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Agency leaders are facing a perfect storm right now. Your clients demand more value while scrutinizing every hour billed. AI tools threaten to commoditize the work your team creates. Meanwhile, your team wants to do work they care about, not just tick off tasks.

In this high-stakes situation, your response might be to tighten control or track more metrics to ensure your team’s productivity. But Laurel Burton is choosing a different path.

At the time Burton took over as CEO of Instrument, the 300-person agency “was in decline.” She was under pressure to turn things around—and in moments like that, control can feel like the only lever left to pull. “When things get really difficult, outdated beliefs sneak back in,” she says. “Because on the other side of stress and anxiety, everything feels out of control.”

But Burton recognized that gripping the reins tightly wouldn’t solve the agency’s challenges. Instead, she built an environment of trust. She focused on matching talent to meaningful work through chemistry and compatibility. She carefully curated tools that enabled creativity rather than just tracking it, leaving Instrument much stronger and more profitable.

Here’s tactical advice from Burton on building a high-performing team that delivers innovative work while maintaining healthy margins.

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1. Make trust your foundation

At Instrument, trust isn’t a value, it’s an operating system.��

The agency is structured so that product, marketing, and design teams operate with full autonomy, like their own creative studios. They don’t track time or set utilization targets. It’s a radical model—and a deliberate rejection of the systems that Burton believes stifle innovation. “If you have to use time as the metric of your success, you’ve already lost the brief for creativity,” she explains.��

For Burton, stepping away from traditional metrics was a necessary move. In other contexts, tools like time tracking can play a valuable role—surfacing insights that improve margins and resourcing decisions. But for Burton, the priority was clear: restore autonomy first and create space for teams to do their best work.

Instead of billing per hour, they have a fixed rate for each project. So, their producers are entrusted to find the right teams for the right projects, balancing skills and costs to deliver on budget.��

“Our producers are empowered to make the decisions. I trust them. I tell them, ’Let me get out of your way. You know what you need to deliver. Play around with the hours. It’s not science, it’s art.’”

While trust is central, projects are not left to chance. To track the health of every project, they scenario plan in a custom tool and monitor in ����ɫ��Ƭ. This process helps ensure they do not exceed the planned costs.��

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Lead with trust—and still protect your margins

Instrument’s model shows that trust and structure aren’t opposites—they work best together. When your systems support autonomy, you unlock better work and better results.

Consider doing a quick audit of your processes to help identify where you rely on tools or metrics to enforce accountability. Could conversations or clearer ownership replace some of them? Can you develop custom metrics or processes that give your team more autonomy?

The shift might be simple: replacing rigid metrics with intentional trust, backed by the right systems.

2. Create conditions for your people to thrive��

Your team’s environment determines their performance. Sometimes, well-intentioned changes to these conditions can go wrong, causing your team to work less effectively and reducing their motivation.

Burton learned this lesson when she implemented a return-to-office mandate at a time when Instrument was losing its rhythm and in decline. Instead of reconnecting the teams and improving momentum as she expected, morale plummeted. When she decided to roll back the mandate, team members found ways to connect and work together organically.

Now, before implementing changes, Burton asks herself, “Would I want to work under these conditions?” If the answer is no, it’s likely a sign to rethink the policy.

Design from their perspective, not yours

Burton’s experience is a reminder: even well-intended changes can fall flat if they’re built from the top down. Tools, policies, and processes need to reflect how your team actually works—not just how you imagine they do.��

Leading with empathy means designing with your people, not just for them. That starts with listening. Talk to your team before rolling out new processes or tools—they’ll surface blind spots you might not see from a leadership seat. “Many people start to feel a little disconnected when they become leaders. You start making decisions that are no longer rooted in reality and the environment in which your team is functioning,” Burton explains.

And when a policy doesn’t land? Be willing to change it. Reversing course isn’t weakness—it’s leadership that builds trust.

3. Assign work that aligns with your team’s strengths

Agencies are under constant pressure to deliver, so they often assign work based on availability rather than fit. But Burton believes this approach leads to misaligned teams and mediocre outcomes. That’s why Instrument doesn’t just assign people to projects based on availability—they “cast talent” based on compatibility and chemistry.

“Compatibility means you have the right skill sets and your passions align, and chemistry means you work really well with the team,” Burton explains. It’s not about uniformity—it’s about building teams where diverse perspectives thrive, and individual strengths balance one another.

To support this, Instrument runs a “borrows and loans” program. When a project needs extra support, like a designer for marketing, they borrow from other teams—prioritizing both skill and interest. The producers use in ����ɫ��Ƭ to find the right mix of talent and availability across the org.

But knowing who has what skill is just the first step. Direct managers at Instrument are expected and trained to understand individual motivations and career goals. They then share this information with vertical leads to help find the right people for the right work.

Know who’s available, know what drives them

Consider training team leads to understand what motivates their direct reports and make it part of their core responsibilities. Burton suggests using—a deck of cards with 100 questions for 1:1s—to learn more about team members.

4. Curate tools with intention

Before reaching for something new, Instrument asks: can our current tools evolve with us?

Every tool they adopt reflects how they want their teams to work: with trust, flexibility, and a mindset of continuous growth. They expect their tools to evolve alongside them—not slow them down. That’s one reason ����ɫ��Ƭ remains their go-to resourcing platform: it supports how they lead, scale, and stay agile.

“I want to work with companies building tools that think about the users and different types of flexibility businesses will have,” says Burton.

Optimize before you overhaul

Before adding another tool, check in with your team: are you making the most of what you already use? A resourcing issue, for instance, might be solved by adjusting views or workflows in your current platform—not switching systems.

When a tool truly can’t meet your needs, choose one that supports how your team already works—so you’re not adding complexity to what already functions well. A focused, intentional stack also helps your team build expertise, instead of chasing the promise of every shiny new platform.

You can’t control external chaos, but you can build resilient systems

Storms may be raging around your agency, and while you can’t change the weather, you can create the right conditions for your team to do their best work in the midst of uncertainty.

That means making bold, intentional choices: questioning long-standing metrics that stifle creativity, replacing pressure with trust and autonomy, and choosing systems over stress. When you lead with intention, your team doesn’t need to brace harder; instead, they navigate chaos with clarity, confidence, and the strength to stay on course.