Shannon Cullum (Saatchi & Saatchi): "One of the Things That We Set Out To Do Is To Have Our People Be Permanently Inspired Which Is Obviously Very Lofty Goal But There Are Things You Can Do"
Shannon Cullum, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Russia, thinks that one of the most important traits for a leader is to have an unwavering goal in the mind that people should keep getting to despite different challenges they can meet on their way to it. We also talk about the importance of the inspiration and how to keep people be permanently inspired.
1. What is strongest leadership competency?
One really nice thing that I heard about, which really stuck with me, is the idea that really successful leaders they have sort of unwavering goal in mind. That goal never changes and that’s a constant but they are completely flexible and open to how they get there. That suites with me, so when I think about competencies I think about things like open-mindedness and resiliency, and creativity, the ability to come-in everyday with "this is the destination" but not fully well that you are going to spend the entire time finding a way to get there, that everyday is going to be different. So, to me it’s about resiliency and, I guess, optimism is a big part of it. Yes, it’s about focus and dedication but it’s more about the fact that you are constantly challenged and people or things are constantly taking you off your goal. It’s the ability to find a way everyday to get there in a different way, creativity, I guess.
2. How do you build this sort of culture?
When you are leading people if you are using more formal tools to lead people, say you have a strategic plan for your business or you are stepping up in front off the people that you lead and addressing them formally, sometimes going: "This is our plan, this is what we stand for", you want to avoid, obviously, coming back one week later saying: "We stand for something different". I don’t think it’s about that, another good thought is, I think it’s F.C. Fitzgerald said, that intelligence is about being able to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. In his case he was saying that the world is hopeless but that you can change it. It’s this notion of paradox. A big part of leadership, I think, is being able to embrace paradox, so it’s kind of like stepping up in front of people and saying "Ok, our numbers are really bad, we are really struggling but I fully believe we are going to get there". Some of it are communication skills, I guess, but I think more of it is you instill confidence by people genuinely seeing that you believe in it. You have to convince yourself first, in a way. I found myself doing that all the time, sitting there in front of people and going: "Yeah, I know we said we are going to do that yesterday, today we are going to do this but see how, in a way, it’s the same thing." They have to believe you because, you are talking out of both sides of your mouth – maybe but it’s more you are saying to them to be open-minded, be flexible, be resilient and it’s charisma and energy and all the clichés elements of leadership that’s where they are coming I think is keeping people’s confidence when you are constantly having to move.
3. Do you have any examples of how it works?
I can think of several, it happens on a daily basis but on a bigger sort of spectrum, our business is about creativity, it's about big ideas, so we are at our best and in Saatchi we are talking about our biggest imaginable challenge being a revered hothouse for world changing ideas and it's a big language, it's a big goal, feeling the world with love marks is our goal. It's a very big goal. The reality is the business that we are operating today, in the economic climate that we are operating today it's about fast and cheap. In one hand we have our business plan which is built completely around inspiring consumers, coming up with big creative ideas, doing big sustainable things for our clients' business and, on the other hand, we walk in day to day into meetings and it's like "I need it fast and I need it cheap". Again, it's this paradox.
4. What did you do?
We said we have to do it fast and cheap to survive, it’s fundamental, this got to be a part of everybody’s business model, but we are going to use creativity to do it; we are going to take creative initiative. One of the things that we did was we actioned on a weekly basis our own initiative work. We said: "Maybe over here the clients aren’t looking for inspired work, they are just looking for fast and easy, we’ll take them an inspired work at our own initiative." We became our own client, one of our biggest clients, every week we work on our own initiatives. That does two things. One – it means that we are still doing those world changing ideas and that creative work, so our people see that we believe in that and that we stand for that but it has a dual benefit after. It’s allowing us to take client’s value and, then, we are taking this to our client and saying: "We’ve done this at our own initiative. We’ve done this without asking you . We are going to offer you this for nothing essentially, that’s value, the real value. You want value, you want cheap and fast. We are saying no value is us bringing you big ideas for less at our own initiative." It’s another example of being sort of creative and how you get to your final goal. We need to be able to offer value, financial value as well to survive, to thrive but our goal is to be an inspiring creative organization. We managed to merge the two.
5. Do you have any challenge in communicating this strategy to your team?
I think sometimes when we are really busy which is most times because obviously in times like this you keep your stuff relatively lean. So everyone is busier than usual even though maybe the actual amount of work that's going on in the agency hasn't increased much, your stuff is at sort of at leanest. I think the key is for them, they need to buy into it less because it's about bringing our clients value and more because of what the organization stands for. When you create an organization and people truly do believe that you are about world changing ideas and great creativity, it's much easier for them to accept that because then you are saying you are not getting the opportunities right now with the client's business, so we are going to create them for you. We see it as in a way it's a part of creating more inspiring environment. Like: "Look, we stand for this. We are doing this on our own. They are not asking for it. We are not going to wait for them to ask for it. This is what we do. We do it anyway. We do it because we believe in it." Again it comes down to if for one second it looks like we don't stand for it, it's really easy for them to go away without doing it. Just to say these people don't want to pay us money. We are doing this because they do truly believe we stand for it because we do truly stand for it. It's so important that you have this goal at the end, even though you're flexible how you get there, you do have to have it, to stand for something internally. And because we stand for that, people buy it, then it's not so hard to get to do it.
6. Everyone who works in Saatchi & Saatchi has to share this goal, don’t they?
Everyone working here should be working here because they want to do creative things, because they’ve chosen to work here, because they believe that we are more creative and ultimately more committed to creativity. It’s just natural that they would be excited about doing that, and if they are not excited about doing that then they should work at a place that stands for something that they are excited about. The thing about Saatchi it’s very polarizing, we are very unapologetic in a way about what we stand for. People get that very quickly and they realize very quickly that at the end of the day these are things we are going to get excited about, and in a sort of unapologetic way the rest of it will be ignored and those that value this will probably not be happy, but people who get excited about this will love it and it tensed to be like that. I think even globally. I think in Russia we really do live the Saatchi culture quite strongly, so you really feel it here.
7. Are there any challenges in leading creative people?
I think the key that they have to be inspired. I think all people need to be inspired but when you run a creative organization if the creative energy of the inspiration of the imagination starts to drain out of that organization you really have a problem because you don’t have assets to drone, you don’t have technology that you own, you don’t have patents on things, you have your people, 100%, and you are only as good as your people. That’s particularly true in the organizations that sell intellectual capital like ideas.
8. Could you give one more example?
This is another example of embracing paradox. In our business plan there are sort of three pillows and of the key pillow is permanently inspired people. One of the things that we set out to do is to have our people be permanently inspired which is obviously very lofty goal but there are things you can do. Our office, the office that we selected and the investment that we put into our office going into a tough economic time, we went into a new office, in more beautiful office, we spent a lot of time, we spent a lot of money making sure it was an inspiring place. Does that make sense going into these times? For us it does because our people more than ever are going to be challenged to be inspired. In a face of lay-offs and pay-cuts, some of our competitors have cut pay across the board, we’ve decided that we have to put even more emphasis into things like training, we just did a workshop, we just took two days off of work, two full days, we had people from our global organization here for like a two days workshop and training. When we talked about it, it was a big investment, it cost money, it cost time, and we talked about we should save our pennies for rainy day and we said: "No, we’re not", because we need to continually inspire people. That’s our insurance policy basically. When I presented a business plan to some of the senior people, the first thing they said was that they thought it was very ambitious going into a crisis, and I didn’t really see it that way but they thought: "All these things you want to do are exciting but it seems ambitious", and I sort of felt like what would be ambitious would be to not do those things and assume it will just work out. So, investing in our people trying to keep our people inspired, I guess, is a short answer to that.
9. How do you keep people being inspired?
Yeah, you have to be creative about it, I guess. You find more affordable ways to do it. We've tried to create more internal trainings that have a more productive sight in them. For example, with our strategic people we've done sessions where we almost have workshops on developing strategies for clients' upcoming projects but what we do is we work on live projects. As opposed to doing a theoretical training, over here we have work sessions with people and we work through but the output is actual work. It's productive but we decided to it in a way that hopefully more inspiring, that takes the form of training. It's a little bit of my time, maybe, a little bit more of our sort of senior strategic people's time but then it has a much bigger value. We did the same with creative, we'll do groups sort of creative what people would ideation sessions or brainstorming, we have a different name for it. We jammed for time, time is precious, we are not getting the same time as we used to have. We don't necessarily have the resource. We don't necessarily have the money to maybe get new creative resourcing to help us. So what we do, we turning it into an opportunity, we're doing a very intense version of our regular process that involves sort of really explosive ideation and we are trying to turn that fact that we had to do it really quickly under a little more severe time pressure and turn it into an inspiring example of what can be done when you bring different people together, if that makes sense. Just get people to embrace the power off... we call it in Saatchi "Nothing is impossible". Getting people to embrace that by using it in everyday real examples. It's not hard in our business because you constantly face those challenges. Advertising agency should be inspiring place, to be honest, because you constantly have people coming to you with challenges that they require creativity; it's not like you have to seek them out really.
Prepared by Liza Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on July 15, 2009
