There's a conversation no one wants to have in agencies, but one that surfaces on its own every few months. It's the one that opens when a team member announces they're leaving. Sometimes it's someone key. Sometimes it's someone who had just started to hit their stride. Almost always, it's someone the client knew by name.
When it happens, the first reaction is usually the same: we saw it coming, just not in time.
The creative industry lives with annual turnover hovering around 60%. That's not a trivial number. It's one of the sectors with the highest talent attrition in the world. And behind every departure is a delayed project, a client asking why their account manager changed, and knowledge that walks out the door without anyone ever documenting it.
The problem isn't new. What's new is understanding that turnover rarely explodes. It builds slowly, in silence, in places no one is watching. Someone carrying double the workload of everyone else for three months without anyone noticing. An account exec who ends up organizing client requests because they arrive disorganized. A team that drags itself to Friday, but says everything is fine in the status meeting.
That gray zone — between what people feel and what can actually be proven — is where the next resignation is already incubating.
“"The problem isn't working hard. The problem is working without visibility", says Camila Brando, Business Executive at Sancho BBDO.
For years, the debate was cultural. Fruit in the office, short Fridays, team rituals. But there's a more basic question almost no one asks: when someone on the team is on the edge, do we know before they resign, or do we find out when they've already written the email?
The difference between one and the other isn't about how sensitive the leader is. It's about visibility. Managing by gut feeling works until the team grows, until the accounts multiply, until the month becomes unpredictable. After that, the manager's intuition starts falling short without warning.
Taking care of the team has stopped being a stated value. It's a daily practice that needs information to sustain itself. Everything else is waiting for the problem to name itself — usually when it's already too late.
Want to learn more?
Camila Brando, Business Executive at Sancho BBDO, shared how her team went from two monthly departures to zero turnover for more than eight months. It wasn't a major cultural transformation — it was daily decisions that made visible something no one had been watching before.
That conversation is captured in a brief ebook, a 12-minute read [download ebook]. Worth it for anyone leading a team who senses the next resignation is already incubating, even if it doesn't have a name yet.
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