Fearless Creative Leadership

Edited highlights of our full conversation. Who takes care of you? Colleen DeCourcy has been named Creative Leader of the Decade. She led Wieden and Kennedy to three consecutive Agency of the Year wins and her contribution to creativity has just been recognized by Cannes Lions with the Lion of St Mark Lifetime Achievement Award. I met Colleen in April of 2015. And as I got to know her, I learned that she was humble, that she was generous, that she was vulnerable. That she was going to make it happen, even though, as you’ll hear, she was filled with self-doubt. Today, three months into her version of retirement, her impact is everywhere. And her sense of self has found a permanent home. At its heart, leadership is an act of generosity. It asks so much of us that to do it well, to have lasting impact, requires that we give much more of ourselves than we get back. At least in the short term. It’s one of the reasons why leadership is so lonely. But the longer that I do this, the more that I talk to leaders and try to understand them, the more I realize that there is a truth that shows up over and over again. That the generosity that the best leaders bring, generosity that exists even in the face of their own fears and doubts, generosity that exists even in the furnace of modern business, lifts the people around them to heights they never thought possible. And in the process of doing that for others, what these leaders end up creating, is themselves.

How many ways are you looking at the future? Lori Bradley is the Vice President for Talent at Chewy. Lori sees the management and development of talent through multiple lenses. Academic. Strategic. Intellectual. For sure. But the perspective she brings that sits on top of all of these is the most important of all. The human one. Here’s something you already know if you listen to this podcast. People that choose to work in creative business are complicated and unpredictable. Despite which, so many business try so very hard to build single model operations that view all members of a group or a department or a discipline as being the same. No wonder that most businesses leave millions of dollars of untapped creativity and innovation on the table every night. Lori used the word experiment three times in about ten seconds. Can you remember the last time that word was used in any leadership team meeting you’ve been part of in the last few months? There’s no way back. There’s no one way forward. And no way of knowing which way is going to work. The future is waiting to be invented - by those who are brave enough to experiment.

If you could look into the future and see the results of what you’re doing today, would you want to? Uncommon London was just named Creative Agency of the Year for the second year in a row, and Independent Agency of the Year. It’s the first time a company has ever received both awards at the same time. Creative leadership isn’t a theory. It’s a practice, and it happens in the real world. And the reason this podcast exists is to bring the lessons of the best leaders in the world into the light where they can be learned from and applied. This week’s episode is a re-run of one of my very earliest episodes. It’s a conversation I had with Nils Leonard in the summer of 2017. Nils was on the show only a few weeks ago. But I’m airing this episode again for a simple reason. It’s a case study. When we recorded this conversation, Nils and his partners - Lucy Jameson and Natalie Graeme - had just launched Uncommon. They had big dreams. And, as Nils realized at the end of our conversation - they had something to support them. Hope sits at the heart of any creative endeavor. The willingness to try, the capacity to fail and then try again are all fueled by hope. But if hope is the driving force, then the track that you lay down is held in place by the standards that you hold yourselves to. If you take the time to listen to this conversation, or read the transcript, you’ll find evidence that when it comes to leadership, saying what you mean and meaning what you say matter a lot. Maybe more than anything. And less than five years after this conversation, the company that Nils, Lucy and Natalie are building is proof that it is possible to predict the future - by inventing it. What do you want to have built by 2027?

Are you leading a team or a group of individuals? Joanna Coles is the CEO of Northern Star Acquisition. She’s the former Chief Content Officer for Hearst Magazines, and the former Editor-in-Chief of Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan. She sits on the boards of Snap and Sonos and she advises some of the world’s most influential businesses. She’s also brilliant at telling the story of what’s going on all around us, in ways that we haven’t heard before. It is widely - and I think incorrectly assumed - that for any creative business, the key to winning is to have better talent. Having the best talent helps. But the businesses that win, unlock talent best. I can’t tell you how many companies I have been invited into, whose reputation on the street or in the press is that they’re struggling or decaying. Or in some cases, the word goes, they’re even dying. For years, I’d walk into the businesses and assume that one of the problems would be that they had mediocre talent. It was never the case. The talent was always much better, much better, than the reputation, than the work, than the results. It was the organizations that were failing. Usually because of a failure of leadership sensitivity and imagination. Creative businesses win or lose based on how successfully they take disparate, talented individuals and combine them together to produce extraordinary outcomes. Whether that’s ads or code or clothes or cars or content or ideas. As Joanna says, we’re moving into an era of heightened individualism. Suddenly the talent has discovered that they have choices and opinions and standards and expectations of their own. Can you adapt fast enough to meet them? Or are you walking around frustrated because people won’t do what you want them to any more? Welcome to the age of talent. It’s going to be interesting.

Are you re-imagining the future or re-building the past? Justin Spooner is the co-founder of Unthinkable - they describe themselves as a digital strategy and digital transformation company. Transformation is a word that gets used a lot. It also gets practiced little. Mostly because it’s hard and expensive and, honestly, in some respects it’s frightening. It’s why so many companies are so focused on facing the future with policies and practices and initiatives that start with the word ‘back.' Back to work. Back to normal. Back to real life. The truth about life is that it doesn’t and never has worked backwards. You can’t rewind anything. We measure the past, experience the present, and plan the future. So if the future you’re planning is based on recreating history, stop for a few moments and think about this. If I could live the past again, which parts would I want to keep - as in really want to keep - and what would I change? Then do that.

How do you know when something’s impossible? This is the full conversation with the futurist Faith Popcorn that we recorded a few weeks ago, some of which we included in our first episode of the year - ‘How Will The Best Leaders Lead In 2022.’ Faith is the founder of The BrainReserve and she and her team are hired to tell companies and industries what the future looks like. Most people like the illusion of the status quo. The here and now is safe and warm, and predicting a future filled with disruption upsets companies and their leaders who are counting on more of the same to get them to next year. The world has never worked like that, actually. And as we approach the 24th month of the new society that we are building, I’m consistently struck by how many people still trying to use the past as the reference point for the future. The cost of entry to becoming a leader is imagination. The weekly fee for membership in the club of great leaders is the capacity and willingness to keep seeking out the seemingly impossible and then finding a way to make it part of the expected. And if you think I’m asking too much, consider this, courtesy of Faith’s Twitter feed last week. Over the last 200 years, the average lifespan of our species has tripled. What makes any of us sure that won’t happen again?

In the movie of your life, which part do you want to play? During award-winning costume designer Ellen Mirojnick's career, she’s worked with directing greats, from Steven Soderbergh, to Ridley and Tony Scott, to Oliver Stone. She’s the reason the name Gordon Gekko immediately conjures an image in our mind, and why Bridgerton swept millions of viewers off their feet. Ellen turns costumes into characters. How she does that is worth thinking about for every leader. Over the last few months on this podcast, we’ve been talking a lot about empathetic, sensitive leadership. About building trust and displaying vulnerability. Not any of which are words to attach to Gordon Gekko. Gordon Gekko was greedy, immoral, self-obsessed. Labels that fit some of today’s leaders but are probably not descriptions that you aspire to, if you’re listening to this podcast. Which brings up the all important question. How do you want to be described? Each of us play multiple roles in our lives. In every relationship, we have to decide which parts of ourselves we bring center stage and which we move into the wings. Which personality traits, which characteristics, which areas of expertise should be prominent, and which should take a back seat in that moment. In our private lives, there’s - usually - more forgiveness and more latitude. But in our leadership roles, when we are confused or inconsistent about how we show up, we run the risk of being misunderstood or, worse, misrepresented. And the consequence of that inconsistency is an erosion of trust and confidence from everyone around you. The best leaders are clear about the attributes they want to be known for, and then turn them into a character that shows up, consistently, every day. Strategic, empathetic, ambitious, risk-taking, disruptive, loyal, creative, sensitive, rule-breaking. The choices are yours. And as long as they are true to who you really are, you’ll have the foundations of a leadership character that can draw people with you on the journey, and will have people remember the impact that you made long after the final credits have rolled.

Edited highlights of our full conversation. In the movie of your life, which part do you want to play? During award-winning costume designer Ellen Mirojnick's career, she’s worked with directing greats, from Steven Soderbergh, to Ridley and Tony Scott, to Oliver Stone. She’s the reason the name Gordon Gekko immediately conjures an image in our mind, and why Bridgerton swept millions of viewers off their feet. Ellen turns costumes into characters. How she does that is worth thinking about for every leader. Over the last few months on this podcast, we’ve been talking a lot about empathetic, sensitive leadership. About building trust and displaying vulnerability. Not any of which are words to attach to Gordon Gekko. Gordon Gekko was greedy, immoral, self-obsessed. Labels that fit some of today’s leaders but are probably not descriptions that you aspire to, if you’re listening to this podcast. Which brings up the all important question. How do you want to be described? Each of us play multiple roles in our lives. In every relationship, we have to decide which parts of ourselves we bring center stage and which we move into the wings. Which personality traits, which characteristics, which areas of expertise should be prominent, and which should take a back seat in that moment. In our private lives, there’s - usually - more forgiveness and more latitude. But in our leadership roles, when we are confused or inconsistent about how we show up, we run the risk of being misunderstood or, worse, misrepresented. And the consequence of that inconsistency is an erosion of trust and confidence from everyone around you. The best leaders are clear about the attributes they want to be known for, and then turn them into a character that shows up, consistently, every day. Strategic, empathetic, ambitious, risk-taking, disruptive, loyal, creative, sensitive, rule-breaking. The choices are yours. And as long as they are true to who you really are, you’ll have the foundations of a leadership character that can draw people with you on the journey, and will have people remember the impact that you made long after the final credits have rolled.

Who do you really want to join you on the ride?  Nils Leonard is one of the co-founders of Uncommon London. They describe themselves as a creative studio building brands that people in the real world actually wish existed. Nils has been on the show before. He was one of my early guests on the podcast and that conversation came in the early days of Uncommon and he was very open about his ambitions and his expectations for himself and his company.  Four years on and it’s hard to see the gaps between what he said back then and how he talks about the company today.  In my experience - both as a company founder and as a coach - there is one aspect of leadership that brings many to their emotional knees. Firing someone.  When to acknowledge that the fit between the person and the organization doesn’t work. On a human level, we all want to belong and the fear - conscious or instinctive - that we might one day be on the receiving end of this conversation, makes many leaders do everything they can to avoid that moment. The one in which we say out loud, to someone’s face, we don’t want you.  Even now, as you’re listening, if you hit pause and say out loud, we don’t want you, there will be a feeling in your stomach that you hope goes away fast. But there are three other parts of this that don’t get enough weight in the emotional wrestling match. First are the hopes, needs and expectations of all the people that work for you who are contributing so much that they will never be part of a conversation like this. Whose talent and efforts and commitment to you and to the business are subsidizing the person who doesn’t fit. Second are the needs of the organization as a whole, which has no agency and no ability to help itself, and which is as reliant on your protection and care as an infant. And third is the person who is receiving this news. Who knows, in almost every instance in my experience, that this job isn’t a fit, that these people are not their tribe and that they are, to use Nils’ description, a passenger on someone’s else’s ride. “Death twitches my ear. Live, he says I'm coming.”     They say that life is a journey. And so is building a business. Who gets to go on that ride is perhaps the most important decision that a leader takes.

Edited highlights of our full conversation. Who do you really want to join you on the ride?  Nils Leonard is one of the co-founders of Uncommon London. They describe themselves as a creative studio building brands that people in the real world actually wish existed. Nils has been on the show before. He was one of my early guests on the podcast and that conversation came in the early days of Uncommon and he was very open about his ambitions and his expectations for himself and his company.  Four years on and it’s hard to see the gaps between what he said back then and how he talks about the company today.  In my experience - both as a company founder and as a coach - there is one aspect of leadership that brings many to their emotional knees. Firing someone.  When to acknowledge that the fit between the person and the organization doesn’t work. On a human level, we all want to belong and the fear - conscious or instinctive - that we might one day be on the receiving end of this conversation, makes many leaders do everything they can to avoid that moment. The one in which we say out loud, to someone’s face, we don’t want you.  Even now, as you’re listening, if you hit pause and say out loud, we don’t want you, there will be a feeling in your stomach that you hope goes away fast. But there are three other parts of this that don’t get enough weight in the emotional wrestling match. First are the hopes, needs and expectations of all the people that work for you who are contributing so much that they will never be part of a conversation like this. Whose talent and efforts and commitment to you and to the business are subsidizing the person who doesn’t fit. Second are the needs of the organization as a whole, which has no agency and no ability to help itself, and which is as reliant on your protection and care as an infant. And third is the person who is receiving this news. Who knows, in almost every instance in my experience, that this job isn’t a fit, that these people are not their tribe and that they are, to use Nils’ description, a passenger on someone’s else’s ride. “Death twitches my ear. Live, he says I'm coming.”     They say that life is a journey. And so is building a business. Who gets to go on that ride is perhaps the most important decision that a leader takes.