Why Leadership Training Is Essential for Marketing Agencies in 2026 (with Mads Singers)

James Dooley: Why leadership training is important for marketing agencies. The amount of people that seem to promote good members of staff to be managers and don't do any sort of management training is scary. Obviously yourself, you do a lot of consultancy and business coach kind of mentorship. Why is it that you feel that people don't put managers through leadership training?

Mads Singers: They don't know how. Like, so reality is most business owners aren't particularly great leaders. They've never learned how to lead. They've never learned how to manage and they don't know how. So when they hire a manager, when they promote someone into a management role, they don't know, right? They understand that when you have a sales guy or when you have a marketing guy, they, they need training. But most people assume that when they promote someone into a managerial role, it's just upskilling their current skills. So they think if they take a sales guy, if you're, if you're working in sales and you get promoted to the sales manager, they're more likely to give you another sales course than they are to give you a leadership or a management training. And unfortunately that means a lot of companies are missing out on a lot of opportunities because reality is when you take your most important people and don't give them training in how to do their job, you're losing. Like, you're losing out.

James Dooley: Many years ago, I think it was about eight or nine years ago, you told me about this and you was like, "You've got a leadership kind of training problem in certain areas in certain businesses." And I was like, "I've never really thought about that." They was great at what they did, but yeah, maybe they're not great managers. And, you know, straight away I kind of referenced it against football players. And a great football player doesn't make them a great football manager, right? And so many football players have come along and gone into the management scenario. And they've been great footballers, but terrible football managers. And then there's some that was average footballers, but made great football managers because they went through the whole training. They listened. They looked at the coaching. They looked at how to get the best out of other players and stuff like that. And I'm like, "Wow." And it's like, it sounds daft, but a lot of, like, defenders and stuff like that in football I've seen end up being pretty good managers. And I feel it's because they're not the ones that it's all about me, it's all about me. They're more about defending the team and helping other players to then score the goals and stuff. I'm like, is it at times now I've started to look at, is the person... They might be great at sales, but if I go and get my best salesperson to become the sales manager, if they're not good at the sales manager, what I've actually found as well is they then start falling out of love with the business. And I've lost my best sales manager and he's not a good manager. I've lost my best salesperson and they're not a good manager and they end up leaving. And I'm like, wow. How do you stop initially, before we get on to the actual leadership training, how do we stop the promotion of people just naturally thinking, "Oh, I'm going to promote them because it's the next viable step to become a manager"? How do we stop that happening if they're not the right calibre of person to go into that role?

Mads Singers: So, here's the thing. From, from just a high-level mindset standpoint, I always want to promote at least one of my best sales managers. And I'll tell you why. Because I want to sit with that, with them and say, "James, you're my best sales guy. I want you to teach this entire team how... [Snorts] ...to be like you," right? So, I want to promote my best people because they, they have the skill set. Right? Now, what we do to make this work is that we start the leadership training earlier. Right? The problem is most companies, they're like, "Oh, we need a new manager. Uh, James, you're up." And you're like, "Oh, okay." Right? We, we have a solid system within our business where we're trying to, to grow and develop the leaders before they need to be ready.

James Dooley: Is there anything you can do? Let's say someone doesn't want a management role or a leadership role, but you know that they're going to be brilliant. Is there anything you can do to try to nurture them into encouraging them that this is the right role for you?

Mads Singers: Yeah. I mean, for, for me, the core thing is doing good management. So, first of all, good management is if, if your staff see what good management is, if you, if they have a manager who's doing one-on-ones with them, if they have a manager who's giving them ownership and responsibility, if they see what great management feels like, they also have a good example of what they should do. So, the starting point, the, the simplest way to start when you're growing good managers is actually showing them what is good management. Right? Now the second part following on to that is then, um, making sure that you, the manager of, of the person who is leading them, is starting to slowly develop their leadership skills, right? Like, a lot of the time I don't say, "Hey James, do you want to be our next manager?" I, I say, "Hey, you know, you're doing pretty well. You're, you're in this place. You know, what's the next step for you? What's the next growth thing?" And I would often encourage people to learn particular skills. So I'll help people improve their communication. I'll get some of my good people to delegate some of their work to someone else in the team so that they can do more important stuff. Right? So, and that is learning management, right? Like, reality is that is how you learn management the best way because you get to slowly train it, slowly pick up the skills, and over time you, you, you suddenly have the skills, right? So instead of being like, "Oh James, from tomorrow, you're manager," and you're just like, you have no idea. You're already building out the team. You're building out the people and you're, you're, you're slowly rolling them into management. And my experience with when you do that, a lot less of them are afraid of being a manager because they're like, "Oh, this is what it is." Right.

James Dooley: Yeah. For sure. Anyone who's watching this, leadership training is absolutely key to growth. It's been one of the biggest things that we've had to do with people like yourself to come in to get the A players in there to get to the next level to be able to nurture virtual assistants. I'd strongly recommend checking out the link in the description about remote workers and how to manage remote workers successfully. In my opinion, this episode is a key part of getting the leadership programme right because then when they're looking to recruit and train up and level up staff, it's very important, especially in the AI age. There's another episode about how to build a team in the AI age. Strongly recommend checking out in the description. Mads, it's been an absolute pleasure as always.