The Tool We Built for Growing Agencies (and Why It Matters More for Women)
4 min read.
You don’t get a high-performing leadership team by putting smart people in a room together. You get it by being intentional about how that team operates.
We built the Agency Leadership Team Wheel to help growing agency leadership teams do exactly that. It’s a ten-minute exercise, not a workshop, not a training day. Just ten minutes to pause and look at how you’re really working together, not how it looks from the outside.
What we notice in these rooms
We work with a lot of agency leadership teams, usually somewhere between twenty and forty people, right around the point where the founder can’t be in every conversation anymore. A few patterns show up again and again.
Decisions still land on the founder’s desk
Even after a leadership team’s been built to share that load, the habit of everything routing through one person hasn’t caught up. The team’s there. The decisions still aren’t.
Disagreement happens after the meeting, not in it
Leaders avoid disagreeing with each other in the room. Then they say what they really think afterwards, one-to-one, to someone else. So the room agrees, and the corridor doesn’t.
Not everyone’s reading the same numbers
Some leaders know the commercial detail cold: margins, revenue drivers, what keeps the lights on. Others have never really been walked through it, and nobody’s quite named the difference.
Nobody’s watching outside the building
The team gets so wrapped up in what’s happening inside the agency that nobody’s watching what’s happening outside it: the market, the competitors, what clients are asking for elsewhere.
People leave with different versions of what was agreed
Then they brief their own teams differently. Which means the agency ends up pulling in more than one direction without anyone deciding that on purpose.
None of this means something’s broken. It usually just means the leadership team was never deliberately built; it grew, the way most things in a fast-moving agency grow.
What the Wheel covers
It looks at how the team leads the agency: clarity around priorities, commercial leadership, decision ownership, responsibility for solving problems, and behaviour under pressure.
And how the team works together: trust inside the team, communication with the wider organisation, willingness to challenge each other, awareness of what’s happening outside, and shared direction across the team.
How it works
Everyone on the leadership team scores it on their own first. No discussing answers beforehand. Then you bring it all together and compare.
Most of the time, the useful bit isn’t the scores themselves; it’s where people scored the same thing completely differently. That’s what’s worth talking through.
When teams compare answers, three things usually come up: big differences in scores between leaders, areas where most people agree something isn’t working, and topics the team realises it just doesn’t talk about.
One rule: treat this as the start of a conversation, not a scorecard.”We knew we were a strong team, but HappyHQ’s Leadership Team Wheel showed us exactly where the gaps were. How we were making decisions, how ownership was being shared, where we were avoiding the harder conversations. It gave us a way into the work that was practical from the start.” – Jenny Emslie, CEO and Founder, Sunshine The Social Agency
Why we think it’s even more brilliant for women
We built this for any growing agency leadership team. But we think it does something particular for women in that room.
Only 16% of UK agencies are solely founded by women. If you’re one of them, or one of the few women in senior leadership, being one of few can make it harder to be the person who names something uncomfortable, even when you’ve clocked it clearly.
The Wheel takes some of the personality and politics out of that. It’s not about how confidently you argue your point, or whether you’re usually the one who speaks up first. It’s a score, sitting next to everyone else’s score, on the table before anyone’s had the chance to make it personal.
Download the Agency Leadership Team Wheel free at happyhq.co.uk/agency-
