If you want your agency to really thrive and you need your employees to help you get there, you have to be able to eliminate fear. Your employees have got to feel safe.

If years at previous jobs has conditioned your employees to always be worrying about losing their jobs, it forces them to focus on how to keep themselves safe, not focused on how to think hard about important problems facing your business.

Your first job as a leader is to figure out how to make your employees feel safe at work and help them stop senselessly worrying about losing their job or what is the bare minimum they need to do so that the boss doesn’t fire me?

If you can do that, then you can start to drive real alignment for your agency and start driving serious long-term growth.