Thoughts on strategy and leadership, from a conversation with Rosie Yakob of Genius Steals
I was honored to be featured recently as an "expert interview" as part of Rosie and Faris Yakob's new School of Stolen Genius, a community and resource-rich learning gym for strategists. Rosie's questions struck me deeply, and while the interviews are meant to be available to members only, I asked for special permission to share here, too.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what keeps you busy these days.
Work is busy. I recognize how lucky I am to have a job – this job – in times of turmoil. At one point we thought it would be slow on the strategy front, but we were wrong. Intense times of change provide a clear opportunity for strategy to lead, and we are trying to provide the best guidance we can to our clients while producing IP that attempts to predict the future. My team and I have been publishing forecast reports on how COVID will change culture and society. The 16 predictions we published in March – when many thought we’d be back to work in no time -- have since all come true, especially the way remote work has proved viability and the home has become everyone’s “castle”.
We’ve also been doing a lot of work understanding and reporting on the Gen Z mindset and using that to help guide our clients. That means I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time talking to today’s teens and young adults, and let me tell you: if the pandemic et al have you facing despair, I couldn’t imagine a better salve than spending time with these determined, clear-eyed, change-oriented young people.
The start of the interview is always awkward. Like the start of a meeting. What’s the best creative exercise or icebreaker you’ve used to bring people together?
I wish I had a clever answer here but I am much more of an intuitive strategist than a methodical one and I like to feel my way around these situations. I am ‘in time’ not ‘on time.’ If ice needs to be broken I will typically start with some kind of personal overshare and use that to start the conversation. So for example: as I sat down to write this tonight, my dog pooped on the floor right in front of me. This literally just happened! If I was in a virtual meeting or workshop, I would tell everyone and then ask them to share anecdotes of times they felt betrayed by their pets (or kids!). Everyone has one.
Like many strategists we connect with, your background is varied. You’ve got killer agency experience, as well as brand-side experience, but you’re also an artist, and have strong connections to the world of food, having formerly acted as the right hand woman to celebrity chef Jose Andres. Did your path feel linear at the time? Did you have any idea where you were heading?
Did I know where I was heading!? Of course not. Has my path felt linear? Never.
I never had a strong sense of what I wanted to do, but knew early on that I was someone motivated by passion, curiosity, a desire to do good… and that I was drawn to the unconventional. Food was my entry point, my obsession. When I got the job working for José Andrés I felt like Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada. And it was a bit like that! I got to meet idols like Anthony Bourdain (RIP), Ferran Adria, Alice Waters, Diana Kennedy… I ate delicious, deeply creative food, befriended food journalists, and went to amazing parties. I felt holy-shit-pinch-me lucky that I could be at the center of this industry that I had studied and admired since I was 15.
But I did not love – nor was I exceptionally skilled at – the core of that job, which was, plainly, a high-stress non-stop admin role. I coordinated flight plans and booked cars. I dry cleaned chef’s coats. I slept with my Palm Treo (a pre-Blackberry smartphone) under my pillow at night and answered e-mails at 3 a.m. when José was traveling in other time zones. And more importantly, there wasn’t a growth path in place for me to do anything beyond that. And what I wanted to do was work on big problems.
After leaving that job, I pursued a Master’s in Public Health focused on the intersection of food, health and sustainability, and then helped launch a non-profit called FoodCorps, which felt like the deepest actualization of my mission and passion. And again, I often felt holy-shit-pinch-me lucky that I was able to work with amazing leaders and on the issue that I was most passionate about at that time. But once again, I did not love – nor was I exceptionally skilled at – the core of the communications and fundraising job I had there, either.
And even when I knew I wanted to work in marketing and branding, it took a bit to realize that the vast majority of in-house marketing jobs are a sprinkle of strategy, a dollop of creativity, and a big ol serving bowl of tactics and operations. I kept getting in trouble because I wanted to focus on the former instead of the latter, until I realized that there was an actual career where I could focus on what I was good at without being hamstrung by the stuff I was not good at and did not love.
So it really took me a while to realize what the actual job skills I wanted to cultivate looked like, and even longer to realize that the intuitive focus I had on asking big questions and trying to understand the nature of things could be a job. So now, five years into my official Strategy career, I again am in a situation where I feel holy-shit-pinch me lucky, but it feels really different this time because I am finally doing something I love and am exceptionally skilled at.
And now you’re leading a team at Edelman. How would you describe your leadership style?
First of all, I have only been leading this team for about a month, and am doing so on an interim basis during my boss Jenn London’s maternity leave. She gets all the credit for hiring the brilliant superheroes that I now have the pleasure to lead, for setting me up to succeed in this role and for cultivating a strong team culture.
Since I am new at this, I feel OK throwing out a few platitude-sounding leadership principles that I try to follow and we can see how much my team makes fun of me for them later:
1. Connect at the human level first, always
2. Celebrate individuality and team accordingly
3. Everyone is a teacher, everyone is a student
4. Work is not the most important thing
Lastly, I’ll say I’ve found Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership framework incredibly helpful in helping navigate what level of support or guidance I should provide a team member based on the task and their experience, with a huge bonus that it’s a professional development tool you can whiteboard during one-on-ones. There are few things more satisfying to a strategist than a visual framework.
Have you felt the need to adapt your leadership style to better resonate with your male counterparts?
I haven’t experienced any issues working with male counterparts within our strategy team or the broader strategy network, though I have experienced it working with creatives, other account people or clients, but it’s less in the “leadership” context and more in the day-to-day strategy work: Are my insights accepted or challenged? Am I getting buy-in on my brief? When I face these challenges I try to operate according to the fundamentals of strategy: Who is my audience? What do they care about? How can I use that as part of my approach to persuasion?
Duke scientists recently released some research around the keys to evolutionary survival. From the report, “People think of it as strong alpha males who deserve to win. That’s not what Darwin suggested, or what has been demonstrated. The most successful strategy in life is friendliness and cooperation, and we see it again and again.” Do you apply strategy practices to life? If so, in what ways?
OMG, I love that you mentioned this. There’s plenty of real-world evidence that shows that brilliant assholes – the alpha males of the workplace, regardless of gender – are destructive to culture, productivity and the bottom line. My leadership style was greatly influenced by having to work with a lot of brilliant assholes and experiencing directly how much that suppressed the quality of my work.
Do I apply strategy practices to life? Yes, totally.
I used to do New Year’s resolutions but always felt weird about them: this year I realized it was because my goals were quite tactical and unstrategic. This year I will Do A Thing! OK, but why?
To help shift my personal goals in a more strategic direction I created a simple framework that I’m using to help provide gentle guidance on my growth and decision-making.
The process will sound familiar to any strategists!
Discovery: What values are most important to me? How have I been living these values in the past year? How have I not?
Insight: Where do my values intersect with the areas where I think I can make the biggest impact or change in the next year?
Strategy: What three areas will I focus on? What will I keep, stop, and start doing to achieve them?
Here’s an example of what that looks like for me. You could call this my personal development brief.
I love the keep/stop/start framework because it helps give credit and continued momentum to the things I am already doing. Space and time are finite. Maintenance is a task.
Do you find it easy to devote time to life outside of Edelman (art, cooking, etc) or is it something that you have to be intentional about? How do you think about work/life balance? Got any tips? ;)
One thing a lot of people don’t know about me is that I have a disability. I’ve never framed it that way publicly but here we go! I have treatment resistant major depression, which is a mental health condition that is either unresponsive or only temporarily responsive to the treatments we currently have access to. So for me, managing my health requires really carefully managing my time, monitoring my energy levels, and looking out for the “red zone” when things are apt to get really bad.
So I manage my work-life balance and time outside of work extremely intentionally.
I once had an acupuncturist read my pulse and immediately ask if I had an artistic pursuit, like painting or dancing. He said people with my kind of pulse require artistic outlets in order to fully access their energy, and I find that to be 100% true. Equally importantly, there’s now plenty of scientific evidence that practicing visual arts has profound neurological benefits. It’s like cross-training for your mind.
As for the work/life balance piece, I have found Edelman to be most supportive workplace. It’s part of what drew me here and has kept me here. My boss is extremely supportive, and so is her boss, and on up. Of course there are times that are crazy and critical pitches that require off-hours work, but that’s not the norm and it isn’t the expectation.
With that said, I don’t think that having boundaries around work hours is something that should be afforded only to those of us with health needs or at exceptionally humane workplaces. There is plenty of evidence that burning out employees is a bad business decision, with some estimates showing that a burned out employee costs 34% of their annual salary.
My tips are:
If your employer expects overwork, use your research skills to make the case that it’s harming their business. If that doesn’t make a difference, move elsewhere
Set boundaries around work hours and deliverables by saying “I’m at my maximum capacity, so won’t be able to get to this until X date.” This is hardest for junior employees so they need often need cover from managers which brings me to…
If you are a leader, don’t let your team overwork. Help your team prioritize projects so they can focus on truly urgent deliverables and provide flexibility around other deadlines. Some employees will chronically overwork in an effort to prove themselves. Rewarding this sets a bad example to the team and can shift the culture into one where there aren’t boundaries. Don’t reward it.
Our theme this quarter is Uncertainty. How do you manage it, personally and professionally?
I feel like this interview is going to seem so ridiculous because I am revealing a lot of deeply personal, life-altering things. But that is what is true for me right now so here we go.
Last October my partner was diagnosed with a serious illness. We were a year into our relationship and planning for the future, family… we were about to go on this 3-week dream trip to Southeast Asia we had been planning for months. Everything got cancelled. Instead we had to start planning around an intensive treatment schedule and endless hospital visits. Talk about uncertainty.
When you are rocked by earth-shattering life events like this one, the whole idea of certainty becomes kind of funny. Pema Chödrön, one of my favorite wise people, talks about shifting into a state of groundlessness, of “becoming friends” with the fact that there’s no ground on to stand on and accepting that there never will be.
When the Coronavirus crisis hit, I saw my peers and friends and colleagues deal with similar experiences of grief and loss that I had faced in October: vacations being cancelled, quarantine, the world becoming smaller and more restrictive, and fear setting in for what might happen to our own and others’ health.
What was interesting is that my partner and I had already gone through that experience nearly half a year before. So while the grief and fear over COVID-19 hit us, it hit different. We weren’t as hooked into an idea of certainty because we had already become untethered from it and closer to acceptance of our own groundlessness.
So how I manage uncertainty is through the (attempt!!!) at an active practice of detachment, of knowing that there is a certain flow of change that I can’t stop, but that I can find spots of agency within that change and do my best to focus there.
You say you’re a “values-driven brand strategist,” which really resonates with us. In some ways, it feels at odds with our current landscape, with many brands rooted in values only with regards to communications, rather than action. There are plenty of examples, but one that springs to mind is how Facebook claims two of their five core values as “Focus on impact” and “Build Social Value.” It sounds great, and yet so many of their actions, for example around Black Lives Matter, seem to be at odds with their values. The New York Times called out Facebook, Twitter and YouTube saying, “Social Media Giants Support Racial Justice. Their Products Undermine It.”
When you’re talking to clients, how do you frame the conversation of values? Is there a focus on life after communications?
Growing up I never dreamed of working in marketing or advertising or even business. I was raised by parents who moved our family from Peru to the U.S. so they could make a difference working in international NGOs. Fighting for good was the professional ambition that they modeled.
What I realized through a lot of learning and some experience was that I wanted to do good by changing culture, because when you change culture, you change everything. That’s how I ended up becoming a brand strategist.
What we’re seeing now is a massive culture change on a fast-forward timeframe. Think about the way expectations of companies have shifted since COVID took hold across the world, and then again when the racial justice movement lit up in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
There’s been a change in culture and expectations that is shifting the ground beneath all institutions, but especially for-profit companies. Their customers expect them to do good, and so do their employees, their suppliers, their communities, and on and on down the line.
Edelman is known for studying Trust and its impact on short and long-term value, and to no one’s surprise, trusted companies have better business outcomes. Also to no one’s surprise, trust is built through action, not just words (we call it “solve don’t sell”). We have this conversation with clients constantly, and we help provide guidance on the acts that they can take that are aligned with their values.
There’s a saying , maybe stolen from Bernbach?, which says something like: “Principles are only principles when they cost you money.” Do you believe that brands can truly have values if they don’t come at a cost to the brand? (any examples of brands doing it well or ‘failures’ would also be welcomed here!)
I agree that the balance sheet is a statement of values, but think the “cost” framing is part of the problem. Is it a cost, or is it an investment? Investments pay dividends, which is how I view values-based bets on sustainability, gender equity, diversity, equity and inclusion, community investment, etc.
Usually at one point or another in our careers, we’re assigned to work on a client or project that just doesn’t resonate with us. Sometimes, these projects have moral or ethical considerations themselves. Have you ever had to navigate this kind of situation? Or another way in to the same question, You lead a strategy department. If one of your team members had a moral or ethical problem working on a brand or project, what would be your recommendation to your team member on how to approach the situation?
As a strategist the idea of “not resonating” is kind of funny because our whole career is based on exploring things we may not know or care about. My favorite assignments are those where I get to work on something that I have no personal interest in or knowledge about. It’s so rare to get to learn from scratch!
But that’s obviously different from having an ethical or moral objection. I’m grateful to work at a firm that has clear respect for and guardrails around those types of objections. As a policy, we don’t work on guns, cigarettes, coal or climate-change deniers. And if individual employees have a belief-driven opposition to a project, they can make the choice to opt out. I’ve helped manage this process with my team on the occasions where such conflicts have come up.
If you could implement a single industry-wide policy tomorrow, what would it be?
Abolish hourly billing.
Last question. As you know, we believe there is so much value in having a wide range of teachers. What’s the best piece of advice/knowledge you’ve stolen, and who/where’d you steal it from?
I am feeling a lot of pressure from the superlative here so I am going to go with what I’m chewing on right now, which is the late John Lewis’s call for “Good Trouble.”
The way I understand it, Good Trouble is about standing up for what is right, for equity and justice and for a brighter future. As strategists we have a responsibility to reject the status quo that excludes and oppresses people –racially and otherwise – whether through the creative assets we help shape, the insights we inform, or who we see at the table.
That guidance informs the way I and my team counsel our clients, the way we push our leaders, and the way I am trying to live as a human being. Good Trouble is why I talk about my mental health and personal challenges so that I can cut through the stigma and hopefully make it a little bit easier for others experiencing the same thing. Good Trouble is part of the guiding ethos of Gen Z and I see it manifesting significantly in our work for the next generation. What a cool time to be doing this work!
I hope you know what I now mean about those amazing questions. For more of this thoughtful fodder, decks, POVs and more sign up the School of Stolen Genius with the MCVFTW to get $10 off your membership -- a steal at $15/mo.