We hear a version of this story a lot.
The leadership meeting starts with good intentions. Within a few minutes, it turns into a project update. A delivery issue. A client problem. Everyone speaks. No one really decides.
The meeting ends with actions scattered across departments, and the founder quietly picking up the decisions that still feel unresolved.
If that sounds familiar, it doesn’t mean something is broken. In our experience, it usually means you’ve reached a turning point.
Growth doesn’t break agencies. It exposes them.
In the early years, founder-led leadership works remarkably well. You’re close to the work, close to the team, and involved in most decisions. Culture spreads naturally. Problems surface early. Things move fast.
But somewhere between twenty and forty people, the way leadership works starts to change. Founders can no longer see everything. Decisions travel through more people. Information moves more slowly.
The agency is no longer small, but it isn’t yet structured either. The leaders around you are capable and experienced – but they’ve rarely been asked to operate as a collective. And so the agency starts to feel harder to run. Not because anything is catastrophically wrong. The leadership model that got you here just isn’t quite built for where you’re going.
Leadership teams in agencies are rarely designed
People step up because they’re exceptional at their craft. They earned the founder’s trust. But what rarely happens is a deliberate conversation about how those leaders work together.
Leaders avoid challenging each other.
Not because they don’t have views – because the relationships feel too important to risk. So they agree in the room and quietly disagree outside it.
Not everyone understands the commercial picture.
Revenue drivers, margins, what makes the business tick. That gap creates friction that nobody names.
The team loses sight of what’s happening outside.
So focused on internal problems that nobody is watching the market, the competition, or what clients are really feeling.
People leave the room going in different directions.
Without a shared understanding of how decisions get made, leaders brief their teams differently – and the organisation pulls apart at the seams.
And underneath all of it, a lack of real psychological safety at the top. We assume the most senior people in the room feel comfortable being honest. Often they don’t. And that trickles down fast.
So we built the Agency Leadership Team Wheel
We created it because we kept having versions of this conversation with founders and wanted to give leadership teams a way to have it themselves.
Each leader scores the team across 16 areas covering how the team leads the agency and how it works together. Then you compare. The most valuable insights don’t come from the scores – they come from the differences. The places where leaders see the same team in completely different ways. Those gaps tend to surface exactly the issues that have been sitting quietly below the surface.
It’s free. It takes ten minutes. It’s designed to be the beginning of a conversation, not a verdict on your team.
“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
Download the Agency Leadership Team Wheel free at happyhq.co.uk/agency-leadership-team-wheel – free, ten minutes, built for growing agency leadership teams.
At HappyHQ, we help agencies and in-house teams build strong cultures and the leaders and teams who sustain them. Find out more about how we work at happyhq.co.uk/what-we-do, or say hello at hello@happyhq.co.uk