How To Lead Like A Human
The last couple of months have been a testing time for almost everybody in every industry and in every sector, but there has been a particular spotlight on leaders through this time.
At a time when there is so much uncertainty around health and economic concerns, our leaders have had to carry an extraordinary weight in terms of how they navigate their organisations through this time and how they communicate with their teams, even at a distance, as the case might have been. We talk to Rob Harvey, CEO of Dentsu Aegis New Zealand, about his recent article Human Leadership In a Crisis – 10 Principles To Help You Lead Your Team Through Unchartered Waters, how he has been shaped as a leader and his vision for the future.
Watch the interview here.
You recently wrote an article about human leadership in a crisis. is The term ‘human’ in the title an indication that some leaders forget about the human element?
Absolutely. The use of that term in the title was very intentional. It’s been fascinating for me going through this crisis period, both the lockdown period and now with the economic impacts of that. I’m just exploring how important it is to be a good human.
We’ve talked as a country about kindness, but often leaders, when they’re approaching and managing a crisis like this, revert to very operational and commercial aspects of what they need to do, without remembering that they’re actually dealing with a team of humans.
Through this crisis in particular, which I think is different to an economic crisis, there was a whole lot of fear and anxiety that was raised quite quickly that teams were trying to manage, whilst also managing the workload. All of your human qualities needed to be on the best display through this period. It’s a very intentional use of that term ‘human’.
It really was such a profoundly different time to other crisises that we’ve been through because everyone was in the same boat. You do have that health element, but then you’ve got this economic element as well. It’s like a double whammy.
I’m so over the use of the word ‘unprecedented’. But I think it absolutely was and there’s probably not a more appropriate term for what we were dealing with. I think the very scale of this crisis and the fact that you had multifaceted elements of it, being a health crisis and an economic crisis for businesses, it became a real operational crisis as they look to mobilise technology that they hadn’t had before. There were so many components to it. I don’t think we’ve ever seen a crisis or event on such a global scale.
Almost every business, every individual around the world was impacted by it. But it also wasn’t evenly distributed. There were some sectors, from a business perspective, that were hit much harder than others, through no fault of their own.
If I look back on how our businesses managed through this, we have really detailed business continuity plans and none of them really foresaw something of this nature. We might have had small health incidents that we thought we could manage in a local market and might have impacted for us for a few weeks or a month. Nothing that would be as enduring as this is turning out to be. I think we’re only just getting started in terms of the true impact of that as well.
In New Zealand, we’ve done a remarkable job in terms of managing the health aspects of it, but we’ve done that at great cost and you’ve seen already the impact of us having the borders closed. The second you open them up to anyone internationally, you risk bringing Covid into the country.
We simply can’t do that in a rush which means that the economic impacts are going to be really long and sustained. I think we also have a little bit of a false sense of security at the moment. We’ve had these wage subsidies propping up businesses. As we’ve moved to level one, people have got their confidence back a little bit, but I think that’ll be a short-term blip.
And then again, the realities of that will set in over the coming months and we’re going to be dealing with this for quite sometime. But then in all of this as well, there’s some great opportunity for disruption and business evolution and societal evolution as well. It’s not all bad news.
It seems like as soon as there’s a crisis, marketing and advertising seems to be one of the first things for people to pull a lever on. How was it for you being in a sector that’s across so many other sectors?
I think we were fortunate in that we had done a lot of planning over the last 12 months in terms of how we would respond in a situation where we had to rapidly implement new technology. In terms of our business operations, we very much took a leadership approach and we duly sent everyone to work from home a couple of weeks in advance of the government officially locking people down.
In that respect, it means that our team was fully set up and ready to respond to client needs from day one. Initially, what we saw with our clients was a lot of them scrambling to catch up as they hadn’t necessarily tested those systems and ways of communicating. In that respect, we were ready to go. So that particular moment didn’t necessarily hit us as hard.
What did hit us hard though, was the client’s response to their marketing activity. Again, that wasn’t evenly distributed. We had some sectors, like the clients that we have in the travel and tourism space, who almost ceased activity immediately for obvious reasons.
We have clients in the banking sector who weren’t necessarily as immediately reactive. And then we had some retail clients who needed to rapidly move into new ways of operating. I think we’re really fortunate in the way in which our group here in New Zealand is constructed and that we have a broad suite of capabilities, from marketing, advertising, media capability, performance, digital, right through to customer strategy, digital transformation and customer communications.
That aspect of our business was actually really busy. The marketing components definitely did pull back quite quickly. What you were dealing with and what we found most challenging was the rapidly evolving situation. We’d be looking at revenue one day and it was very different the next day and then it changed again the day following, both ups and downs.
It was very hard for us to forecast in terms of what our business was going to look like for the coming month. I know that was certainly an issue that a lot of businesses really struggled with was the uncertainty, more than the actual revenue decline.
If you have certainty around revenue decline and know what you’re planning to for, say the next six to 12 months, you can manage your business around it. When you’ve got a situation that’s moving by the day, or hour in some cases, to really significant degrees, it’s almost impossible for you to plan cost and resource management around that. That was probably the thing that we grappled with the most.
From a business model perspective that could potentially be applied to a whole lot of areas, do you think that there is a lesson in having that broad suite of capability, the multiple revenues?
We would have been really exposed, I think, if we were all in as a media organisation. Your sector is a prime example of that. I think what you’ve done with M2 is great because you have diversified into different types of content; digital revenue streams, as well as print. But there are organisations within your sector who were hit really hard by the ability or the inability for them to be able to print.
For us, if we were all in, either one sector or area of capability, I think that would have made life really difficult for us. But the ability for us to refocus our energy into areas where clients needed that service the most was really helpful for us. It enabled us to smooth out some of the edges that we had in terms of our revenue movement.
Some parts of the business were hit really hard, but because we had other parts of the business performing quite strongly, it didn’t have the holistic impact on our business that it could have otherwise. Diversification is really important for businesses looking forward.
During the lockdown, we were still dealing with the minefield around how you market and how you promote yourself and sell. A lot of people were saying that now’s not the right time to sell. But it’s so fundamental to an economy to keep moving things around. What was your guidance over that period?
That’s right and that’s actually not the feedback that we had from consumers over that period. We very quickly realised that we needed to have a better understanding of how consumers were responding through the situation in order for us to guide our clients.
Almost two weeks into the lockdown, we implemented a quantitative research study interviewing New Zealanders on a weekly basis around how they were responding through the situation, how their interaction with media was changing and how they were viewing brand communications.
We were running that on a weekly basis as a tracker and what we were seeing through that was anywhere from 50 to 60 percent of people expecting brands to communicate as if they were operating business as usual.
I think we quite quickly saw a move to brands activating activity around Covid messaging, but what consumers were telling us was they just wanted brands to continue as usual. They were hearing enough about it on the news, they weren’t expecting brands to solve all of the problems that came along with this crisis and they just wanted them to give them some sense of normality.
As brands have activated through that period, and importantly now what we’ve been advising our clients, is to really ensure that you’re providing some form of utility, something useful and practical that your customers can take from your business. This care washing and virtue signalling was just blanket across the comms industry at the moment and consumers see through that stuff really quickly.
It’s that search for normality again, People just want that comfort. Maybe it was more a reaction against the care washing. People just want to get back to normal communication.
If you were a brand that was providing practical and useful products, services and communication, then that stuff went down reasonably well. If you were a brand that was just talking about the fact that you were there to support customers, without really doing anything to demonstrate that, then that was where brands found themselves in a relatively difficult situation. Consumers were expecting much more from them and just saying they were doing something simply wasn’t enough. They were better off saying nothing at all.
There seems to be a lot of traction behind supporting local and New Zealand-made. Are you seeing that from your perspective? Is that changing elements of the communication?
Prior to going into the whole Covid situation, there was obviously a lot of discussion around sustainability and removal of single use plastics and so on. Very much a macro interest and care for the environment. What we saw happen quite quickly as we entered into the Covid situation, was a real narrowing of focus from consumers.
From saving the world to saving their community, their jobs, their family, and with it, a real desire to support their local community. Rather than them thinking about how they might save someone in some far flung part of the world, they were very much focused on their local cafe, a local bakery, the local community that surrounds them. There was a very real trend that we saw and I think that will continue over the coming six, 12 months.
I think post that again, as we settle into some form of normality, people are again going to be looking for the highest quality product at the lowest cost, essentially. Whether that’s a sustained trend or not, I’m not sure, but there’s certainly a lot of really positive sentiment around that “support local” movement at the moment, which is great.
During lockdown you had to deal with a whole lot of uncertainty around the business side of things. you’ve got to be a good human leader to the organisation and deal with people that are dealing with their own uncertainty. How was it for you personally dealing with the uncertainty, your family and then trying to balance everything else?
We were dealing with massive implications in terms of how we managed our team through that process. But, what I did really enjoy was the learnings and the challenge that came with how we manage the business through that period.
I think because there was so much to do in such a short space of time, and we were dealing with circumstances that we’d never experienced before from personal perspective, I didn’t find there was a huge amount of time to stop and think. I was working from home, I’ve got two young daughters and a wife who was also full time working from home.
I probably spent the entire day locked away in the bedroom, arguably busier than ever on stuff that I’ve never been working on historically, just trying to keep the business moving, making sure that we had the right support in place for our people.
For me, I really thrived on the challenge of that, but my primary focus was ensuring that we looked after the interests of our team. We have nearly 300 people in the team across those various businesses and I was most concerned about how we protect their jobs and their health through that period. Because I had that as my focus, I didn’t really think too much about the personal consequences, to be honest.
That’s still a lot of weight on your shoulders. When you’re worrying about 300 people and their jobs, how do you handle the pressure of that?
It’s a good question. We actually talk a lot in the business about the importance of people looking after their mental health. I spoke a lot about that through the lockdown period and the need for people to take time out. I didn’t necessarily apply that to myself. The way I managed that was just chunking it down into the things that I could see in the immediate future.
We talked quite a lot about controlling the things we could to control. For whatever reason, I was able to mentally break up the task and focus on the things that we needed to focus on immediately, without getting too caught up in the weight of what might come further down the track and the implications of that.
We made some pretty swift decisions. I made the call really early that, certainly in the short term and through the Covid lockdown, we would protect jobs. We didn’t implement any redundancies through that period. We made some quick decisions around temporary cost measures, such as salary reductions, and so on.
I promised to the team that we’d overly communicate. We’d be really honest and authentic with how we did that. We’d give them the true picture of what was going on in the business.
Looking back, because I was sharing that degree of transparency and we were having those open conversations quite regularly, I almost felt like it wasn’t just me in this situation managing, we were all in it together. Maybe that helped, but I actually felt like, going through that period, it didn’t feel like a weight.
Is there a point where you can become too authentic? If you don’t have a clear picture of how viable things might be, say three months down the track, is that the sort of thing you’d share with the team?
To an extent. I’d share with the team what I knew today. If I didn’t have a clear and viable picture around what three months down the track looked like, then we’d have that conversation. We were dealing with the situation that was evolving quite quickly.
I was giving the team regular updates around how our revenue was moving, not with a huge amount of detail, because that wasn’t necessary. But we were giving a lot of visibility around what was happening commercially to the business as a result of what was going on. We needed to.
You’re asking people to take sacrifices around their pay, which was all permission-based obviously, we’re asking them to clear out some of their annual leave balances and so on. I don’t think it’s fair to ask people to do that without giving them transparency around why they’re doing that.
I would really encourage as much as you possibly can as a leader, to have real authenticity in your communication, real transparency around the state of the business. I don’t think through that period you could over communicate.
I was running sessions with the team where I’d give them a presentation on our immediate strategic priorities. I’d then do a follow up Q and A the day after, recognising that people didn’t want to ask questions in an open forum. They could submit them anonymously prior and then I’d answer them with as much transparency as I could.
The feedback that we had through that period was that the communication really helped people understand what they needed to do and how the business was responding to the situation.
In terms of cutting out all the buffers of communication and just being totally open and transparent and working on it together, do you think that’s created a tighter team?
I don’t think it’s sustainable in its current form, in terms of virtual communication, because you need that physical contact and the hallway conversations to build that collaboration.
But I think in terms of unity, everyone did feel like they were in it together and we were having really regular all-staff communications that we’d probably only do regularly when we’re all together in person. It’s harder logistically to organise people.
And then the teams within the business were all doing that within their smaller groups as well. I think communication was probably better than it’s ever been. I think most businesses will say this; it really accelerated our use of technology to collaborate and interact with each other as well.
We use Microsoft Teams, we’d had that in place for 12 to 18 months prior. No one was really using it, now everyone’s on Teams.We’re doing collaborative documents based on Teams.
That way of working has changed quite quickly. I think with that comes a sense of unity as well. What we’re also seeing is people keen to get back into the office to be collaborating in person. Coming back to the human elements of that, that’s really important.
Do you get the sense that this has forced businesses to be a lot stronger, a lot more efficient?
Yeah, I think so. What you’ll see is a lot of businesses really doubling down on the key talent, the key capabilities that they have. I think anything that was margin dilutive periphery to the business will probably be cut and a much more singular focus for those businesses around their strategic priorities. I think diversification is important, but I think businesses will trim first before they then look to add diversified or adjacent services.
In terms of the total business ecosystem, as difficult as this, it will trim out a lot of the fat that might exist in some of our sectors where there are competitors that were a little bit weaker. Those will disappear. I think you’ll see new players, new startups with new models emerge as a result, which will be interesting because there’s great opportunity to be hard within this environment.
What consumers are looking for is disruptors who have new ways of doing things who are much more digitally-focused and customer-centric in how they go to market. I think we’ll see a real emergence of those types of businesses.
Do you suspect that there will be areas which will be rife with the sort of disruption that you’re talking about?
I don’t know that there’ll be any sector that is immune to this. But I think what will be interesting is how quickly some of those new competitors emerge. What is going to happen is there is a lot of people who are in larger organisations who will either be made redundant or who have viewed this as an opportunity to rethink their future. A number of those will be looking at startup opportunities simply because the job pools aren’t there.
You can see this in your sector with a number of individuals coming out of some media organisations and setting up new entities. I can see it already in our sector. We’ve got people who have come out of agencies and are setting up new consultancies.
Where all of that lands, I don’t know. But I think in most sectors, you’ll see new competitors emerge. The restaurant and hospitality industry has been fascinating through this. We’ve had a lot of restaurants move into much more food delivery or digital commerce, similar to a My Food Bag-type proposition.
If you come through that and you realise that there’s more profit in that, would you continue to run a restaurant with all the logistics that goes with that? I’m not sure, I think will be interesting. I don’t think there’s any sector that’s not ripe for disruption.
In terms of this new future, with all these entrepreneurs running around, are there certain skills that we need to be encouraging in our children to be able to help them create a stronger New Zealand future? Even an attitude and the ability to deal with uncertainty?
Yeah, it’s exactly that. One thing we’ve talked a lot about in our business, which I think is really important for my children as well and I know the schools are talking about it, is resilience and the ability to come through unusual and challenging situations like this with strength and with optimism and to view the opportunities within that.
We see adaptability within how our business is responding with real agility. We’re looking at our clients and encouraging them to really operate with agility. The ability for a young person or a leader within a business to be able to move with real agility, I think is important.
All the digital skills, not necessarily coding, but everything that comes with that, obviously that’s only going to be more important as we move into the future. I think it really encourages the human connection. It’s something that can be a little bit lost when you’re constantly on video calls. But just connecting with people in really authentic and human ways, caring for each other.
Those aren’t necessarily terms that we use enough in business, because we do often view things through the filter of a P&L and the commercial aspects of a business. Those qualities of care and so on are really important for our young people. Diversity of thinking, that’s been really important throughout business, because we’ve had multidimensional capabilities we’ve been able to bring to bear.
It has really encouraged, at a rapid pace, a much greater diversity of thinking to solve business problems for our clients. Really being able to collaborate and work with a diverse set of individuals to solve problems in unique and differentiated ways. Because it’s been a unique situation, those qualities have been really brought on as well.
Can you give an example of diversity of thinking when you’re looking at the motivation or the planning of the business?
When we talk about diversity of thinking, it’s actually consisting of a number of different components. Ethnic diversity, which is taking influence from other cultures, in terms of how they operate. I’ll be the first to say that we’re not doing enough in respect to that.
We’re very patiently committed to doing more, but we haven’t done enough. Our industry is massively underrepresented of certain ethnicities, Māori and Pacific Island in particular. Diversity of thinking in terms of cultural backgrounds, where you grew up and the environment you grew up in. Diversity of thinking in terms of gender and sexuality. And then capability; do you come to solving a problem from a creative perspective? Do you come from a technical perspective? From a management or people focus?
We work really hard on trying to bring together very different thinkers to solve business problems for our clients. That’s the benefit we have being a multi-dimensional business and that we really can take someone who is a technology consultant, maybe working on the Salesforce platform, we can get them together with a creative individual who might be a writer.
We can put them with someone who is really focused on how we build our customer experience for our clients with a media person. It’s that breadth of thinking that really does step change the types of solutions you can solve for clients. If you come at it from a very one dimensional perspective, you’re going to get a one dimensional answer.
We really try and encourage all of those aspects of diversity. I think that’s only going to become more important as the problems we’re trying to solve for businesses and society become more complex.
It’s good to be optimistic, but we do have the reality of the fact that the helicopter money is going to run out soon and there will be flow on effect. How do you think we can capitalise our position globally?
I think we also have a history of being a bit of a pioneering and innovative culture. We might’ve lost our way on this in the past few years potentially, but there’s great opportunity for us at the bottom of the world as a small market to test new ways of working, new ways of doing things and new products and service. I think there’s real potential for innovation to come out of this.
If I look at global organisations, and we’re one of those, we’ve got a number of clients that are global organisations, there’s the potential for them to look at us as a test market for things. We’re now ahead, obviously in terms of the world, in terms of how we responded to the Covid situation. They use us as a test case for programs of activity that they can then potentially roll out globally.
I think there’s real opportunity for that. We’re a sophisticated market with relatively small scale. We’ve got great talent in this country. The opportunity for us to really harness that, to build a new digital economy future in a way that’s differentiated internationally whilst the rest of the world is still, quite frankly, struggling to manage the health crisis.
I think that’s a really interesting opportunity for us, but you’ve got to have a real appetite for that. I think we still have a number of pockets of our society and of our business community who are still pretty traditional. Those are the businesses that will struggle through this, where there are other businesses who are really looking and hunting for opportunity and are optimistic about the growth potential.
There are those that are very protectionist around the current position and the current way of working. I think those are the businesses that will struggle. We’re going to end up in a bit of a two speed economy.
Is there one particular principle that you’re most fond of?
Coming back to that need to be a good human and all the aspects that come with that. Being authentic, being compassionate, showing gratitude, having real care for people, I think all of those are just qualities of being a good human.
If you apply that and you think about how you treat your team through a very human lens, I think that the team will respond really well to that. It doesn’t mean you can’t take tough commercial decisions, but I think it’s the way in which you deliver those and the way in which you implement those that people judge you on, not the decisions themselves because people understand that we’re dealing in a pretty tough commercial reality.
That is the reality of it as a leader, you do have to make tough decisions, but you can at least afford people that dignity and respect along the way.
Yeah, that’s right and thank them. I talk about gratitude. We should be immensely grateful for the way all of our teams within all of our businesses have responded through this. Not only have they had to keep the lights on in businesses in some respects, but they would be managing the demands of family at home.
In a lot of cases reduced pay, reduced hours, the impact that has on their personal situation, they had real anxiety around their health situation and their financial security and so on. Be grateful for the work that people are doing for you.
Have you got one question that you’d like me to include in my next interview to another leader, another human?
That’s a really tough one on the spot. It depends on who you’re talking to. I’d be really interested to know what view they have on what New Zealand will look like in 12 months time? None of us can predict the future.
We don’t know how this health crisis will evolve or where the recessionary crisis that is about to follow will take us. But it will be really interesting to see how New Zealand has responded to that within 12 months time.
Are you optimistic?
I’ve remained optimistic throughout this. Despite all the challenges we’re facing, there’s real opportunity for the future. It gave us a great opportunity from day one to review all our strategies for the business, to reset those. I think it’s created a whole lot of new strategic priorities for us that we hadn’t seen before.
I’m really excited about the future. I think there’s great opportunity for our sector. I think there’s great opportunity for New Zealand and for the businesses. But it’s not going to be easy, we’ve got a really tough road ahead of us.
Watch the interview here.
Rob’s 10 Principles for Human Leadership In A Crisis
1. Keep Calm
First and foremost, try to keep calm and take the situation one step a time. Recognise that you can only control the controllable and accept that the situation is going to be fluid.
The way you approach this is never going to be perfect, but a calm and steady hand will engender a calm response from your team.
2 Care Deeply and Genuinely
We are in the people business so put them first. Look after your people and help and inspire them to look after your clients/customers. True care requires a very empathetic approach. The anxieties and challenges your team members are facing are very often not related to the commercial aspects of your business, they are personal.
Appreciate that in the initial stages of the crisis, the most important thing to them will be the health and safety of their family. It’s super important in times like this that you give people permission to prioritise these things, to take time out, and to have some fun.
One of the greatest challenges we have through a crisis like this is protection of our mental health and we have a real responsibility as employers to support our teams through this. So, dig deeper. Ask what your teams are really feeling and how the business can help.
3. Communicate, Communicate and Communicate
This is arguably one of the most important principles. Communication is absolutely critical, and I don’t think you can ever over communicate. Silence is a void that your team will fill for themselves so give them updates frequently. Even if you don’t have all the answers, just check in and let the team know what you and the other leaders are thinking and working on.
This is particularly important when your team are dispersed around the country and often isolated from each other. It’s also important that you conduct as much communication via video as possible. Don’t hide behind voice or email. People take comfort in seeing each other and it makes us more human and emotionally available.
4. Be Transparent
As you communicate, be as transparent as possible. Make yourself available and be prepared to answer questions regularly and honestly. Your team would much rather hear it like it is than some sanitised response that ultimately doesn’t tell them anything.
Tough decisions are required but don’t be afraid to speak the truth, just do it empathetically. It’s also important to recognise that often people won’t be comfortable speaking up and asking hard questions of their leaders in public forums, so create opportunities for them to submit questions anonymously.
5. Be Authentic
This is much easier said than done. To be authentic you need to be honest, and you need to be open.
Your team don’t expect you to have all the answers so it’s okay to say you don’t know, but they do expect you to tell them the truth, and on a personal level understand what they are going through.
6. Be Decisive
This is not the time to be indecisive or slow. Hard decisions are required so back yourself and the advice of your team, and once you have made decisions, own them.
7. Remain Agile
Whilst it’s important to be decisive, you also need to be prepared to be agile with your strategy. This is a situation that is changing by the day, and in some cases hour. Best laid plans will need to evolve, and you will need to either change or accelerate strategies.
This is okay, but it’s important to clearly and transparently communicate to your team as to why you have changed tack. A change in direction without open communication will only create uncertainty.
8. Don’t Do It Alone
This is not a time to attempt to do everything on your own, or without strong counsel. Surround yourself with great leaders and talent from within your business and from outside.
Lean on your trusted advisors and really listen. Unique and diverse perspectives are critically important through this time, as is trusting those around you to help execute your collective plan.
9. Look Up And Forward
Your team are looking to you for leadership. Whilst the situation may be uncertain and commercially challenging, it’s important you remain optimistic about the future and present this to them in a way that is true to your leadership style. Now that some of the dust has settled on the immediate response required, it’s a good opportunity to begin to look at what your business will look like post this crisis. Things have undoubtedly changed for all of us, but great opportunities arise from situations like this and it is those who remain optimistic, open for change, and hungry for growth that will capitalise on the inevitable bounce back.
10. Express Gratitude
This is a time where it is important to frequently say thanks. Recognising that through this time many of your team are going above and beyond and are likely to be making some form of financial sacrifice to support the business, it’s important this isn’t taken for granted. Thank them and do so both privately and publicly. When physical connection is restricted, it’s all the more important you tell people they are doing a great job. Also, sadly for many leaders, you will need to be saying goodbye to people who have been made redundant. Don’t let them slip out quietly in fear of highlighting you have let people go, make sure you thank them for their contribution too.
