Clarity Is Kindness: How Being Direct Will Help You Grow Your Agency
Key Takeaways
- Most lack of clarity is unintentional. It's the default state, so creating clarity is a discipline you build into the organization, not a one-time fix
- A clear vision means the whole team can close their eyes and picture the same end of this year and end of three years, even if you land somewhere else
- Keep the vision simple: what size business, who you serve, why it exists, how you win and serve clients, and what the team and day-to-day look like
- Be more blunt than you think for about 95% of people. Directness removes the anxiety of guessing what the boss really meant
- When one account manager crushes it and the next doesn't, look for the process gap before calling it a people problem. Shadow them and document it
- Deciding who ZenPilot is for and not for (agencies, ClickUp only) was the best catalyst for its growth
Kuba Grajcar hosts. The guest is ZenPilot founder Gray MacKenzie, the show’s previous host, back for a dedicated episode on his catchphrase: clarity is kindness. Kuba works through vision, people, and process, and pushes Gray on how blunt is too blunt.
A clear vision is one the whole team can picture the same way
Kuba opened with the symptoms. Gray started with vision and the accidental agency owner, who never drew this business up at 18 and is still working out where it’s going. Most lack of clarity, he said, is unintentional, “just the default way of things.” People can name who the agency serves. The gap shows up one question later.
What does success look like in the business? What does that look like in your role specifically? And you’ll get 10 different answers from 10 different people on the team around what exactly it looks like. Versus clarity here is: this is identified, it’s written down, we all can close our eyes and picture the same thing at the end of this year and at the end of three years, and say that is the goal. Will we wind up there? Almost certainly we will not wind up exactly there… but that’s the goal.
Why it matters: Gray was reading Extreme Ownership with his leadership team, and other leaders can only make decisions consistent with the vision if the vision is clear. His advice: relax. Answer a few simple questions (size, who you serve, why the business exists, how you win and serve clients, what the team looks like), keep it aspirational, and put it where everyone can see it. ZenPilot keeps its EOS Vision/Traction Organizer in ClickUp and reviews it every quarter at a State of ZenPilot Address.
Directness removes anxiety, and relational equity is what lets it land
Kuba defined clarity as removing doubt about what’s in the plan and in my job. Gray tied it to being direct.
I want our team to be much more direct than probably most people who spent any time in the corporate world, or in at least the US education system, are used to being… The kindness piece, what else that eliminates or reduces, is the anxiety that people feel when it’s not clear. “Oh, did he say that because he meant I should actually be working more hours? Or did he say that because he’s glad that I’m taking a day off?”
Clarity, he said, is a form of respect for others. Kuba asked how to stay direct without damaging the relationship.
Always more blunt than you think, for 95% of people, probably… Most of us would much rather know that people are just speaking their mind and saying, here’s exactly how I feel… I’ve coached people on, “Hey, I would have phrased this differently.” I’ve never told someone, “You should not have said what you really felt.”
Gray doesn’t love the phrase relational equity, since the truth is he loves the people he works with and wants them to flourish. But the concept holds: if people don’t know that, blunt criticism gets taken personally. His comparison is parenting. You discipline your three-year-old, and it has nothing to do with how much you love them. A filter isn’t lying, it’s being professional, but most of us “think that we’re being professional when really we’re just not being honest with people."
"I just need to clone Kuba” is usually a process gap
Asked which EOS component suffers most, Gray picked process.
I’ve got this one account manager who is absolutely crushing it. All their clients love them, very high success rates, referral rates, NPS scores… And then I brought on somebody else, or I’ve got these other people, and it’s totally opposite. And so much gets attributed to just, man, I just need to clone Kuba… When really what’s happening is there’s a huge distinction in process between the two. And if you actually got in and looked at what’s happening… you would realize almost every time that there’s a huge process gap.
The fix: have someone else shadow the star on Zoom for a day and write down what they observe, because what people say they do rarely matches what they do. Teams used to shadow and never document; remote teams now document and never shadow. He wants both, because “clarity is not the natural state of things.”
The one move most agencies still need to make: decide who you’re for
Kuba’s last question: what’s the one move most agencies need? Gray’s first answer was to be honest with yourself about whether your actions match what you say you want. He’s asked prospects “can I say something I think might offend you?” and a double-digit number have come back a year or more later to say it changed what they did. The concrete version is positioning.
If you would have told me 10 years ago, someday you will run a business, this is the largest business that you’ve ever run, and it’s only going to service this specific type of client on top of this one specific software that was started in 2017 and hardly anybody knew about until 2020, and you won’t accept people who don’t work with that software… I would have been like, those are crazy constraints and I can’t see that happening. And the truth is, making those hard decisions and clear decisions about who we work with, who we’re for and who we’re not for, has been the best catalyst for growth.
Kuba said it matched what he’d heard most as host: the fulfilled agency leaders are the ones who picked a lane. Gray’s closing ask: give the gift of clarity to someone else, since it’s easier to see another person’s situation clearly than your own.