The good and bad of "we" in public relations
The teamwork atmosphere of a communications or marketing agency offers incredible benefits, particularly for younger employees. It offers junior staff a group of people who have the same or similar jobs as them, an incredible resource of insight, support and ideas. Many agency settings feel like a professional finishing school, surrounded by research, big ideas, trainings, etc. And I will never forget the feeling after brainstorms where really good ideas emerge; it's intoxicating.
It's important to also recognize traps of this setting, because they create real challenges to development that can result in lasting, difficult-to-identify feelings of dissatisfaction, resentment and anxiety for staff.
In my opinion, one of the most dangerous traps is the insidious power of "we". I don't mean WE, the PR agency, formerly known as Waggener Edstrom. I mean the ironing out of individuality.
The motivation for agency professionals to present all thoughts, work and outputs as from the collective - the "we" - comes from a good place. Once the agency presents work to the client, both sides assume the agency presents such work on a united front. Obfuscating the origination of the work provides helpful protection for employees against an embarrassing call-out from a client or being seen as lower-quality than other teammates. Perhaps most importantly, a "one team, one dream" mentality creates a sense of camaraderie around the results of the work; we create it together, we sink together, we rise together.
But too much "we" could create organizational imbalance that spirals into personnel and developmental roadblocks.
For junior staff, who likely have less context on why such behavior happens, fewer opportunities for individual success and failure can be enervating. Over time, junior staff may tell themselves stories like, “my opinion doesn't matter,” “I don't deserve to present my work,” and “I am just an input-output machine”. Separating individual accountability and responsibility with self-worth can prove challenging to recent grads and younger staff anxious to prove themselves; such stories can be demotivating, if not entirely soul-crushing. Too much "we" also limits the opportunities for junior staff to test-and-learn their own styles of leadership and presentation, in my opinion a crucial development opportunity.
The leaders in such scenarios may also be suffering. They may feel like they have no room to breathe, that their days fill up with endless busywork, or that their career has stagnated. Too much "we" could unwittingly concentrate too much day-to-day responsibility in the leaders' lap: client responses, document reviews, agenda advancement, sending key emails, etc. An aspiring leader may desperately want to divest some of these responsibilities, to allow them to focus on more strategic work or tasks that more directly advance their careers. But out of a desire to protect their staff, maintain a high quality of work, believing that clients only want to deal with a single point of contact, challenges of letting go of responsibility, or all of the above, they struggle to change their situation.
The well-meaning culture of "we" can coexist with more intentional spaces for employees to stake out identity and individuality.
Ownership moments. The "Directly Responsible Individual" (DRI) model was originally popularized by Apple to identify the person with whom "the buck stopped" on any given project. GitLab published a great explainer. We can transfer this model to the PR agency setting via empowered ownership of deliverables. By breaking down ownership into specific deliverables or actions, a leader can create a model where they don't reflexively make themselves responsible for everything. Make someone responsible for a task, be it a junior staff owning an agenda, or a midlevel employee needing to track that project management deliverable that endlessly tugs at the leader's consciousness. As a leader, it's on you to lay out specific guidelines for completion, and to qualify what deliverable ownership means, explicitly, to those being empowered. What does success look like? Success does not equal perfection, nor does it mean that empowered owners cannot ask for help. It also likely means that the empowered owner should provide leaders regular updates at specified intervals. It also means the empowered individual must take feedback non-defensively and non-personally. But crucially, the DRI is responsible for leading the resources for getting a job done and making several key strategic and directional decisions. (perhaps the leader could ask that any strategic decisions are run by them first?) I have seen first-hand that such a model can be deployed to mid-level and even junior team staff; work gets done at a high-quality, on time, clients are happy, and the employee feels like a boss.
Program opportunities for individuality. As a leader, what opportunities can you program to explicitly allow for your team to test their individuality and style? Presenting in team settings and to clients is always a great opportunity for an employee to get a chance to shine "with the lights on" and many agency leads leverage this moment. However, I encourage agency leads to distinguish between individual activity and individual thought. Presenting to clients in a team meeting or a pitch frequently puts the staffer in the position of sharing something that many people helped develop, and the staffer may end up mostly reading from a script or notes. What happens when that same staffer is asked to give feedback to ideas, or develop their own? If they applied skepticism to a strategy (either the agency's or a client's), what would it reveal? (Developing and expressing compassionate skepticism comprises a huge part of one's individual development.) Do your teammates have a chance to work back-and-forth with clients or senior leadership on questions or assignments? (and as a senior leader, during such back-and-forth, do you demonstrate that you accept questions and skepticism non-defensively?) Such opportunities could be scary - both for the individual, and the team lead - but done in the right setting, it offers a valuable chance to "test their powers" and maybe even earn some "scars" in a safe space.
Practice giving and receiving compliments. Some employees genuinely struggle with accepting individual credit for the work; it makes them awkward, like they're being selfish for being given individual acclaim in within the "we" context. Left unchecked, such employees could advance believing that they don't need to be considered individually to succeed. This is bad! Leaders can intentionally create spaces to reprogram how rising staff get recognized, and train teammates on how to best share praise. It's often not enough to simply be given a quick "thank you" in a meeting, and then quickly move on to the work; the employee doesn't get practice sitting with the praise in the team context, often an important moment of value reaffirmation. This can be programmed for pretty easily. Collect feedback from teammates about the individual or the project, and create a slide or short video with anecdotes from the team explaining why they're giving the praise; follow up with a team-wide email about the praiseworthy moment; share the praise with clients or senior leadership. (I credit Michelle Scully for showing me how this is done, and I shamelessly steal this mindset from her.) Explain to the team that the purpose of such moments is explicitly to break from the collective to recognize individual value.
I empathize with leadership preaching and creating the "we" culture. In many cases, such culture creation efforts are well-intentioned. Heck, I would take a culture of too much "we" over a group of individuals who can’t work well together.
But remember that leadership should also serve the emotional and developmental needs of the team. Leaders should place themselves in the shoes of their team members, particularly remembering what it's like to be a younger employee, and revisiting what value system / affirmations / fears they held at that time. Recall the moments that felt like everything, the bosses talked about as "the good bosses," and the lessons the younger leader swore they'd remember when they were in charge. Now, these leaders have an opportunity to blend very well-intentioned culture with sprinkles of value affirmation for those cutting their cloth.
Moreover, how often does the leader obtain input from their team about what's working and what's not? Perhaps they went through the ranks absent many of these lessons, and don't believe these ideas have merit. What do their junior teammates think? What do their 1:1 meetings, annual reviews, level-specific meetings, etc., reveal?
To that end, it's crucial for the leader to retain a compassionate, non-defensive mindset toward their own view of yourself and your abilities. The leader can be carrying a huge burden, and doing all this great culture creation and still have room to evolve your style. They aren't a bad person for needing to course correct a little; it doesn't invalidate how they lead. They should have grace for themselves about their motivations and the difficulties of evolving as they lead, especially now. (published in mid-late pandemic era. Where even are we in the pandemic era right now?)
Leading with "we" is not all bad. But giving team members chances for ownership, individuality, accountability and praise often have exponential positive dividends.