are not a good cultural or value-based fit. You’re going to spend most of your time solving symptomatic problems, dealing with people problems, fixing client issues, because there’s just, there’s nothing there.

It’s just a collection of people bashing keys on a daily basis, and your management job is impossible.