Joanna Coles of Northern Star
Are you leading a team or a group of individuals?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 346: Joanna Coles
Here’s a question. Are you leading a team or a group of individuals?
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 has its greatest impact. The intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Joanna Coles. She 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.
“I think what we've lost is the collective. We've moved from the water cooler moments when everyone is discussing the same show that pretty much everybody watched the night before because everybody's now watching their own streaming services or whatever. But people now have their news separately, they take their culture separately, they're now living separately. The office provided that connectivity in a culture, in a society, in a town, in a village, in a city, and now we're seeing much less of that. This is American individualism heightened, really heightened.”
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.
Here’s Joanna Coles.
Charles: (02:55)
Joanna, thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Joanna Coles: (02:58)
Oh, my pleasure.
Charles: (03:00)
What do you think we have learned from the last two years? How do you think society has changed from the last two years?
Joanna Coles: (03:06)
I think we're in the middle of a massive shift where work was the center of American life to a recalibration where work is now very important, but it's balanced much more with regular life, and you see this in the way that people are refusing to go back to the office, in a way that I think has surprised many CEOs who prided themselves on running largely healthy cultures. You know, ignoring the odd Activision here or there. And I think you're seeing a whole range of leaders astonished that their staff don't want to be in the office more and can't understand it. And you're seeing a massive recalibration of people, especially in their 20s and 30s, many of whom are really lumbered with student debt thinking, “Well, I've got all these debts. I'm not going to be able to pay them off anytime soon. I'm not going to sacrifice my entire life for corporate America.” And I think it's a really big shift.
Charles: (04:11)
Do you think this shift is sustainable? Do you think this is what we're going to be living with for the foreseeable future?
Joanna Coles: (04:16)
I do, because you're seeing boomers age out or leave the workplace. You're seeing a shortage of workers in their 20s and 30s, and you're seeing the workers having much more power. So, they're much more able to say to people, “I'm sorry, I'm only coming in two days a week,” or, “I'm sorry, I'm going to work from Arizona.” I mean, one of the fascinating things I'm watching is all these people who've moved to tax haven states like Texas or Florida and then if people are trying to hire them, they're saying, “Well, if you want me to move to New York or you want me to move to California, you're going to have to make up the difference in what I will lose in taxes,” which is not something anybody had really had to deal with.
So I think this is a really big fundamental change and American corporations are scrambling to keep up with it, and I think they've been surprised.
Charles: (05:09)
What do you think the economic impact is of this is on a business?
Joanna Coles: (05:13)
I think the economic impact is severe. I think people are going to have to pay workers more. And you're seeing workers unionize, and for the first time in a long time, you're feeling that workers have choices, that they can say to a boss, “Well, you know, I've been offered something else,” or, “I don't love it here anymore. You're not flexible in a way I want, and I'm pretty confident I can get a job elsewhere.” And I think you're also seeing the weakening of cultures, of company cultures, because people are in the office less, so there are fewer ties to keep them to the office. Especially with a lot of younger companies, some companies now have more workers that they've hired during COVID than they had before, if you're a fast-growing younger company. And so much less to tie people, because they have fewer connections in the office, and often they're working, you know, remotely all week.
So much easier to pick people off. It's a great time to hire people because there's much less loyalty around.
Charles: (06:18)
And what has the office become, do you think?
Joanna Coles: (06:21)
Great question. What does the office become? I think for certain companies, it's going to be a social hub. It's going to be where people turn up, and they do, and I cringe as an English person, to think of these sort of relationship-building exercises where you all build a canoe together and then have to take it out on an open river or, you know, you do some baking together, which actually, I remember doing to great effect, when I was running Cosmo and trying to understand the new staff, and we all made tuna tartare, I think, in the café.
But it was kind of fun. Nobody wanted to eat it, but it as fun. So I think you're going to see a lot of those sort of relationship-building exercises. I think, you know, very complicated for people to be scheduling around other people. You know, one person may want to be in the office Monday and Tuesday, but this other person only wants to be in Thursday and Friday, but in theory, they have overlapping teams. All of that scheduling is going to be much more complicated. And I think it's going to cost offices.
Charles: (07:25)
And how do you think decision-making changes? Because, to your point, when you've got half the team in the office, half the team out, the idea of FOMO stops being a social media issue and starts becoming a practical business issue, right? Because if you're on a call, you hang up, but half the team is in the office and they continue talking. How do you think decision-making starts to get constructed in that kind of environment?
Joanna Coles: (07:47)
I think it largely depends on the specific jobs and the people involved, but clearly, it's more complicated when you're doing half Zoom and half in-person. And I think people forget who they've met now in person, especially if you're dealing with other companies. And so there's less personal connection to help people make decisions. It's hard to generalize on decision-making, because it so depends on the situation, but you're often much better making decisions when you've been able to talk it through with people, and on Zoom, it's not a great environment to do anything other than be purely transactional.
And again, once you've switched off Zoom, you've switched it off. Sometimes the most important conversations are when you've finished a meeting, you're packing up your bag, you're leaving to go, you turn around at the door, and you say, "Oh, just one other thing," which leads to a whole new conversation. And it's partly about the very human nature of conversations, which are different online than they are in person.
You know it's much less satisfying being on the phone than it is in person with someone, and I do think that Zoom has made us much more efficient, much more effective, much more transactional, but we've lost a whole dimension of the ability to make decisions, the ability to manage, the ability to run teams, and the ability to get support in complicated times. I think it's much more stressful being a CEO now than it really ever has been.
Charles: (09:28)
So, to your earlier point, there's lots of agency that has come about as a result of these changes, people having the ability to live where they want, work where they want, work on their own terms. What do you think of the costs of this? What do you think people are missing out as a result of this?
Joanna Coles: (09:42)
Well, I think they're gaining a lot. I think there's no question that people having much more flexibility in their lives means you gain much more, in terms of just feeling more relaxed. If you're seeing your kids more or you're not anxious about having to leave a meeting, because you've got to be there for pick-up, but actually you can do the meeting on Zoom or on your phone, I think that's huge, and particularly huge for women. So I think there's a lot to be gained by flexible working. I think probably the ideal is a hybrid that allows people flexibility over their lives.
What's lost is, I think, the boss's control over the office, over the staff. I think that senior leaders are very stressed about not being able to see everybody in place. Everyone I know who's a major leader quotes me some sort of what I think might be an urban myth at this point about the person, their employee, who had two other jobs and nobody knew because they would always be available on Zoom, but in fact, they were pulling in two other salaries, which infuriated people.
But I think there's an enormous amount to be gained by not feeling scared and not feeling anxious, which is a lot of American workers' default position being in the office, because you know that the boss controls you, and when you're in the office, you're under their control, and that's very stressful. It's a bit like when we're at school, there was always, you know, the boss is like the teacher, and when the teacher's away, it's so much more relaxing.
And if you work from home, or if you have a snow day and you're supposed to do your schoolwork from home, it's just much more relaxing. It doesn't mean you don't get the work done.
Charles: (11:29)
Some people are talking about this being, essentially, a global shared post traumatic stress situation, that we're all suffering from PTSD, and some of us recognize it more than others. Do you think that it will have that kind of long term impact on society or do you think that's overstated?
Joanna Coles: (11:50)
I think it depends on the age of the person and how they've been handling COVID. And I think, you know, it's very clear that one person's hunkering down and not leaving the home and actually enjoying that, is another person's idea of hell. So, I think it's different strokes for different folks, actually.
Charles: (12:16)
How do you think leadership has to evolve over the next 12 to 18 months?
Joanna Coles: (12:20)
I was having a conversation with a CEO who has had a very successful IPO earlier this year. We were in a group situation, and one person raised the issue, raised the issue provoked by a conversation around China, about the difference between CEO pay and regular workers' pays, and the enormous delta, especially in American companies, and how that's frowned on in China. And someone sort of cavalierly said, “Well, it's obviously true that American CEOs get paid so much more, their salaries are out of control.”
And this woman, who was a CEO, very successful CEO, turned around and just, you know, let rip on, “You have no idea how difficult it is being a CEO. It's my ass on the line, my head out there. You know, if things go well, that's great, but if things go badly, then I'm the single person that everybody comes after and criticizes.” And she was absolutely vehement that CEOs deserved every dollar that they earned, and I did feel some sympathy with her. I think that, you know, social media makes them much more visible, workforces are very easily able to mobilize against someone.
All you need is a disgruntled tweet from a customer or a client or an employee, and you are suddenly very vulnerable. so I think it's been a very stressful time for CEOs. I think... and also for Chief People Officers, you know, managing the stress of people, managing teams that are completely dispersed. I think it's been very difficult for senior leadership, and you see a lot of them leaving. And the largest rate of CEOs leaving Fortune 500 companies, in living memory.
Charles: (14:04)
Yeah, I think that's true. The evidence supports that. If you were advising senior leaders, how would somebody who's running a serious business next to you know that they are being successful beyond the business results themselves? What will people be saying about their leadership a year from now if they have had a successful year from a leadership standpoint?
Joanna Coles: (14:23)
Well, I think you're looking at your retention rates, right, and your attrition rates and saying, “Are we losing people? What are our staff telling us?” And, you know, it's really, you judge people by their actions. Are they staying? Are they leaving? Are they encouraging their friends to join the company? So what you hope for is a reduction in staff leaving, because for the most part, it's very disruptive, and you're looking for, obviously, growth. But I think you're looking for people that will compromise and come together and say, “You know what we're going to do? Mondays and Fridays from home, but Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, we've agreed we're all going to be in the office.”
And I think you're looking for a delegation of decision-making down the chain, as it were. So you're looking for people cooperating, and that's increasingly hard when people are working on their own at home, and it's harder to ask for help when you're not sitting next to someone in the office. I mean, one of the companies I'm working with talked about how you would normally ramp people, it would normally take three months for someone to be fully ramped, and now it's taking six months because they've just got much less informal education going on around them.
You know, you can't just shout to someone, "Hey, how do you do this?" Or whatever. You have to make a specific phone call, and then the person's not available because they're on a Zoom. You lose all the spontaneity of the office, which is really, really helpful for the learning curve in the office. And also, for cementing decision-making and for cooperation. And I think it's so easy now for everybody to have their own line of chatter in a way, people are beginning to work in their own filter bubbles. We talk about news people living in a filter bubble for their news, but now you can see that people are working in filter bubbles, and we've got to be able to prick those bubbles and bring people together.
And a physical office obviously does that. Much harder to do that when everybody's working away. And then you've got different time zones. I mean, you know, you think in America alone, you've got three different time zones, but then now you've got people saying, “Well, I'm going to live in Europe. I'm going to live in Hawaii.” I was trying to do a deal at one point with someone who was in Hawaii and the time difference just made it impossible for us to speak together on a regular basis.
And, of course, you've got to be flexible, but I think it makes it harder for people to cooperate or want to cooperate, because they haven't just had a coffee with that person, or that person that hasn't given them their leftover takeout or shared a bag of chips with them or brought them a coffee back. And all those little tiny interactions are incredibly important as connective tissue for building an office environment, and we're definitely losing that.
Charles: (17:13)
And last question for you, if we roll the clock forward two years, do you think, as a society, we're more connected or less connected?
Joanna Coles: (17:20)
I think we're probably less connected in two years because people have retreated into their own communication systems.
Charles: (17:28)
It's going to be sad to see if that's true, right? Because human beings, I think, are so much better off when we are actually interconnected, and it feels like we're moving in the wrong direction from that standpoint.
Joanna Coles: (17:36)
Well, I think what we've lost is the collective. We've moved from the water cooler moments when everyone is discussing the same show that pretty much everybody watched the night before, because everybody's now watching their own streaming services or whatever. But people now have their news separately, they take their culture separately, they're now living separately. The office provided that connectivity in a culture, in a society, in a town, in a village, in a city, and now we're seeing much less of that. This is American individualism heightened, really heightened.
Charles: (18:10)
I want to thank you for joining me. I'm always so grateful for your insight in terms of how you think the shape of society and audiences is going to change and evolve, and you're always ahead of the curve, so thanks again for joining me today.
Joanna Coles: (18:21)
Oh, my pleasure. I'm very curious to know what everybody else thinks.
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