(MENAFN- PRovoke)
Gail Heimann, who announced in July that she was stepping down after 28 years with Weber Shandwick and five years as global chief executive, sat down with PRovoke media editor Paul Holmes to discuss the challenges of running one of the largest public relations firms in the world.
In the following conversation (lightly edited for length and clarity), Heimann talks about being a woman in leadership, her slightly unconventional path to the top job, leading a global organization, working within a holding company, and creating a global culture.
Paul Holmes : Can we start by asking you to describe your career path with Weber Shandwick?
Gail Heimann : I've been at what is now known as the Weber Shandwick Collective for close to 30 years. I mean, I chart on the ages of my kids. One was just born and one was seven years old when I joined. Andy Polansky interviewed me. It was right before the holiday season kicked in. There was a Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. We met there. We split a beer called a Dead Guy, and he had half of it. It was in a big bottle, so we split a Dead Guy.
And he offered me this job, to run the HP business. So I joined to do that. And then moved from that into, running consumer stuff in the New York office and then various different titles then from the New York office-which was then and is today the largest operation in the world and an extraordinary operation in and of itself. It enabled me to inhabit that title and do what it is that I think I do well, which is lead client work, bring creativity, hopefully move people towards that.
PH : Did it already feel at that point that you were being groomed for the CEO role?
GH : Not really, no. Ultimately I became president and that begins to feel like a more like a succession scenario obviously.
I'll digress for a little bit, one of the issues... you saw the McKinsey report around women and the fact that women still have a long way to go to get parity by I think, I have to check the data, but I think it's 2046 and women of color by 2074, something like that. So it's a pretty significant gap. So I mention that, if you go back to our industry, public relations, strategic comms, I feel we've done a lot of great things. And I'm super proud of the Weber-Shandwick Collective record around women in the executive leadership team.
And that's always been there. Credit to the forebears of Weber Shandwick. But I think if we look, people in the operations side move up. So when you talk about succession, the operations side moves up faster. Many women enter public relations not in the operations side, and don't get operations experience. We don't as an industry do a good job of ensuring that everybody gets a little glimpse, a little tutorial. And we could do much better, and that would I think propel women a little faster.
So to go back to the question, did I feel there was maybe some succession going on, sure. I had run the New York office, so obviously had the P&L experience.
PH : So to that point I always associated you, more than anything else, with creativity, being a big, bold, creative idea person, which is not the normal path to CEO-dom. So, how did that prepare you for the top job? And did you have to leave that behind when you took the top job?
GH : It is an atypical path, for sure. I don't see too much of that trajectory out there. But I think today to lead an organization, one has to get the client work. It's gotten increasingly complicated. There's tools, there's resources. So not being in the client work makes it very, very difficult to lead and grow clients and to lead an organization and bring in the right specialists and specialisms.
So I think part of the creative process, just being in the work is a critical part. And I hope that we'll see more of the leadership emerge from the work, less from the P&L side. I have been told, perhaps controversially, that you can learn the P&L business's always going to be people who are better at it and who get more gratification out of that. It is harder to learn some of the other stuff. You can't make a person have original thoughts. They either do or they do not.
So I've always felt there was a new balance a little bit in leadership. So I'm hoping that if I can be a poster child for anything, I will be a poster child for that.
PH : So when you got the top job how prepared did you feel for it? And what then surprised you about the job?
GH : I think in business life, you have people above you somewhere. You either learn what to do from them or learn what not to do from them. I was exceedingly lucky in having Andt Polansky, Harris Diamond, Jack Leslie and others from whom I really did learn a lot. So I in that respect, I felt prepared.
But I took on the CEO job, I think it was July or August of 2019. And we all know that COVID happened several months later. So one is never really prepared. You think here's my vision and I'm going to enact something with this and then, you know, something changes. I was prepared for some sort of unexpected. I wasn't prepared for the level of unexpected. But that just becomes the job.
PH : The other thing that interests me is that you inherited a business that had a great reputation. There have been two agencies that have outperformed the market over the last decade and a half and Weber was one of them, firing on most cylinders in most markets. And it would have been pretty easy to simply be a caretaker, but you implemented some pretty major changes. How did you decide what needed changing?
GH : I inherited a great culture, and I think our culture has been a differentiator. The notion that we have built a culture where there is real collaboration as de minimis territorialism and a general sense of people have each other's backs. So that's that. I credit Andy a lot with that.
When I got into the role, I looked at it and thought, OK, we have this great global organization. How can I bring it together in a world where we're getting more and more global clients, how can I bring it together so that our vision is similar, recognizing our local differences, our quality remains peerless everywhere, and clients get the benefit of what we're seeing as it rolls across the world.
I looked to shape an ELT that could do that a little better.
The zeitgeist was changing as well, employees' attitudes were changing everywhere, not just in PR. I looked to elevate the voices of employees, to create mechanisms where we listened harder, where we bring people in more. I looked to maintain the esprit de corps, perhaps, broaden it, enlarge it, and mostly celebrate the work. That's the world I come from. Get people to, make the work, recognize the work, make that a purpose. Growth comes from doing good work.
PH : So, any CEO job is really multi-dimensional, right? There's managing the people in the organization, there's managing the finances and the operations, being a cheerleader for both the brand and when you're at the level you're at for the industry, being a voice. There's the portfolio management aspect of it, and in the PR business, there's creative work. There's a technology dimension to it now, with AI and other tools. That's a lot for one person to do. So how do you decide where your focus is going to be and what you're going to delegate?
GH : I was just talking about Socrates the other day, the Socratic method...
PH : As one does.
GH : Yes, you look at yourself and you ask yourself some questions, what am I good at, what gift can I bring? I would focus more on work and delegate more operational elements and that's how we set it up. And Susan Howe, who is the next CEO, was managing the operations of the regions as president of the organization.
I did that so that I could do more of the strategic work, more of the where's technology going, more of the, OK, let's take a look at our major clients and look at our product. So I was very intentional about that, thinking that's where I can deliver best for the company.
But at the end of the day, you're accountable for everything. And that gets down to... there does need to be trust. You have to have a team that you truly can trust so that when you sit down with them you feel like we have the best in class operations. Financials, you have to have great people. Our CFO, Deb Nichols, is a true, true, true partner.
So, I think the key is being thoughtful about what, as a CEO, you are going to bring, what you are going to stand for, what your highest purpose is, and building a trusted, hopefully pretty flat team, and making sure every one of those individuals has a strong voice on the agenda of the organization.
PH : Is it a fun job and what did you find to be the most fun part of it, or the most rewarding part of it?
GH : It is a fun job. The exhilarating days outnumber the other days, but there are stressful days.
Part of it is contextual. The world is stressful. Every single thing that happens in the world touches what we do. Not some of the things, everything. And the days when there's a major event in the world and you wake up and you scroll on your phone and you're like, this happened, what shall I say about it to our organization. That's the part of the job I didn't expect. And I certainly didn't expect that to be such a regular part of the job.
I think we've seen CEOs rise to that occasion. We've seen CEOs be judged on that. But the expectations are really high. So is that exhilarating? Not always, but it's important. It's important because people expect to feel your values and feel your leadership in very tough situations.
Overall I think for me the rush has been the people part. I mean I think that's always the rush. It's also hard, I mean you can't control how people feel sometimes but when you can create an environment and you watch people make something that gets awarded and you kind of feel for them, that's a pretty good part of it.
PH : What are the parts of the job that are either not fun or at least challenging or kind of a grind?
GH : Things that are repetitive are never fun for me. I like doing new things.
Things on the financial management side, it's quite a repetitive situation. You want to win, you want to be up there, you want to be on the top of your list and everybody else's list. You want to, in our case, deliver for the holding company. The management of that happens year after year, month after month, day after day. It's essential, it's important. It doesn't fall into a fun category. I hope it does for others. But for me, the work begets the numbers and you have to maintain your focus.
PH : What about working within a holding company and a publicly traded company? Does that feel constraining at all?
GH : I've never found it constraining. I can talk about it on an enterprise level, but I'll talk about it on an individual level for a moment. Individually, intellectually, it's terrific because you're a part of something big. When you're working on a client together, you're learning, you're bringing the data people or you're bringing the CRM people. I think, wow, look how they do things. For me, in my 30 years, that's been mind-expanding. So I do think it intellectually is good for the people within it, because of that exposure, that knowledge, that sharing of knowledge.
On an enterprise level, I think clients, larger clients benefit from co-solutions, they benefit from a roundtable of expertise where everyone is incentivized purely to deliver. I think that the holding company model, we're seeing some change born of the reality of the resources needed to create the technologies that we will all need to solve bigger problems.
PH : And what about managing people? How many people does Weber Shandwick have now?
GH : I think it's around 4,000.
PH :
So what are the challenges of manning managing an organization of that size spread across all the geographies? How much of your time do you spend actually visiting offices and connecting with people?
GH : You look at the world pre-COVID and then COVID and then evolving out of COVID, right? Traditionally, we've been a very hands-on organization. We have gone around the world and spent time and sat in offices and gone to dinners and all the stuff, and that's important because you really don't get... the virtual stuff is fantastic but it isn't a replacement for sitting in a room with somebody and them telling you how they feel.
I think there was a client years ago who asked me how do we grow big and stay small? And I think we've done a decent job. I think we have maintained the oneness, sort of intimacy, and the way to do it is you have people you trust in every location who understand the culture you want the place to have.
Does it work 100% of the time? No, but I think when you're out there enough, physically and in the virtual... we do town halls. And when you implement policies that reflect the kind of culture that you have, just in terms of flexibility. We were the first out there with hybrid work. So I think you do your best to set the tone from the top, recognize that things are different in different parts of the world and different organizations, respect that, but have people who you believe will carry forth that culture.
PH : Same question, but about clients. I don't know how many clients you have, but I'm guessing it's a pretty huge number. How do you manage the process of making sure client satisfaction remains high? I know we've talked about Net Promoter Sscores for clients but what's the human element and what's the system element?
GH : That's kind of symbiotic, right? So we reach out to clients and a number of people within the client. So it might be 20 or 30 people within the client and across as many clients as we can. Some clients have their own processes, and we do that with those people. And that gives us a Net Promoter Score, and it gives us a lot of other, more granular information.
And then we reach out to every client after and say, hey, let's get together and talk about if it was good, if it was bad, what needs fixing. But we also reach out to say, you know, how are you doing? What's up? What do you think? Oh, this happened today. That kind of thing. So I'll have those and Susan does and so do others on the team.
High touch is pretty important. Plans go awry, things change. So you do need the high touch because it's the relationship that's important. Which is why, at the ELT level, you need people who know the work and can do the work, or else the counseling piece of the job becomes very difficult.
PH : So we're getting a sense of the scope of your role as CEO and I'll come back to this: how do you how do you balance the the fact that you have to be so focused day-to-day on all of these things? People and clients and finances. How do you balance that with being able to occasionally step back and see the big picture and sort of recognize patterns and predict the future?
GH : You've got to love what it is we do. I feel lucky. It's been possibly the most interesting time to be in this business? It's not been an evolution. It's been this series of micro revolutions that have happened along the way. You've got to be into it. The only way to balance it is to be into it, to love the swirl. Sometimes, you know, it swirls in the wrong direction, but you've got to love it, be into it, and give yourself the time to do it.
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