The 6 Most Important Steps to Effective Agency Change Management

Andrew Dymski, then ZenPilot’s co-founder, came back on Agency Journey in 2022 for a conversation hosted by Gray MacKenzie. There’s no outside guest: the two founders talk through what their team sees while moving agencies onto new project management systems. Andrew lays out six keys that apply to any change in an agency, a CRM switch as much as a ClickUp migration, and Gray adds what he hears from agency owners.

Key 1: give the team a channel for its pain

The first two keys are about leadership. Andrew’s starting point is that when leadership sees a need, picks a process or tool or partner to solve it, and rolls it out, adoption struggles because the team was never engaged. ZenPilot does this with an intake survey of every team member: one-to-five ratings of statements like “we set healthy expectations for our clients,” then open-ended questions. The scores show where the problems are; the comments explain them. Gray asked when a survey beats asking out loud in an all-hands.

I would prefer the notes or the survey side of things just because the squeaky wheel gets the grease in the all hands setting. And you’ve got your talkers in your group and you’ve got your quiet folks. And if you only make decisions based on who the talkers are or who the complainers are in your team, you’re going to be stuck always bending to their will and their whims.

(Listen at 03:29)

Key 2: the leadership team makes the call

Once the feedback is in, it goes back to leadership for a decision.

That is not a decision that should be made by a committee… As a leadership team, you have the closest eye on where the business is trying to go. And the rest of the team may just want life to be easy. And your job is to find the balance in between where you can grow a healthy business with healthy margins, you can maintain healthy and happy clients, and you can facilitate a healthy and happy team.

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Straight democracy votes tend to be poorly informed, Andrew said, because the team doesn’t see every impact on the business. Gray hears a version from owners considering ZenPilot.

I’ve got this project manager who does not want to move off of Basecamp. And that’s a conversation that winds up going to, okay, well, what do you really want for the business? Do you want the result and the outcome? And if so, what’s their plan for giving you that outcome that you’re struggling with right now on Basecamp?

(Listen at 10:11)

Keys 3 and 4: map the journey, then tell each person what it means for them

Key 3 is a high-level map: the end state as a rallying cry, then the milestones on the way there.

If you’re doing something and your explanation for it is just so that leadership can have better reports, you’re going to struggle to get buy-in from the team at the end of the day. You want to paint a picture that everyone is excited to drive toward.

(Listen at 11:15)

Key 4 drills into that map and spells out what’s expected of each person: what to learn, build, or change in their day to day. Andrew sees busy owners stop at the vision.

They can say, hey, here’s what we’re doing. Here’s why we’re doing it… Go get them, team. And then the rest of the team kind of gets off the call, and they’re like, cool, they got it… And then it’s only at the 11th hour that they realize, oh, this is going to impact my world in XYZ ways.

(Listen at 12:22)

When the journey is fuzzy because it’s your first time, Andrew’s answer is research, so you know which stones you’ll step on, and accepting that the cost is either your time testing or money for a partner who’s done it before. His example of a journey communicated well is the Domino’s pizza tracker, which doesn’t teach anyone to make a pizza but shows where you are in the timeline.

Keys 5 and 6: watch adoption, and don’t optimize too early

Key 5 is the launch: a set period of actively watching how people live up to the expectations from key 4, with a plan for the friction that will come, because nobody hits it out of the park the first time. Key 6 follows from it.

Before you optimize anything and you change any aspect of what you just implemented, make sure that it’s not a user adoption issue that you’re facing. Spend time sitting with issues before you fix issues when you’re rolling something out to see, is this the system failing or is this people that are just learning to adopt to the new system?

(Listen at 16:18)

Drastic changes mid-rollout breed confusion and cost the team’s confidence in the launch. Gray connected it to ZenPilot’s own year, seven months into re-implementing EOS with a professional implementer, with new scorecards and a new meeting structure.

The common thread: one champion with leadership backing

Gray asked for examples of teams that handle change well. Andrew didn’t name names, but he named the pattern.

What the common underpinning is, is clear ownership in that process, that there’s a ringleader inside of any change initiative who’s there to spearhead it. And that can be a member of your leadership team, or it could be someone else, as long as there’s leadership team backing to that person.

(Listen at 19:02)

The teams that struggle let democracy rule or run a committee of champions. One person needs to own the project plan, run the one-on-ones, carry the team through rollout, and know the process well enough to tell a system failure from an adoption failure. Gray closed by promising a follow-up episode on what makes a good ClickUp champion.