The Culture Creators In the Middle
This article is going to be most relevant to mid-sized firms who have reached a size where they have senior, mid-level, and junior team members as individual contributors.
Tiers of Seniority for Individual Contributors
Let’s assume the senior tiers break down as follows:
Partners win the work in new business and consult the senior project leads. They might provide the creative or technical direction for the project.
Seniors lead the projects and provide the creative or technical direction, if not done by a partner. A project may have multiple senior-level team members on it if it’s particularly challenging or the agency is senior-heavy
Mid-level team members are productive contributors to the project. They can tackle anywhere from 60% to 80% of the project work outside of creative and technical direction.
Junior team member contributions range from “break-even” (the amount of time mentoring them may not make them an asset on the project) to productive contributors. They’re mostly learning and are the future mid-level contributors; their present is an investment by the agency (with high profit upside on the work they can deliver without oversight).
Convention Wisdom on Company Culture
When we talk about company culture, we’re talking about a few things:
The norms on how work gets done
The beliefs and values that inform those norms
Conventional wisdom holds that, after the founders themselves, senior team members are most influential in setting company culture. There’s a reason the term “senior leadership” is ubiquitous and “junior leadership” sounds contradictory.
Senior team members are often evaluated on their availability to mentor more junior team members. They’re tasked with leading meetings and keeping conversations on track. And when the toughest design or engineering challenges arise on a project, they’re the ones who are going to figure it out and unblock the team. To be blunt about it – projects don’t get delivered without senior team members.
The Problem with a Senior-led Culture
But there are some structural disadvantages the senior team members face if they’re going to be the core culture-definers at an agency.
First – junior-level team members can’t relate to senior-level work. The gap between the two is so large, that it’s difficult for the senior’s work to inform how the junior team member would go about solving the problem in the future. In some ways, the senior-level team member might as well be a magician. They come in, fix an intractable problem that the junior may not even understand the underlying cause of, and then they’re pulled in another direction. In this regard, seniors are ill-suited to change how juniors go about doing the work, because the gap in skills creates a translation problem.
The second structural disadvantage seniors run into in terms of being culture-definers is their preferred treatment over mid-level team members. Seniors will be compensated more, often have more access to decision-making at the agency, and are more esteemed. This can create a dynamic where a mid-level team member sees a senior busting their ass, and thinks: that’s what they get paid for. Yes, many mid-level team members will model how a senior behaves, especially in agencies with established, healthy cultures, but it’s not a given.
Defining Culture at the Mid-Level
What I’ll argue is that mid-level team members have an equal, if not more important role, in defining the culture at an agency.
Let’s do a similar structural analysis.
When a mid-level team members pairs or works with a junior team member, it’s a completely different dynamic. The junior team member knows that mid-level is the next stage in their career; if they’re going to remain with the agency, they need to be conducting the work with the same norms and values as the current mid-level team members. So this creates a natural incentive for them to model their work ethic after the mid-level team members. Additionally, the gap between the two levels is not as severe as it was with the senior team member, so mid-level team members often have an easier time explaining things to juniors. After all, they were in that junior’s shoes not too long ago.
Where things really get interesting is in the dynamic between senior and mid-level team members. The work ethic of the mid-level team members serves as a baseline for the senior team members. When mid-level team members (who are paid less and know less) work hard, senior team members naturally feel compelled to step up their efforts and maintain the mentor-mentee dynamic implied by the roles structure.
In this way, structurally, mid-level team members have the most leverage in influencing how other team members behave. One can argue that after the partners themselves, they have the most influence over the agency’s culture.
Culture Changes and Adaptability
In the Harvard Business Review Article, The New Analytics of Culture, Matthew Corritore, Amir Goldberg and Sameer B. Srivastava observed:
“Employees who could quickly adapt to cultural norms as they changed over time were more successful than employees who exhibited high cultural fit when first hired.”
This introduces another dynamic that favors mid-level team members: adaptability.
At most agency senior team members are going to be less adaptable. They’re later in their careers, they’ve achieved success on their existing work values and behaviors, and their role in decision-making diminishes the need for them to be adaptable.
On the other hand, mid-level team members are likely to be more adaptable. They’re not in positions of decision-making, they’re still learning, and almost by definition, they’re molding themselves to the norms of the agency.
So at a growing agency, where culture is inevitably going to evolve, there is an argument to be made that once the leadership around creative and technical direction is sufficient, the agency should invest most heavily in the most adaptable team members. This has a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the team members who are most adaptable then become the ones defining the company culture that future hires will adapt to.
Takeaways
If you buy into the notion that the core culture of an agency is at much at the mid-level as the senior-level, here are some things to consider:
How does this present an opportunity to differentiate your agency in terms of team roster construction?
How should cultural impact be reconsidered in compensation programs? Should it be weighted more heavily for mid-level team members?
Does this present an opportunity to rely less on senior-level hiring? What would a more mid-level team look like and how would senior-level roles need to change to accommodate it?
Are there alternative team structures that could re-align culture-defining dynamics within the agency?
If you’d like help designing your agency culture…
