inVOYAGE are delighted to announce the newest update to their Marbella program with the addition of professional Change agent and speaker Chris Hirst - previous CEO Havas Creative Group and author of the book “No Bullsh*t Leadership”.  

After more than a decade in CEO positions Chris now dedicates his time to helping others drive success, dipping into his own first-hand experience delivering record growth at Havas Creative Group and Grey Group UK and working directly with the world’s biggest businesses and brands. 

He’ll be joining us in Marbella to give you an exclusive keynote on how to level up your Leadership in 2023. Read on for a taste of what you can expect...

Richard Joslin, inVOYAGE: Hi Chris, thank you so much for joining us. We’re really looking forward to having you with us in Marbella this March to really get under the skin of what’s needed in leadership today and your experience of that within the creative industry. You’ve just published your book “No Bullsh*t Leadership” which claims to untangle the jargon and guff around the word and reveal the truth to successful leadership...

So, tell us, why is there so much baggage around leadership and how do we strip that away?

Chris Hirst: I think one of the great fallacies around the subject of leadership is that it’s some exalted stench available only to a “chosen few”. And yet the reality of it is, you don't have to have walked the corridors of Whitehall, or have sat around a boardroom table, or have gone to an expensive business school to understand what leadership is, or indeed, to be an effective leader. And we know that – because we've all met plenty of people who have gone to those nice schools and got those fancy jobs that don't seem to exhibit either an understanding or an ability to deliver against leadership.

So why is there so much baggage around leadership? Because it's a multi-billion-dollar industry. This industry (by that I mean your consultancies, training programs and, dare I say, conferences) has a vested interest in creating this sense of an elite and untouchable knowledge. And guess what? They’re the gatekeepers – if you hand over your cash, they’ll let you in. And yet, most of what they are telling us, and usually selling us is just nickel – it’s bullsh*t.

And it has two really baleful real-world consequences. The first is it inhibits people in leadership positions from fulfilling their potential. And second of all, I think it excludes whole swathes of society from believing that leadership is something that they could aspire to. And I genuinely think just by wiping away some of that bullshit, we'll make better leaders of us all.

Richard Joslin, inVOYAGE: Diversity and Inclusion are a big area of leadership and I know that in the past you’ve worked tirelessly to bring through strategies on diversity and inclusion during your time at Havas and elsewhere. Can you tell us more about this?

Chris Hirst: The challenge with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is that the acronym sort of implies there’s a one-size-fits-all solution. And there really isn’t. It’s not enough for organisations just to say “we want to have a more diverse workforce” - you need to have a culture and environment that invites people not just to join but to join and thrive. I look back at what I first wrote when I joined in 2015 and I was pretty naïve at the time, but we were learning as we went along and it was very much an iterative process.

So, for example, we began by writing a 10-point chart with all the key aspects we wanted to try, put metrics against it, talked about it, tried it and then learnt from it. And what I came to understand was that data was critical for our ability to make progress. We needed to know who we were hiring, who we were promoting and at what stages we were promoting them, but also who was leaving.

And that last point is crucial. It’s all well and fine looking at who you’re hiring, but if you’re losing people at the same rate, you haven’t progressed. And that collection of data allows you to be far more specific and create far more bespoke problems to people’s individual particular challenges (because of course challenges around female representation are very different to challenges around non-white representation).

Richard Joslin, inVOYAGE: One of the reasons we’ve asked you to come down to talk in Marbella is that the experiences and pressures you’ve experienced at Havas and elsewhere are something a lot of our events agencies can probably relate to so it would be great to really get under the skin of your take on leadership. So, with that in mind, why is it so important to create more leaders?

Chris Hirst: Well, put simply, leadership is how you get stuff done. Being able to understand what leadership is and how to do it effectively is how we achieve the things we want to achieve within our lives or improve the lives of other people. To succeed as a great agency, you need two things: happy clients and winning pitches. I think a lot of people in the industry overcomplicate things and that’s one of the most important things about leadership – being able to see the wood for the trees.

Richard Joslin, inVOYAGE: So, you need to eliminate those peripheral factors to gain the clarity you need to become a great leader and to create devolved leadership?

Chris Hirst: Absolutely, I’ve just finished my second book and when I was writing it, one of the things that struck was that leadership is a bit like alchemy – leaders have to try and achieve more with the same (or sometimes less) resources. And that’s because resources are always constrained – whether that be time, people or money (and often these three are interchangeably the same thing). If there was no constraint on the amount of people you could hire or the amount of time you could spend, it would be easy! But it’s not, and that’s particularly a challenge in the marketing industry.

Richard Joslin: Well, we’re incredibly excited to have you coming to Marbella, we’ve got a lot of great professionals joining us at the event and we look forward to seeing you down there!

Has this piqued your interest? Join us in Marbella and make that first step towards levelling up your leadership with an exclusive keynote speech from Chris Hirst.