Josh Akapo | Co-founder | archtype

If not, what alternative advice would you give to agency leaders?

If we're talking about agency leaders, specifically:
Who are your clients?
What work do they need you to deliver?
And what culture do you need to foster to get there?

A lot of agencies start with this backwards approach where they'll say:
“We're driven by this!”
“We are passionate about this thing!”
“We are social purpose led!”
“We are social first!”
“We put the person in the centre of branded campaigns!”
“We believe in people before profit!”
“We believe in saving the environment!”

To me that’s just talk to try to make it look like you have this culture of nurture and care and like you’re doing all of these good points that we love to shout about in our marketing without actually doing the work to foster that culture first.

So then when you get new hires and new clients who perhaps have chosen your agency on the basis of that, they're expecting one thing: A good, equitable and transformative culture that actually helps clients deliver on whatever the brief is. A culture that helps run a sustainable business model, but also helps the people - the audience, the target market, the consumer, whatever you wanna call them - with their needs.

If you don't have a culture, that's going to do that - that’s a big problem.

And this is where we get into diversity, equity and inclusion. Because most of the time the cultures are built on systems that are quite depressive.

For example:
If part of your culture is that “the office” is a necessary thing.
Then are you thinking about all your potential team members?
Those who might have disabilities, who might be neurodiverse, who might have other commitments that mean they can't conform to that kind of culture?

I'm giving a really simple example here because it is that simple. Ensuring that a culture is equitable means thinking about the people who are beneficiaries or potential victims of that culture.

If you can't do that, yet you like to believe that your culture eats strategy for breakfast, then I don't know if you are going to really be able to develop an equitable culture. You also won’t be able to use that culture to define a strategy that will go on to inform future cultures for future team members that will be working in that same agency.

At archtype, the agency I run, we talk about culture in this way:
We say that people make up communities.
Then communities shape culture.
And culture shapes people in this sort of reciprocal cycle of cultural production.

And that's how we see it because our company is immersed in culture by all of us being in this young demographic that they call gen Z - which BTW I'm not the biggest fan of calling it gen Z, but hey, whatever, everyone loves the word.

We're all young people from diverse backgrounds. We hit like three or four continents in just a team of seven. We're queer folk. We're black folk. We're working class folk. We're neurodiverse folk, like all across the board. And because of that, we are just exposed to so many different cultures and thinking outside of our organisation.

It's the communities who are marginalised, who are oppressed, who require culture as a means for political activation and social awakening, are the ones who create the best cultures. Who create the cultures that are most favourable to reproduce and we are immersed in those.

I'll reiterate:
People make up communities, communities make and shape culture and culture shapes people. That's the cycle. If your culture is not able to shape people in a way that the community of your organisation can benefit properly and by the community of your organisation, I mean, everyone, from the lowest paid individual who might be only there for three weeks to your C-suite execs, then that's not a culture that's going to drive home any workable strategy or any transformative, impactful, meaningful and purposeful work.