Kingdom Digital, a thriving startup digital media agency with a large parent company had massive turnover and upheaval in its Programmatic team. The Programmatic team was responsible for much of the agency’s revenue. Their largest client was a luxury automobile company. When the luxury automobile business was first won, several leaders were brought on but ultimately decided to move off the business, had maternity leave, or abruptly resigned to pursue other opportunities. To address this issue, Human Resources partnered with the agency’s leaders to interview a candidate who would stick it out for the long haul. Amy was that candidate! She came into her interviews with high energy as well as fresh ideas. They offered her the role of “Director of Programmatic” with an attractive compensation package. Amy was very excited and accepted the offer right away.
On Amy’s first day, she was super excited and got to the office early to meet her new team. To understand the challenges that she would face, Amy set up one-on-one meetings with each team member as well as agency leadership. She found out that the Programmatic team wasn’t known for doing quality work. In fact, they had the lowest satisfaction scores of any of the other departments. Her meetings with her team were equally uninspiring as she found that their pain points were inconsistent leadership, poor agency communication, and inconsistent processes and standards across Tier 1 (National) and Tier 2 (Local). As reality quickly set in, Amy’s optimism about her new role began to wane. However, she vowed to turn things around for her team.
Her first order of business was to tackle the PR problem that her Programmatic team had. She took the feedback from other agency departments and compiled a list of actionable solutions. Her primary focus was ensuring that her team provided quality work. To do this, she needed to investigate and audit current work processes, reports, and deliverables. After performing her audit, she found inconsistencies across Tier 1 and Tier 2 billing and deliverables. She then sent her findings to her team in a meeting invite two days prior to the actual meeting to give her team time to provide their feedback and rationale behind their work.
Amy’s team consisted of:
Brian, Media Coordinator fresh out of college who was very extroverted and ambitious.
Linda, Media Specialist who had several years of Ad Operations experience. Linda oversaw the Tier 1 business. Linda was mostly an introvert who preferred to work alone and did things her way.
Nora, Media Specialist who had several years of analytics experience. Nora oversaw the Tier 2 business. Nora was an introvert who worked alone and was very task-oriented.
Paul, Media Coordinator who had an MBA but not a lot of work experience because he went to grad school right after college. Paul was an ambitious and hard-working extrovert who enjoyed attending and coordinating team events.
Gabe, Media Coordinator fresh out of college who was unsure of himself. Gabe tended to get overwhelmed with tasks resulting in him making small mistakes. Gabe was introverted as he tended to come in unnoticed and failed to speak up during meetings.
An unspoken norm of the team was that the two Media Specialists indirectly mentor the Media Coordinators.
As Amy began to get a more realistic view of the challenges ahead, she realized that she would need to extend herself and her team grace in the coming days due to the agency’s busy season approaching. During the anticipated busy season, her team was going to be swamped with millions of dollars worth of advertising for both Tier 1 and Tier 2 digital campaigns. Therefore, Amy understood the importance of proving that with her leadership, her team could thrive during the agency’s busy season thus showing everyone that they deserved the privilege of overseeing large media campaigns. Despite the long road ahead, Amy was confident that she could lead her team to victory!
Mercedes Tucker 