Why Your Best Consultant’s Output Cannot Be Your Agency’s Standard

By Gabriel Tan  |  March 2026

At the start of 2026, a financial services CEO sent a company-wide email with a clip of Steph Curry sinking an almost full-court shot. The crowd erupts. The email read: “We can’t control the market, the industry, or politics. But we can control the effort and focus we bring to work every single day.”

The message was clear: work harder, be more like Steph.

James Fulton and Todd Warner, writing in Harvard Business Review, point out what that message misses. Steph Curry trained inside systems that built his skills over years. Coaches demanded specific standards. Team routines made learning unavoidable. What looks like individual brilliance is usually the visible output of an invisible system.

Fulton and Warner spent over 50 years advising CEOs and studying elite organisations. Their conclusion: sustained performance comes from systems that make learning, standards, and discipline part of everyday work. Not from individual talent alone.

They identify three elements that elite organisations engineer to work together: how people learn the craft through the work itself, how teams enforce standards socially, and how routines structure the moments that matter.

I have been thinking about how directly this applies to PR agencies.

The PR agency version of the problem

Most PR agencies run on individual talent. The best consultant produces excellent work because of their experience, their instincts, and their relationship with the client. When that consultant is on the job, the output is strong. When they are not, the output varies.

This is the model Fulton and Warner describe in weaker systems: development depends on which leader you work for, standards live in individual preferences rather than shared norms, and routines are variable rather than structured. In their words, “capable juniors often left for environments that would make them better.”

That description fits a significant number of PR agencies I have worked with. The senior consultant is excellent. The system around them is not. When the senior is stretched across too many clients, quality drops. When the senior leaves the firm, the knowledge walks out with them.

The alternative is to design a system where the standard is built in, not carried in one person’s head.

Here is what that looks like in practice, using a press release workflow as the example.

Point 1: The work teaches the junior, not the training programme

Fulton and Warner’s first element is talent development. Their argument: elite organisations do not develop people through separate training events. They design work so that capability is constantly being built. Development is a byproduct of how work is designed, reviewed, and experienced.

In a PR agency, this means the junior learns what a good press release looks like by producing one inside a structured system, not by attending a workshop on press release writing.

Here is how we built this for a financial communications client.

The junior opens a shared Claude project that already contains the client’s brand voice document, an anti-AI writing guide, best-in-class samples of previous releases, and a research dossier on the topic. They fill in a structured intake form: who, what, where, when, why, how, quote source, objective. Claude produces a first draft that matches the client’s tone and avoids the language patterns that make AI writing sound generic.

The junior reviews the draft against a QA checklist: data verified, quote attribution checked, regulatory language confirmed, formatting correct. The senior sees the draft only after QA is complete.

Every time the junior runs this process, they are learning. They learn what the client sounds like by reading the brand voice document. They learn what good structure looks like by reviewing Claude’s output against the checklist. They learn what errors to catch by running QA before the senior sees anything.

The system is the teacher. The work is the curriculum. After a few cycles, the junior’s judgment improves because the process exposed them to the right standards repeatedly, not because someone sat them down and explained it in a meeting room.

Fulton and Warner describe exactly this: “Juniors are trusted with responsibility before they feel ready, with exposure determined by their appetite, energy, and leaders’ judgment. Feedback is frequent, specific, and tied to real decisions.”

In a well-built press release workflow, the feedback is built into the QA checklist. The junior does not wait for the senior to tell them what went wrong. The checklist tells them before the senior is involved.

Point 2: Standards are built into the workflow, not carried in the senior’s head

Fulton and Warner’s second element is team. Their argument: elite organisations enforce standards socially through shared norms, peer accountability, and explicit expectations. In weaker systems, teams inherit the preferences of individual leaders rather than shared standards.

In most PR agencies, the standard for a press release lives in the senior consultant’s head. They know what the client likes. They know which phrases to avoid. They know how the CEO speaks in quotes. When they review a junior’s draft, they apply these standards from memory. The junior receives the feedback but never sees the underlying rules.

The problem is that when the senior is unavailable, the standard disappears. A different senior reviews the draft and applies different preferences. The client receives inconsistent output. The junior does not know whose version of “good” to follow.

In the workflow we built, the standard is codified. The brand voice document captures how the client sounds: their tone, their vocabulary, their preferred phrases, how the CEO speaks. The anti-AI writing guide captures what the output must not sound like. The QA checklist captures what must be verified before the draft leaves the building.

These files do not change based on who is reviewing the draft. They are the standard. The senior’s role shifts from being the standard to enforcing it. Their job is to check whether the process was followed and whether the output meets the documented criteria, not to impose their personal preferences on each draft.

Fulton and Warner put it clearly: “In strong systems, teams inherit shared standards and a collective commitment to improvement. How the team works matters more than who leads it.”

When the standard lives in the system rather than in one person’s head, the agency’s quality becomes consistent regardless of which senior is on the account that week.

Point 3: Routines are audited, not assumed

Fulton and Warner’s third element is routine. Their argument: elite organisations identify a small number of high-stakes moments and structure them deliberately. These routines teach standards by making them unavoidable. In weaker systems, routines are treated as standard operating procedure rather than as opportunities to reinforce quality.

In a PR agency, the press release workflow is one of those high-stakes moments. It touches the client’s reputation, the agency’s credibility, and potentially the stock price of a listed company. Yet in many agencies, the workflow has not been examined since it was first established. It runs on muscle memory. Nobody has timed it, classified each step, or asked whether the process still makes sense.

A routine that is not audited will quietly degrade. Steps get skipped when the team is under pressure. QA becomes a glance rather than a checklist. The brand voice document gets outdated as the client’s preferences evolve. The workflow still produces output, but the gap between what the output should be and what it actually is widens over time.

In the system we built, the routine is audited regularly. We time the workflow. We classify each step as formatting or judgment. We identify which steps the AI handles, which steps the junior handles, and which steps require the senior’s expertise. 

When a step takes longer than expected, we examine why. When an error gets through QA, we trace it back to the checklist and ask what was missing.

This is not bureaucracy. It is the discipline that keeps the system current. Fulton and Warner describe exactly this: “Outcomes are reviewed against shared standards with lessons applied in the next cycle. Discipline and appetite for excellence are reinforced as people work together.”

The agencies that audit their routines catch problems before the client does. The agencies that assume their routines are fine discover the problems when a client walks.

Excellence is a design problem

Fulton and Warner close with a reference to sociologist Dan Chambliss, who studied Olympic swimmers expecting to find breakthrough techniques. What he found instead was consistent attention to basics: slightly better starts, cleaner turns, relentless repetition. Excellence, Chambliss concluded, is not dramatic. It is systemic.

The same is true in a PR agency. The agency that produces consistently excellent press releases is not the one with the most talented senior consultant. It is the one where the workflow is structured so that a junior following the process produces work that meets the standard. Where the standard is codified in files, not stored in one person’s memory. Where the routine is audited and updated, not left on autopilot.

Three questions for any agency leader:

What is your system teaching your people every day?

Where are your standards enforced, and would they hold if your best consultant took a month off?

Which of your routines have been audited in the past six months?

The answers will tell you whether your agency runs on individual talent or on a system that compounds excellence over time. The first is fragile. The second scales.

Gabriel Tan is the founder of Mekong Bridge Advisory. He builds structured execution systems for PR and communications firms.

gabriel.tan@mekongbridge.com  |  www.mekongbridge.com