How to Cultivate Leadership Talent From Within

The Goal is True Leadership, Not Just a Title Change

If you’ve ever promoted a team member into a leadership role only to find yourself still stuck in the middle of every decision, you’re not alone.

In the agency world, leadership titles often get handed out as rewards for tenure or charisma. When someone has been around long enough or they’ve stepped up in a pinch, they are often rewarded with a promotion.

As a result, many agencies find themselves with senior leadership who are missing core skills and competencies to truly lead. The highest performing agencies take a different approach. They cultivate leadership as a true skill that holds up in practice, even when challenges arise.

If you want to scale your agency into an asset that doesn’t require you at the center, you don’t need “leaders” who are hyper-responsible doers with new titles.

You need trusted team members who can navigate ambiguity, make tough calls, hold the line, and bring others with them towards a vision. And you need a way to cultivate that talent without burning people out or constantly stepping back in.

This post breaks down a few under-the-radar strategies we use with agency teams to grow leadership from the inside out. 

1. Redefine Readiness

A missing component for many of the teams we work with is a clear framework to evaluate when someone’s actually ready to step into a leadership role.

Owners are often looking for overt signals like confidence, charisma, doing well under pressure, which are great, but often don’t tell you what you really need to know.

What matters more is whether your team can hold leadership capacity, operate with clarity, and take ownership of outcomes.

Here’s what we help our clients evaluate to build true leadership readiness:

• Decision Hygiene: Are they using a consistent framework (balancing data, instinct, team input, etc.) to make decisions? Or are they reacting on the fly and hoping for the best?
  

• Comfort with Ambiguity: Can they hold space in the grey? Leadership requires being able to move when the answer isn’t obvious and bring others with you toward clarity.
  

• Ability to Manage Complexity: Leaders are asked to hold more than one truth. Are they able to juggle the tension between profit and people? Between speed and sustainability?
  

• Talent Development: Can they cultivate a team of A-players? Are they investing in others? The leader who will take your firm into the future uses the information and resources they have to bring others to the next level with them.
  

• Accountability: Can they hold the line by being both clear and kind? Are they able to lead in a way that strengthens trust?

When we redefine readiness this way, something powerful happens. Team members either rise to meet the standard or they self-select out of leadership tracks that aren’t the right fit. Additionally, when we expand our definition of leadership, it helps founders identify talent potential to cultivate that might otherwise slip through the cracks because they aren’t the most charismatic person in the room. 

2. Build a Feedback Loop Culture

Leadership potential doesn’t just show up in emergencies, but also in how people respond to feedback when things are calm.

Let us explain. 

One of the first things we do with agency teams is rework their meeting rhythm to surface leadership signals more consistently and earlier. This allows for ongoing evaluation in the thick of real work as opposed to just a yearly performance review. 

Here’s what that looks like:

• Tie performance to ownership.
  As part of performance reviews, we create clear throughlines between company goals → team goals → individual responsibilities without ambiguity, and train managers how to manage these expectations day-to-day instead of just once per year.
  

• Expose patterns, not just single occurrences.
  The right format for weekly 1:1s and team check-ins helps identify how someone adapts to feedback (big and small). The right meeting cadence makes those patterns obvious. And, pairing them with the aligned metrics and operational systems is how team performance improves through daily practice.

3. Give Permission to Lead (and Fail) Strategically

Promoting someone into leadership without ever testing their capacity is like building a second story on a house without checking the foundation. It will eventually buckle under the weight it was never equipped to carry. Yet, we see this happen every day with agencies.

Within the firms we support, we design controlled stretch environments that allow team members to develop leadership skills before a title is assigned.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Scoped challenges.
  We help founders identify high-stakes, bounded projects that reveal how someone handles ownership without overwhelming them. This may be a senior team member owning resourcing for a launch or a department lead running a cross-functional planning cycle.
  

• Clear bumpers.
  We set expectations around what success looks like and where decisions still roll up. This creates a safe container to stretch, while protecting the business from unforced errors.
  

• Founder visibility without interference.
  We install simple, direct feedback mechanisms so you can see how they think, not just what they produce. This allows founders to have visibility without hovering.
  

When done well, these stretch containers show you exactly who’s ready to lead, where they wobble, and how to support their next steps. 

When the proper structure is in place, leadership abilities are clearly revealed, and founders are able to move forward without the guesswork. 

4. Name the Invisible Labor

Most founders know who their “go-to” people are. They often become indispensable for reasons that are not noticed or defined. They are usually doing the emotional, relational, and anticipatory labor that keeps the agency running without becoming a fire drill every other day.

Things like:

• De-escalating tension on a call before it becomes a conflict
  
• Supporting a struggling peer without being asked
  
• Prepping a team before a tough client meeting so everyone’s aligned
  
• Softening the blow of internal changes by delivering the message with context and care
  
• Noticing energy shifts in the team and flagging it early
  

This is true leadership, but it easily becomes invisible when it’s not named, tracked, or rewarded. We’ve seen time and time again that when invisible labor compounds without acknowledgment, the best people burn out or opt out quickly.

Here’s what we help founders do instead:

• Make the invisible visible.
  Call it out when it happens and be specific. “I noticed how you prepped the team 1:1 before the org shift, and we felt the difference.”
  
• Build it into development conversations.
  We help teams track emotional labor alongside task performance, so leadership growth isn’t just tied to output.
  
• Shift what gets rewarded.
  If you only celebrate urgency and execution, you’ll keep promoting high-functioning doers instead of leaders. 

Identifying unspoken leadership qualities, such as setting the tone, identifying and sharing context, and providing peer support, allows them to be scaled. 

Build What Holds, Not What Breaks

Building an agency that runs independently of its founder requires a different type of leadership. 

Owners must define a set of skills most overlook and build the structure necessary to cultivate the type of talent that can truly carry the torch. This is where we step in to build clear criteria for leadership, a team culture, and management practices that stretch team members, and visible recognition that allows leadership to meaningfully grow.

Your best future leaders aren’t waiting to be knighted with a title; they’re waiting to be cultivated from within.

If you’d like to learn more about best practices for PR & marketing agency teams, follow our founder on social media–Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.