Whether you are building it deliberately — an extract from The Agency Path

The following is an extract from The Agency Path, published by Greenfields Press.

You did not, most likely, set out to build a business. You set out to do good work, and the work led here. That is a legitimate and honourable origin. It is also, at this stage of the journey, insufficient as a frame for what you are now responsible for.

The agency exists. People work in it. Clients depend on it. A culture is forming within it, whether you are attending to that formation or not. The question is no longer whether you are building something — you are — but whether you are building it deliberately.

---

That deliberateness begins with an honest attention to what is actually happening, as distinct from what the founder intended, assumed, or hoped. It continues through the willingness to think carefully about what the organisation needs, rather than only about what the founder finds most natural to provide. And it deepens, over time, into something that might be called wisdom: the capacity to act well, in the conditions of genuine complexity and genuine uncertainty that running a business always involves, from a foundation of honest self-knowledge.

---

The culture question is the one that most agency founders underestimate until it becomes urgent. Culture is not the values statement on the website, or the away day, or the management philosophy the founder could articulate on request. Culture is what actually happens in the organisation when no one of particular seniority is watching: how decisions are made, how mistakes are handled, how people treat one another when there is pressure, and what is tacitly permitted that is not explicitly endorsed.

The founder’s own conduct is the primary driver of culture, and not primarily their public conduct — the speeches, the stated values, the deliberate modelling of the behaviours they want to see. The culture is shaped most powerfully by what the founder does in the ordinary moments: how they behave when something goes wrong, who gets rewarded and who does not and on what basis, what kind of honesty is actually safe to offer, and what happens to the person who offers it and turns out to be right about an uncomfortable truth.

These things are observed with great accuracy by everyone in the organisation, and the conclusions they draw from the observations — rather than from the stated values — are what the culture actually consists of.

---