Chris Hirst of Havas
Why the leadership journey starts with honesty.
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 335: Chris Hirst
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business. To help them succeed where leadership lives - at the intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Chris Hirst. He’s the Global CEO of Havas Creative - they describe themselves as the world’s most integrated advertising and communications business.
He’s also the author of an award winning book, No Bullsh*t Leadership. Which means he’s given a lot of thought to the art of leading a creative business.
“I think that leaders need to ask themselves two questions. You've got to ask yourself where you are today, and you've got to be able to be honest with that. Now, everybody goes, "Of course you can be honest." But a lot of people actually find that quite difficult. They find it quite difficult to be really honest about the challenges they're trying to fix."
So much has been written and said about leadership. Libraries full of thinking and advice. Strategies and objectives and theories and case studies and oceans-full of best practices.
We humans are complex beings. Biological entities fueled by emotions and very often willing to make decisions and take actions which, even after a moment’s thought, work against our own best interests.
No wonder that the Doomsday Clock is set at 100 seconds to midnight.
Leadership requires you take people on a journey. From where we are today. To a better version of tomorrow.
A lot of attention gets paid to your definition of the destination. Justifiably so. After all, to slightly misquote Alice in Wonderland, if you don’t care where you’re going, any road will do.
But as Chris points out, the other end of the journey, the honest acknowledgement of where you are today, is often missing, for fear that someone will be upset or offended or will judge the progress so far as inadequate.
Honesty about the challenges you're trying to overcome is where leadership begins.
Without that honesty, at least two things become true.
First, every time you think you’re making a decision, you’re making it through a distorted lens. Which means it’s not a decision at all. It’s a guess.
And second, if you won’t trust yourself with the truth, why should anyone else trust you?
So, trust yourself and start with truth.
Here’s Chris Hirst.
Charles: (02:37)
Chris, welcome to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Chris Hirst: (02:40)
Thanks for having me, great to be here.
Charles: (02:42)
When did creativity first show up in your life? When are you first conscious of creativity as a force in your life or a thing in your life?
Chris Hirst: (02:50)
Wow. Certainly not before I left university. So I mean, I… you know, my first job was in a factory. Then I did a four-year degree, engineering degree. So by the time I got through all of that, I'm about 24. I get to 24 and think, "The one thing I'm sure about is I don't want to work in a factory, and I don't want to be an engineer. So, okay, what do I do?" And I think I kind of just looked around for stuff that was as far away from engineering as I could get, or at least as far away from a factory as I could get.
And it wasn't like I only tried to get jobs in advertising, but in the end got offered a couple of jobs in advertising. So I guess I'm about 24 by this point. And I suppose then, but you know, it wasn't like some road-to-Damascus experience, it was, "I've got a job in advertising agency now. Right. What do they do?" That was sort of essentially, essentially how it went. Really romantic, eh?
Charles: (04:06)
How did you express yourself growing up?
Chris Hirst: (04:09)
I think I had a pretty ordinary, or, you know, ordinary as in normal upbringing for the 1970s and '80s. I mean, I played quite a lot of sport.
I was a pretty academic kid. I was always… I was actually, I really enjoyed school, actually. I enjoyed the process of learning. I was, like I said, I was quite academic, I was quite good at exams. I enjoyed, I quite enjoyed, actually. I've always enjoyed the process of learning. I like the process of learning. I mean, it has to be something I'm vaguely interested in, but I liked that process, in a sort of an academic, you know, in a literally in that being-taught-things sense, I enjoyed.
Charles: (04:48)
Were you a risk taker as a kid?
Chris Hirst: (04:50)
No. No, I mean, I don't think I've ever been, I never seen myself in that way, anyway. I often kind of wish that I was a bit more... wish, maybe not, but I often would possibly like to be more. But no, I was actually quite a rule follower. I'm actually quite a conformer. I really, I'll say to you, I don't like breaking the rules, you know. I still worry about getting told off for, I don't know, sitting in the wrong place or, you know, don't go through that door or stuff like that. So no, I wasn't particularly a risk taker.
Charles: (05:25)
When do you think you decided you wanted to lead? When did leadership come into your life?
Chris Hirst: (05:30)
So I think there's two sort of slightly separate, I think, answers to that question. First of all, I was always very ambitious, and I was very ambitious at school. I always want to be the best at the thing I'm doing. I always wanted to be top of the class. I always wanted to win the tennis game. You know, I'm a really, really, really, really still, I mean, pathetically bad loser, an embarrassingly bad loser, actually.
So I've always been very ambitious and as soon as I had a job that played straight through into that, I want to get promoted. I just want to keep going upwards, which is kind of a bit unhealthy in some ways. We can probably talk about that, but that's how I certainly was to an extent, I suppose. But that was more about just getting promoted rather than thinking, "I want to be a leader." You know, because I don't think, now that I've got a fairly developed opinion on what leadership is, I don't think that is the same thing as leadership. Being promoted and getting a bigger job - leadership is implicit to an extent within that, but I think it is a different thing.
So I didn't really start to think about leadership, “What is leadership? What do I think about leadership? Has it done well? Has it done badly?” I think until I first got made the CEO of an agency, which was in about 2010. So I suppose it was the point when I officially got given a title that is a title we all traditionally would recognize as a leadership title, if that makes sense. So it was in that sense sort of thrust upon me. Maybe this is a false memory, but in my head I tell myself, that I remember that point thinking, "Oh, right, so how do I do it?" Which of course, we all think that at different points as we progress through our career, but that felt like, "Oh, this isn't just a bigger job, this is a completely different job." Then I suppose over the next five to six to seven years, I then think I started to, with an increasing degree of focus, started to develop a point of view on what leadership was and what it wasn't. But there wasn't any kind of light-switch moment, if you see what I mean.
Charles: (07:55)
And how much has that view of leadership changed between the first time you realized, "I need to figure this out," and where you are today? How much have you evolved your views about what leadership is and isn’t?
Chris Hirst: (08:05)
In that early period, early leadership period, so when I was first a CEO. And it wasn't just me, you know, we were a new leadership team. A lot of that was about me being very clear that even though I might not be that certain what it is we should be doing, I was 100% clear that we weren't going to make all the mistakes that I'd seen various predecessors make along the way.
So it started with, "I'm just not going to do it. You know, we're just not going to make those mistakes again. We might make a whole load of mistakes for ourselves, but at least we're going to be pretty certain we're going to make different mistakes." But I think there was a moment I'd say in about, I think it was something like 2017, something around about there, where I was asked to do a presentation to a load of relatively new graduate trainees. And somebody said to me, "Oh, Chris, we've got a two-day workshop with these grads, we're running this big session, blah, blah, blah. We'd like you to come along and do 20 minutes on leadership."
And at about the same time, I realized, that they'd asked two other people, to do the same presentation. I can't remember, they were, again, real luminaries, big name leaders. And suddenly, I thought, "Shit, not only have I got to talk about leadership. It's become competitive." And back to my inherent nature. How am I going to say something that's just not the same old guff everybody talks about when they talk about leadership? And so I suppose that was the first time that I actually then started to structurally formulate an opinion on it.
Which is what I think most people in leadership positions do, which is rather than just, "Yeah. This is sort of how I go about doing it, and I'm going to keep doing it like this for whatever reason." But most people, I think, aren't able to accurately and concisely characterize their philosophy on leadership. And I actually say to people though, "I think the most important thing is not that you agree with mine, but the most important thing is that you have one of your own.” So it's kind of then that I started to write stuff down.
Charles: (10:21)
And as you started to articulate it and write it down, did you find that you were actually reflecting the things that you were already doing, or were you starting to articulate a way that you would like to lead, that you realized, "I need to do more of those things,”?
Chris Hirst: (10:36)
I think it was a bit of both. I think there's two aspects, and I think that the two aspects are kind of functional and emotional, if you like. Functionally, yes, it was in the first instance, trying to encapsulate the things that I felt that we were doing, that we were doing well, and why were those things, because by that point, they were working. You know, the agency that we taken over was pretty well a shit show and it really, really transformed this business. So part of it was, "Okay, well, why?"
Why is the business doing better than it was? I mean, you could say, the leadership. Yeah, but why? I mean, what are we doing? And that's a non-trivial question, because you know, of course, it works the other way round that isn't working, but why isn't it working?
But I think the emotion, the attitudinal part that I think did start to come to me a bit later. In fact, it probably came as a consequence of starting to answer the functional bit, was the idea that I think a lot of what we're told about leadership is bullshit, and kind of an iconoclastic approach to it.
Not only is it, in my opinion, bullshit, but the consequence of that is it actually inhibits people from being able to fulfill their potential. And it excludes whole swathes of people from thinking leadership is ever something they can aspire to. I talk about the leadership industrial complex. I mean, the leadership industrial complex tells us that leadership is an exalted state open only to a chosen few. Not many of us believe we're one of the chosen few.
Charles: (12:23)
You've always been clear about your definition of leadership being based around having a very clear understanding about what you were trying to build towards in terms of the future. What does the future state look like? When you took the job, was that the place you went to immediately, to say, "We need to become this. We need to build towards that." Or did that come later?
Chris Hirst: (12:43)
Well that came a little bit later But I’ll make two observations about that. One of the first, let's say early on, in the process, I remember thinking, “I'm the CEO of this business. This business is a bit of a shit business. It's been a shit business for a long time. Why is it a shit business? Because our business is just a building full of people and all of our competitors are just buildings with people in them, and most of them don't own the building. So we're people in a rented space. Why are their people in a rented space outperforming our people in a rented space?”
And you can extend that to a huge number of different businesses. And I think it's quite a liberating thought. It's both an intimidating and liberating thought, I think. And there isn't a really hugely insightful answer to it. The answer, or my answer to it, maybe somebody else has got a better one, mine is that it just boils down to culture and talent. How do we create an environment in our building with people in it, that allows us to outperform our competitors? That's what we're trying to do. And in fact, my argument that I developed since then, is that one of the things we're told by the leadership industrial complex is that we have to sit, as leaders, and think of something unique to say about our business. Part of the defining skill of a leader is to come up with a unique vision.
And actually, I think this is a fool's errand. Because virtually no business's organizations are unique. I mean, maybe you could think of one or two, but there's hardly any. Nobody in my industry is, and I don't think any of our clients are, but what we're all trying to do is we're trying to do a common thing better than the competition. And the question then, as a leader, is how. How are we going to do that common thing better than the competition? Anybody can open a creative advertising agency. How are we going to outperform?
So the task is about outperforming, and that's the leader's task. Now, you have to, with that said, you can't just say, "Let's just be a bit better than everybody else." You've then got to try and create some sort of definition of your end point, your end objective, and you've got to be able to be very clear about how you're going to travel along that journey. I mean, I think that leaders need to ask themselves two questions. You've got to ask yourself where you are today, and you've got to be able to be honest with that. Now, everybody goes, "Of course you can be honest." But a lot of people actually find that quite difficult. They find it quite difficult to be really honest about the challenges they're trying to fix.
And also a lot of leaders find… people find it difficult to be honest with them. So you've got to be honest with the people, and people have got to be honest with you. And, you know, some people find that a challenge. But nevertheless, that's not that difficult a question to answer. You've also then got to define your end point. And that's not that difficult a question to answer either, but that is where leaders get so bogged down in trying to come up with incredibly clever… prove their leadership virility, by coming up with some incredibly clever answer to that question. It doesn't need to be clever. Why don't you say, "We want to be the best advertising agency in London”? Okay. That was pretty much what we said. Let's try and be the best in London. Okay. Well, let's start there. Okay. That'll do.
The difficult bit, the very, very difficult bit, is how. And leadership is a journey between the two points. Defining the end points and leadership is the journey between the two. And that's incredibly difficult. You know, it's incredibly difficult to get to be the best of anything. So, essentially, that's my view on how it works.
Charles: (16:36)
What I'm struck by, over the last, I think six months, perhaps, is how much harder it has become to define that future state, that end point on the journey. Because, my contention is that until COVID came along, a lot of people, in fact, weren't leading, they were following somebody else's playbook. They were following the map that had been laid out before, either by the industry, or by the company, or their predecessor, or by their peers. Today, we don't have that. There is no rule book, there is no roadmap. There is no history for this, we have nothing by which to guide us.
How do you now look at how leaders need to define what the future looks like? How do we help leaders to recognize, even in all of this uncertainty, it is still important to place a destination, even if that destination is only, let's say, a year out as opposed to five years out. How do you start to wrestle with all of the impermanence that we're dealing with now?
Chris Hirst: (17:32)
Firstly, I think I probably only partly recognize the world you describe. I mean, I'm not, clearly, I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you. But, my feeling is that it's different, but it's not all completely different, is what I think. I mean, I think the fundamentals of talent and culture… I mean, you could say that you might need different sorts of people, you could say that culture needs to function in a different way.
But ultimately, the fundamentals of, a leader's task is to create an environment for their teams to outperform their competitors, remains true. That is what leaders need to do, because the opposite proves the point. If they're not doing that, why are they there? I don't think the task is to try and predict the future. And the one thing we have learned from the pandemic is, just about everybody who's tried has got it wildly wrong.
I think that you can set an objective and a strategy for your organization, that of course, you have to have some sort of view of how situations will evolve. I mean, to pick an obvious example, eCommerce is only going to become an increasingly important part of all of our lives.
If I run a marketing services group, that's interesting, isn't it? I don't know whether it's going to become 80% of their business, or 20% of their business, but I know it's going to be important, I know it's sit on the middle of their boardroom table. How do we evolve our business to better suit and help them function in that world? I think I can make that statement without having to make big, daring predictions about the future. I think there's large parts of our business, and I think many people's businesses, that will stay the same. I think there are parts that are going to change, but I don't think everything has changed.
So, in that sense, I think you can still set yourself objectives. I mean, you have to. I mean, I can't give you a generalized answer for how, because it's so utterly case by case, the answer to that. But I still think that is a possible thing to do. And by the way, the way I think about your end goal objective, one of the mistakes people make is they try and define that as a tiny little dot. You know, define it to an absolutely precise territory, and I think that is a very difficult thing to do, and I think it's also unnecessary.
I think it's more like, the point of that end goal, is so that you know the general direction you're going in. So I think of it more like a territory than a dot. And your journey towards it, no matter how well you define it, is going to be a zigzag. It's not going to be a straight line, whatever you do. You're going to zigzag towards it, because all sorts of other factors - your competitors are trying to stop you, pandemics come along, recessions happen, recessions fade. All of these things are largely outside of your control. So you're always functioning in this world of change, anyway.
So, your forward direction is going to zigzag. So, don't spend too long agonizing over it, as long as everybody understands broadly where you're trying to get to. And of course, also, it's not set in stone. If facts change, change it. If it ceases to be useful, reword it. I mean, I don't think you want, every 12 months to be writing something completely different. You know, you want that to be a refinement. But as long as it provides a clarification for the strategic decisions you're taking, and something that your organization can galvanize around, I think it still functions.
I mean, by the way, you mentioned pandemic, so I don't want us to digress into huge other areas, but I mean, my feeling is, and I'm going to predict the future now, having said don't, I think that the iimplications, of sustainability, I think the environmental challenges we face, wherever you stand on that, politically, nevertheless the world is changing, whether you think man's done it, or not. Nevertheless, I think that's going to be at least, if not more impactful in terms of the challenges we face as leaders, and within businesses, than the pandemic has been.
I think that the sustainability challenge is now - should now - I think, be sitting on the middle of the boardroom table. It can't sit in the CSR department anymore, or the sustainability department. That is a question that is going to be sitting on the boardroom table of every CEO, really soon if it isn't already.
There's going to be pressure from customers of all sorts. And, of course, employees. So, I think that the implications of that change are, I think, potentially greater, and more long lasting than the pandemic.
Charles: (22:16)
How has your leadership changed, over the last 18, 20 months? What are you conscious of now, that you weren't perhaps as conscious of before this all started?
Chris Hirst: (22:29)
That's a good question. I certainly have more, even more respect, let's say that, for the power of human interaction, literally in-person human interaction, versus what we're doing now, over screens. Which is not to say that, as we're doing now, you can have very fruitful interaction over screens.
But it's so apparent to me, as it is to everybody, I know this is a great insight, how much you can't achieve by simply being remote. I am actually an optimist. I mean, I think that the hybrid working, which is what, it seems to me, the majority of organizations, where they can, are moving towards.
I actually think that that has the possibility for being a win-win. I think that it is really important that people spend time in-person. It's really important that you come together to build the culture, all those other things that many people have said, before me, I'm not going to repeat them. But I also think that people are able to be more flexible in terms of fitting life around work, and work around life, by hybrid working.
So I actually think the thing I have changed on is if you'd asked me two years ago, yes, we'll all get through it by working remotely, but blimey, the minute we can, we all have to be back in the office.
I've definitely changed my mind about that. I think in the majority of, or in many businesses, I think that hybrid working can be a real success for everybody. And, I'm a real optimist, but I think that's really, really positive. So I don't know if I've changed my mind about leadership per se, but I've certainly changed my mind about how many different ways we can work in order to actually not just achieve what we did before, but maybe achieve more.
Charles: (24:21)
Are you conscious that you show up differently these days? Are you aware of evolution or change in how you engage?
Chris Hirst: (24:35)
I am conscious of leadership is about what you, I mean, ideally, it's what you say and what you do, but if you have to choose, it's what you do. If you just say, it counts for almost nothing, if you just do, you're going to get most of the way there, and if the two are aligned, happy days. So, I'm even more conscious that what I do, in terms of walking the walk, in terms of saying, “This is the sort of things that matter to us as a business,” in terms of our behaviors, et cetera.
And how much more powerful that is when you can demonstrate that in-person being around people. So the needs to be around people, the need to be visible, the power of having all of our people back in the office in London, for example, and me being there and me being just around people, not doing anything particularly dramatic, but just being around and being there with the other leaders in London, I think that's a really, really, really, really important part of our business thriving. I don't think that's new news or wildly insightful, but that's probably the best I can give you to that question.
Charles: (25:35)
How do you lead?
Chris Hirst: (25:39)
Well, I try and practice what I preach. I'm very conscious that I think a good leader creates an environment where people that are around them or work for them achieve things that they wouldn't achieve otherwise.
And there are any number of techniques, tools, methods to do that. But I think that I'm very conscious of, how do I interact with the people around me in order to enable that to happen? The question I encourage people to ask themselves is, how good are you for the careers of the people that work for you? If the answer is positive, then in reality you have to be doing a lot of things right for that to be the case.
I mean, that is a demanding question. And in order to do that, you know, that means very, very different things to different people. You know, what is good for one person's career is very different to another. But I try and create space for people.
Charles: (26:46)
And what are you afraid of?
Chris Hirst: (26:49)
Failure. Really, I am. And I think that's a limiting… I don't know if it's a belief, but it's a limiting thing, you know. Because I also know that failure to an extent is inevitable. You can't achieve anything, I don't think, worth doing, without failing along the way.
But I am, and I think you asked me at the start about risk taking, you know, and I think that risk taking is a preparedness. You could argue that your tolerance for risk is correlated to your tolerance for failure, if you see what I mean. Of course I've had many failures along the way, but if I could change one thing, I'd worry less about the downsides and spend more time being excited about the upsides.
Charles: (27:54)
I want to thank you for joining me today. I've always admired the clarity of your thinking around leadership and your willingness to veer away from the status quo in terms of how people talk about it. And I appreciate you coming on today and sharing with us.
Chris Hirst: (28:07)
I've loved being on, so thanks very much.
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