AMV boss & MiAwards judge Ian Pearman talks leadership

I think you know if you like organising things and organising people. In your youth that can just come across as being bossy and precocious, but I suppose those are some of the character traits of a leader. My earliest memory of taking a leadership was role was as a Sixer at the Cub Scouts. It’s positions like that which you take on as a kid that make you realise that leading people can be quite interesting.

What do you think is the key to being a good agency leader?

You have to stay in the kitchen on being a practitioner, you can’t separate yourself ever, and nor should you want to separate yourself, from the work. Agency leaders only get in to their position because they have shown full commitment and a decent level of skill at what they do, whether that be in creative, planning, account management or whatever. You can never take your foot off that pedal and must keep practising your discipline and do it well.

Beyond that a lot of organisations pick their leaders because they are symbolic of their cultural values. That person is the right person for a particular time in that organisation’s development. I was lucky enough to be picked by AMV as a graduate trainee and found the right culture. A lot of people in the agency world seem to spend a lot of their career searching for an organisation that matches their own personal value set. I was lucky enough to find an organisation that matched my value set straight off the bounce and that has helped accelerate my career because it feels very natural here. The things the company expects of people are the same things I would expect of people.

When you walked through the doors of AMV as a graduate trainee in 1996, did you ever think you would be leading the agency one day?

No, I’m always very suspicious of people who have a grand plan mapped out on the back of a napkin. I had no such grand plan. I thought at that time it would be good to be head of account management. That it would be good to manage the resource and help with the training and development stuff, but that was as far as my thinking went at that time. Beyond that I suppose you simply focus on being the best and doing the best job you can in each job you do during your career. Then by definition you get to the next stage more quickly than you expected and that’s what has happened to me at every level.

As you look back over your time at AMV are there any of your leaders or managers that taught you the art of leadership?

I think probably all of them did in some way. I have been very lucky with the roll call of leaders at AMV. From the founders, David and Adrian, and onwards the leaders here have all been stellar and I have learned different things from all of them. I have never doubted the benefit of working for any of those individuals. So, as we are only ever a combination of what we learn and the experience we gain from others I have been very lucky with the mentors I have had. They are not just UK, best of British, but have been world class. That combined with a great tradition of succession management at Abbot Mead means nothing could have prepared me better for the CEO job.

What do you feel are your strengths as a leader?

That’s a really tricky question. Ironically I was going to say self-awareness, but if that was the case I’d have a list of answers for you. I am quite intuitive. There is a tendency in leadership to be over systematic and theoretical about the discipline, but the reality is that leadership is a sequence of conflictive moments of decision making where you make judgements in the moment.

Some of those decisions are big and some are very small, but it’s the quantity that you get right that ultimately defines whether you are a good leader. When you make most of those decisions you don’t have all of the information you need, nor can you have all the information. You just have to use the best judgement you have and trusting in your own judgement is incredibly important.

What has been the toughest decision you have had to make the leader at AMV?

The toughest decisions are always people decisions, when you have to have difficult conversations with people, particularly about performance and sometimes about redundancy. Those are the decisions that will always feel the most visceral and the ones you feel the most pressure about. You are dealing with people’s lives, their dignity and their self-esteem. Anybody who says that gets easier needs to take a long hard look at themselves as you should never get anaesthetised to that. Those are the difficult decisions. Everything else, relatively, is manageable. Nobody dies in this business. Advertising is not manual labour so there are very few huge existential decisions that face us fortunately, but it’s those people decisions that remain the trickiest.

Do you make decisions by committee at AMV or as CEO do you call the shots?

It’s always a team effort. Advertising is one of the most team-based businesses there is. No one person has all of the skills necessary to create great work. So, it always has to be a team effort. Most decisions are made by collecting input from a broad group of people, consolidating that information and sharing the various hypotheses. Ultimately, somebody has to make a choice and a judgement on the respective pros and cons of each option and that usually ends up being the leader. So, it’s the first amongst equals principal – everybody contributes, everybody influences, but ultimately someone has to make the call and be responsible for that call.

As part of a Sunday Times review, you were named the Sixth Most Inspiring Leader, what is the key to inspiring people?

Communication is the key and being honest with people when times get tough and also being consistent in the things you do. Consistency is very under-rated in management and leadership. Particularly in our industry, because of the tales of the great leaders of yesteryear and these mercurial characters who could be charming one second and bashing walls down the next. That is quite an old fashioned view of leadership. Today people need genuine consistency from their leaders. It’s like parenting in that respect, it’s absolutely critical.

You are a graduate of the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School? What were the key learnings you took from that as a leader?

I think it helped me to get a view outside of our industry about the challenges that other corporate cultures face, some of which are common, but many of which are different and that now feeds back into the experiences that I can bring to bear with our clients.

It gave me access to a different set of perspectives that I perhaps would otherwise not be able to get by having worked in one industry and ultimately in one agency during my entire career. To set real dedicated time aside to do that was incredibly stimulating for me as a leader. And of course Harvard Business School is boot camp for capitalism, so there was a great deal of practical learning about the challenges that most industries face these days from globalisation to commoditisation to the war for talent.

Do you need to be highly organised to be good leader or can you wing it?

I think you do need to have a central core structure to everyday, but ultimately a leader’s job combines fire prevention and fire fighting, so you do need to leave enough room to get your fire hose out, so to speak. Sometimes the allocated time for fire prevention and the need for fire hose overlap, but you have to be as rigorous as you can on boxing those tasks or otherwise you would be constantly on the back foot.

How do you react when things go wrong, when mistakes are made that could be detrimental to the agency?

In most cases when a mistake is made it is not an individual’s fault. It is the fault of a broader system or usually an agency practise that wasn’t as refined as it should have been. That means ultimately that I am to blame. So, you have to take a very measured approach and always give people the benefit of the doubt. There is no such thing as a costly mistake, just an expensive lesson. As long as the learning from the mistake is properly taken forward you have done all you can.

Do you have any strategies for when you are faced with losing somebody that you consider Integral at AMV?

It is a short term strategy to try to convince someone to stay with you if they want to go. That said, there is no down side to helping them deconstruct the reason why they are considering leaving in the first place. Often they have jumped to the conclusion that they need to leave, but haven’t seen the wood for the trees and that there are other things that can be done in the organisation that can rectify the concerns and frustrations they had in the first place. I think we must be pretty good at doing that here as it’s quite rare for anyone to leave AMV. By doing this you are giving into the analysis in a very emotion free way about what the thinking process was that got them to concluding that they need to leave your business. Quite often you can work back through that logic and find a solution that works for everyone.

The deadline for MiAwards2013 is Friday 13th September. If you require an extension to submit your report then please contact Nikki Gillies on 0141 559 6076 or by email.