Agile leadership is about inspiring not instructing

Roger Par­ry, media entre­pre­neur and Chair­man of YouGov

For Roger Par­ry being “agile” is a bit of a buzz word, but one that car­ries fun­da­men­tal con­no­ta­tions about flex­i­bil­i­ty and the speed of change.

“The role of the chief exec­u­tive in mak­ing the com­pa­ny more agile is to get across to all employ­ees that change is inevitable and get­ting ahead of it vital. It’s about lead­er­ship not man­age­ment; it’s about inspir­ing not instruct­ing,” says Mr Par­ry, who has had a lex­i­con of busi­ness and pro­fes­sion­al roles and expe­ri­ence, some more agile than oth­ers.

A geol­o­gy grad­u­ate, who was a radio reporter for the BBC’s Today pro­gramme, he then went to con­sul­tants McK­in­sey & Com­pa­ny where he wrote the busi­ness plan for the Globe The­atre in Lon­don before going on to chair the organ­i­sa­tion for many years. He has been chief exec­u­tive of Clear Chan­nel Inter­na­tion­al, the out­door, radio and live events group, of Media Square, the mar­ket­ing ser­vices com­pa­ny, and of the More adver­tis­ing group, while his chair­man­ships have includ­ed John­ston Press, Future mag­a­zines, and cur­rent­ly YouGov, the polling com­pa­ny, tele­vi­sion pro­duc­er Chrysalis Vision and MSQ, the suc­ces­sor to Media Square.

“When I look back to when I was a chief exec­u­tive what has changed is that every­thing hap­pens more quick­ly. Tech­nol­o­gy is mov­ing more quick­ly, pub­lic atti­tudes, pub­lic taste and even polit­i­cal alle­giances are mov­ing more rapid­ly,” says Mr Par­ry.

The role of the chief exec­u­tive in mak­ing the com­pa­ny more agile is to get across to all employ­ees that change is inevitable and get­ting ahead of it vital

The rea­sons and the need for greater agili­ty in response range from the high­er lev­el of grad­u­ates in the work­place – an anti-iner­tia force – to the rapid rate of tech­no­log­i­cal change, the rise of social media and the fact that unex­pect­ed com­pe­ti­tion can now emerge from almost any­where around the world.

A decade ago many chief exec­u­tives were still oper­at­ing the last ves­tiges of the cor­po­rate com­mand-and-con­trol econ­o­my when instruc­tions were issued, employ­ees respond­ed and the results were mon­i­tored.

Now, for the most suc­cess­ful agile chief exec­u­tives, it’s less about con­ven­tion­al man­age­ment, and even just offer­ing lead­er­ship and inspi­ra­tion, it’s also about estab­lish­ing the tone, set­ting val­ues and the aspi­ra­tional des­ti­na­tion of the organ­i­sa­tion.

Reputation

There is anoth­er impor­tant rea­son why exec­u­tives need to be, and often are, more agile. “The rea­son that man­age­ment is more agile is that deci­sion-mak­ing has moved much clos­er to the cus­tomer or the pro­duc­tion line. A real­ly agile organ­i­sa­tion is agile because it is much clos­er to the task it is try­ing to achieve, and the best chief exec­u­tives encour­age that agili­ty, and it’s not just about prof­it, but also rep­u­ta­tion,” says Mr Par­ry, who wrote a book on the chang­ing nature of man­age­ment, enti­tled Enter­prise: The Lead­er­ship Role.

As an exam­ple of an agile exec­u­tive deal­ing well with a rep­u­ta­tion­al cri­sis, he cites Dido Hard­ing, chief exec­u­tive of Talk­Talk. When con­fi­den­tial cus­tomer infor­ma­tion was dumped on the inter­net, Ms Hard­ing went imme­di­ate­ly on tele­vi­sion to apol­o­gise and promise the prob­lem would be fixed.

By way of con­trast, Mr Par­ry believes for­mer BP chief exec­u­tive Tony Hay­ward showed a remark­able lack of agili­ty by going on a sail­ing hol­i­day when many thought he should be con­cen­trat­ing more on clear­ing up the Gulf of Mex­i­co oil spill.

“If you ask the ques­tion what does an agile organ­i­sa­tion look like? – right from the top, it doesn’t go all defen­sive and doesn’t go blam­ing some­one else, but imme­di­ate­ly responds to what the prob­lem is,” says Mr Par­ry. The agile chief exec­u­tive must “own the nar­ra­tive” of the com­pa­ny and be able to com­mu­ni­cate it con­sis­tent­ly both inside and out­side the organ­i­sa­tion.

Cre­at­ing the agile com­pa­ny is part­ly a mat­ter of hav­ing more younger peo­ple in senior posi­tions, includ­ing the board­room. But who wouldn’t want to have the advice of Google’s Eric Schmidt who is 61. It’s more a mat­ter of diver­si­ty of expe­ri­ence than sim­ply age.

John­ston Press was far from agile when con­front­ed with threats such as the migra­tion of clas­si­fied adver­tis­ing to the web and has suf­fered as a result. For­mer chair­man Mr Par­ry con­cedes they should have insist­ed on a greater vari­ety of younger peo­ple on the board, which was main­ly made up of mem­bers of the Scot­tish estab­lish­ment and news­pa­per indus­try peo­ple.

“One of the lessons for any com­pa­ny is to have peo­ple who can alert you to what is going on around you in a very vis­cer­al way,” says Mr Par­ry.

He believes it is no coin­ci­dence the Dai­ly Mail and Gen­er­al Trust has weath­ered bet­ter than most the inter­net storm, which has hit all news­pa­pers. Chair­man Jonathan Harmsworth was 20 to 30 years younger than many of his board mem­bers and senior exec­u­tives.

“He worked in Tele­text (a DMGT com­pa­ny). He reg­u­lar­ly vis­it­ed Cal­i­for­nia to look at the lat­est trends and, as the fourth vis­count, he was in a very strong posi­tion to say things are chang­ing rapid­ly and we must change as well. In ret­ro­spect DMGT played the news­pa­per cat­a­stro­phe bet­ter than most peo­ple,” Mr Par­ry believes.

Management agility

In a “hideous” case of lack of man­age­ment agili­ty, he cites Tesco as an exam­ple of a com­pa­ny which failed to either pre­dict or react quick­ly enough to the onslaught from Aldi, Lidl, Ama­zon and Oca­do because they were “all cut from the same cloth” and were too con­vinced for too long “they were all mar­vel­lous.”

A for­mer con­sul­tant, Mr Par­ry unsur­pris­ing­ly believes con­sul­tants are good at pick­ing up the great macro-eco­nom­ic threats to com­pa­nies, but insti­tu­tion­al share­hold­ers and ana­lysts are con­ser­v­a­tive forces tend­ing to believe that if some­thing worked today it will prob­a­bly work tomor­row.

But in some cas­es there can be a lit­tle too much agili­ty, and this should not always mean tak­ing deci­sions at break­neck speed and always react­ing instant­ly on social media.

Mr Par­ry notes that Nis­san wait­ed for more than a month, con­sid­er­ing its posi­tion on the Brex­it ref­er­en­dum vote, before chief exec­u­tive of Renault-Nis­san Car­los Ghosn said deci­sions on future invest­ments in the UK would only be made when new terms of trade with the Euro­pean Union became clear.

Exec­u­tives should also be wary about the instan­ta­neous nature of com­ment­ing on Twit­ter. “You do have to have a point of view, but you don’t have to have it instant­ly on Twit­ter,” says Mr Par­ry.

So, what will the next gen­er­a­tion of agile chief exec­u­tives look like, where will they come from and how will their roles change?

The agile chief exec­u­tive will have to be an even bet­ter lis­ten­er than they have been in the past with the anten­nas to pick up those new indus­tri­al trends

They will come from the most diverse back­grounds, both per­son­al and aca­d­e­m­ic, and they will have less need for spe­cif­ic finan­cial and tech­no­log­i­cal qual­i­fi­ca­tions, he says.

An essen­tial skill for the agile chief exec­u­tive will be the abil­i­ty to hire top chief finan­cial offi­cers and tech­nol­o­gists. There will also be less need for detailed day-to-day man­age­ment by the chief exec­u­tive. This will increas­ing­ly be the task of the chief oper­at­ing offi­cer.

“The agile chief exec­u­tive will have to be an even bet­ter lis­ten­er than they have been in the past with the anten­nas to pick up those new indus­tri­al trends, which may be rel­e­vant to the com­pa­ny. They will also have to be even bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tors because more and more the task will be to set the nar­ra­tive that tells every­one else what they should be doing,” says Mr Par­ry.

Learning from mistakes

How agile does he have to be in his cur­rent chair­man­ships? At YouGov the agili­ty chal­lenge is to learn from mis­takes made in the polling fail­ures in the gen­er­al elec­tion and the EU ref­er­en­dum, although Mr Par­ry insists YouGov was less bad than most.

“YouGov chief exec­u­tive Stephan Shake­speare is obsessed about learn­ing from mis­takes, and that is a very attrac­tive and use­ful char­ac­ter­is­tic,” says Mr Par­ry.

At MSQ change is being forced by clients, who want to alter con­sumer behav­iour using all avail­able media, includ­ing social media, rather than just book­ing an adver­tis­ing cam­paign in the old way. There has also been a break­ing down of bar­ri­ers between adver­tis­ing, mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions. “The chal­lenge is to find peo­ple, who can oper­ate across all those dis­ci­plines, and it is not easy,” he admits.

For Chrysalis Vision, a tele­vi­sion start­up, agili­ty means recog­nis­ing all the old rules of the tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tion busi­ness have changed. “We are hav­ing to get used to a new world where Ama­zon, Net­flix and Hulu are just as impor­tant to us as cus­tomers as the BBC and ITV,” says Mr Par­ry, who also pro­duced a report for for­mer cul­ture sec­re­tary Jere­my Hunt on how to launch local tele­vi­sion in the UK.

But Mr Par­ry reach­es back to the world of his geo­log­i­cal back­ground where things can often move at a glacial pace to illus­trate how reign­ing ortho­dox­ies can be over­thrown. “When I was a stu­dent, the con­cept of plate tec­ton­ics was regard­ed as dan­ger­ous­ly rad­i­cal. Now it is the com­mon­place sub­ject of tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­taries and mag­a­zine sup­ple­ments,” he says. The mod­ern agile chief exec­u­tive will have to be able to move a lot faster than the chang­ing atti­tudes to plate tec­ton­ics.