The conversation about relationships in advertising almost always looks outward. Client trust, agency partnership, stakeholder management. But the relationship that actually determines whether any of that holds is the one nobody talks about, says Eric Sibanyoni, Group Account Director at Boomtown.
The one between account management and the internal team. Not the professional version of it. The real one.
Everyone in that building has a story. A way they work, a way they receive information, a way they do their best thinking. As Adam Grant writes in Think Again, "A mark of lifelong learners is recognising that they can learn something from everyone they meet."
Account management sits at the intersection of every department involved in delivering the work, and if you do not understand the people on either side of you, you are navigating blind. That is not a skills gap. It is a curiosity gap.
Knowing your team in this way changes how you move. It changes when you walk into a room and when you wait. It changes how you frame a conversation and what you lead with. Not every problem should arrive wearing its urgency. A good account management person learns to translate a client's Tuesday panic into a Wednesday morning conversation that actually gets solved.
And here is what makes that skill complete. You have to be able to do the same in reverse. To look a client in the eye and tell them Tuesday evening is not the answer, and have them trust you enough to wait. That only works when you understand both rooms well enough to manage both simultaneously.
This is about managing up. It is about knowing which battles to fight and which ones to absorb quietly. It is about understanding what motivates the people around you and engaging with them in the way that gets the best out of them. It is knowing the cards you have been dealt and playing them properly.
That knowledge does not arrive in a job description or a process document. It is built over time through genuine interest in the people you work alongside. What makes them sharp, what slows them down, when to push and when to give space.
Account management that invests in this becomes something different to the rest of the agency. Not just a conduit between client and team. The human architecture that holds the whole thing together.
For more information, visit www.boomtownagency.com. You can also follow Boomtown on LinkedIn, or on Instagram.
*Image courtesy of www.boomtownagency.com