The Account Management Training Gap - Why AMs are Under-supported in Agencies

For a while now (usually around 4am while feeding my almost-six-month-old) I’ve found myself circling the same question. Why do agency account managers receive so little real training? I know, exciting stuff right? But really, why is there no instruction on how to actually do the job? Some of this wondering likely stems from my own history slash trauma of years of trying to navigate the role with little (if any at all) leadership support and absolutely no guidance whatsoever on what “good” looked like. Writing this article is probably in part me trying to make sense of that chapter of life so I can finally close it out. But regardless, the longer I sat with the question, and the more it kept popping up and I thought about it, the clearer the answer became. So here we are.

Other agency roles have relatively clear roadmaps. Sales teams get scripts, funnels, and performance targets. Designers have entire ecosystems of tools and critiques to help them improve their craft. Copywriters have structure, tone, and techniques which are things you can study and practice. These roles are built on clearly defined skill sets that can be measured, improved, and celebrated.

Account management? Yeah, not so much.

If you follow me on LinkedIn you’ve heard me say this next part quite a bit. AMs are expected to be experts in trust-building, alignment, strategic thinking, growth, and leadership without anyone ever teaching them HOW to do those things. These aren’t tasks you can check off a list. They’re expectations people assume you either “just have” or don’t. And that’s where the real problem is. The role depends on traits that are crucial but incredibly hard to define, measure, or test. And when something is hard to measure, most people and organizations simply avoid teaching it.

Account Management Is Leadership Work

Once I started tugging at this thread (yes, I’m absolutely going to pun it up as much as I can), the reason behind the lack of training became clearer and clearer to me. Account management is fundamentally a leadership role, just not in the formal “title” sense. It’s leadership rooted in psychology and guiding people through situations, making decisions without full information, influencing without authority, and keeping teams level-headed when emotions or stakes start to climb.

I needed to research to truly believe all this, and found leadership research backs this theory of mine up. Daniel Goleman wrote in Harvard Business Review that emotional intelligence is the “sine qua non” of leadership, meaning you literally cannot lead without it. When you then take into consideration what AMs do day in and day out, it fits almost too perfectly. We (AMs) calm anxious clients. We interpret vague requests. We manage strong personalities. We hold space (shoutout Ariana and Cynthia) for uncertainty. None of that is administrative. It is emotional, relational, and oh so very human.

A review published through the National Institutes of Health also echoes this connection: emotional intelligence is one of the strongest predictors of leadership effectiveness, particularly in roles that rely on trust, communication, and conflict navigation. In simpler, more Tarah words, the very skills people commonly refer to as “soft skills” are actually the core leadership skills that define the AM role.

Why Agencies Still Don’t Train AMs

This brings us to the disconnect. You can’t quantify trust the way you quantify click-through rates. You can’t measure alignment the way you measure revenue. You can’t assign an easy number to judgment, nuance, or emotional steadiness.

Agencies rely heavily on what can be tracked. Anyone who has worked in or with one knows that. And that’s so often necessary! But Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends Report points out a major consequence of this data hungry mindset most of us are in - organizations consistently underinvest in relational and behavioral skills because they’re “difficult to measure and therefore difficult to train.” LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report just so happens to reinforce this too by saying (in summary) soft skills are the most in-demand across industries, but they’re the least developed.

So here we are with an industry where designers have portfolios, sales teams have dashboards, media teams have benchmarks and AMs have, wait for it…..the vibes. Instinct. Invisible labor. The job is preventative and relational, and when done well, it often goes unnoticed. When done poorly, it becomes immediately visible.

Because the work is so hard to define, the training becomes even harder to justify. Which is exactly why most agencies don’t create it. Enter: me. 

Defining the Traits No One Has Bothered to Define

This was a major thing I wanted to convey while building The Thread. The industry talks endlessly about the seemingly vague traits that make a great AM, yet almost never defines them in a way that is practical or teachable. So I decided to define them myself.

After breaking down the role piece by piece, reflecting on my own experience, scouring Reddit and LinkedIn threads, and interviewing dozens and dozens of peers, I kept seeing the same five traits emerging again and again: Trust, Alignment, Growth, Strategic Thinking, and Leadership. None of these traits show up neatly in performance dashboards. None of them produce clean data points. But they clearly dictate almost everything about whether an AM thrives or struggles. And most importantly, these traits are behavioral. They live in the everyday actions that ladder up to larger outcomes.

Trust is built through clarity, reliability, preparation.

Alignment through communication and shared understanding.

Growth through curiosity and anticipation.

Strategic thinking through thoughtful questions and connection-making.

Leadership through presence, tone, decision-making, and emotional steadiness.

These are not magical abilities granted to a select few. They are skills, habits, mindsets. Things you can teach someone once you finally give them the language and structure necessary to learn.

Why I Built The Thread

The Thread came to be out of the realization that if I can define the role, I can teach it. And if it can be taught, AMs can have what every other discipline already has which is a legitimate path to growth.

The industry may have treated these five traits as things you “just have” or don’t, but that’s only because no one bothered to be as stubborn and embrace the Taurus in them like me and break it all down. Once you do, the whole picture changes. The invisible becomes visible. The vague becomes teachable. And the role becomes something you can truly develop and not just hope someone stumbles into one day. 

Account management has always been leadership work. It’s simply time we start training people like it is.