Get Social - The Connected Leader Podcast - Chris Lewis - CEO LEWIS

Michelle C.: Hello and welcome to the Get Social Connected Leader podcast, where I, Michelle Carvill, interview business leaders around the practicalities of how, in this hyperconnected digital age, they are embracing digital technologies to tune in and connect and communicate. You can find all episodes of the podcast together with show notes via our website, CarvillCreative.co.uk/podcasts.
Michelle C.: In this episode of the Get Social Connected Leader podcast, I'm delighted to interview Chris Lewis. With a background in creativity, Chris has worked for a variety of international and national media. The agency he founded has grown to 500 staff in 30 offices globally. He is an experienced strategist and works with senior politicians, business leaders, and celebrities. He volunteers for a range of organizations including the UK's leading scientific organization, the Royal Society, and London's Chelsea College of Art and Design. He is the author of the bestseller on creativity, Too Fast to Think, and in 2016, working with the U.S. Presidential advisor, author, and economist, Dr. Pippa Malmgren, he founded the Lewis Advisory Board. Together, they are coauthors of the 2018 Business Book of the Year, The Leadership Lab: Understanding Leadership in the 21st Century.
Michelle C.: Chris, thank you so much for being on the podcast. It's great to have you here.
Chris Lewis: Thanks. Thanks very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Michelle C.: Fabulous. We met, Chris, at the Business Book Awards back in March, and we were talking at the time. We sat next to each other on the table. We were both there with Kogan Page. And congratulations on the win, by the way. It's a terrific, terrific book. We were talking about communications and social media, and even though we met there physically, I went on to follow various people, yourself and Pippa, on social, connecting that way, kind of keeping in tune. So I wanted to bring you onto the podcast to really get your view as both Chris, the the CEO and founder of LEWIS, and indeed your role as the CEO and indeed you as a practitioner of social media in this space. So, let's start then with why you got into social media, why you use it yourself as a leader of the practice or the agency?
Chris Lewis: Well, thanks, Michelle. One of the central principles in The Leadership Lab, that Pippa Malmgren and I wrote, was that there's a real fundamental problem in the notion of putting all of our faith in single points of failure around one leader rather than looking at the leadership as a group of people and a culture and an ethos. And we felt very strongly that there was too much emphasis on this single infallible, often male, leader. That's passed down to us from Jesus Christ and Moses, and so we can substitute Elon Musk for Moses and we can substitute Steven Jobs for Jesus Christ, but it doesn't make the model any more attractive because it tends to be focused on single points of failure.
Chris Lewis: And they're often, too often, middle-aged white men, and that means that the parenthesis or reference that that person has as an individual is limited, whereas if they are drawing leadership from a group of people, then those people are so much more representative and so much more likely to be accepted as a leadership team. So leadership groups, for that reason, they should seek to look and sound like the groups of people that they're seeking to represent. And so, in social media, we often talk about it as a communications medium, but listening is for me the core of it. So the human being has two ears and one mouth but doesn't always use them in that proportion.
Michelle C.: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. That very kind of analogy is in Get Social, actually. I talk about the power of listening. It's interesting that when I interviewed people then for Get Social Leaders as to how they were engaging and what they were finding was the most useful out of the channels, and indeed, on this podcast. I've interviewed 16 people so far. And there is this consistent theme that listening informs so much. Not always statistically accurate, but it's enough of a barometer to pick up on the sense, you know, what is actually happening out there, and both with competitors, both with your customers, and internally with your own teams, importantly.
Michelle C.: Okay. I talk a lot about the connected leader and that digital technologies allow leaders to be more connected at scale, so the whole Tom Peters thing about walking the floor, leading by by wandering around. Now, these digital technologies enable us to connect and communicate and, indeed, for leaders to kind of be that connected and be walking the floor at scale. Is this something that you find when you're working with clients or within your own organization that it's helping that people are doing this?
Chris Lewis: Well, I think you always got to be aware of that when you're in a structure that the people that are in immediate contact with the team, that's more important than the overall leader is. One of the things that we point out in The Leadership Lab is that leaders kind of get to the top by having a to-do list, but one when they're at the top, they need to have more than just a to-do list. They must have a to-be list, because the values that leadership represents, they're all things that can't just be done. You can't do inspiration. You can only be inspiration. You can't do reassurance. You can only be reassuring. You can't do consistency. You can only be consistent.
Michelle C.: Yeah.
Chris Lewis: And so, in terms of leadership, there's an awful lot of people at the top that want to be seen to be doing things rather than projecting values. And these days, the values of the organization that people work in are becoming more important, because they see such a catalog of wrongdoing from leadership.
Chris Lewis: They see the Volkswagen emissions scandal. They see the Me Too movement and sexual harassment in the entertainment industry. They see politicians fiddling expenses. They see the banks' wholesale crashing of the economy 10 years ago. They see the treatment of people in the Catholic Church and the scandals that have arisen from that, and the hits keep coming. Only two weeks ago we heard that Southern Water was fined £130 million or so for covering up the fact that they polluted some of our rivers in the South of England.
Chris Lewis: So people are beginning to get the message that leadership is catastrophically unrepresentative and broken. And in order for the good leadership to persist, it needs to return to a set of values, not just a set of numbers that they can do.
Michelle C.: Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly, and I suppose there's that challenge, then, isn't there, because there's a huge aspect of disengagement that happens. Not only do we, you know, trust drops, but from an employee perspective, being driven and led by these leaders, you just become totally disengaged, don't you, if there's no trust there? And there's a huge cost to that disengagement to organizations when you have disengaged. So, that personal connection, that connection of the leader to themselves, drives the connection of the leader within that organization. And I suppose that's a big challenge.
Michelle C.: One of the biggest challenge that I saw when I did a piece of research, actually, around disconnected employees, and a lot of the disconnection is, as we just talked about, driven by the leaders. Do you think then that what these new digital technologies are doing, particularly things like social media where there is this expectation for people to be more visible, to be more transparent, to be more accessible, do you think they're kind of shining a light on the problems?
Chris Lewis: Well, here's sort of tip number one for me, for representative leadership, is that you can't claim that you're accessible and that you're listening if the people that follow you are a tiny, tiny fraction of the people that you yourself follow. I see this all the time with senior politicians. I make the point to them, "How can you expect people to believe that you're listening when you follow three people, and you yourself are followed by millions?" And so I would always like to see leaders to up the ratio of people that they choose to follow, because not only is that a way of getting engagement, but people sometimes are incredibly flattered that somebody in a position of prominence would want to follow. So my message to leaders who are on social media is, follow as many people as you can, because it's very difficult for you to make the argument that you're listening if you don't.
Michelle C.: Yeah, that's a good point. And also you can become a little bit in a bubble, can't you? Getting different perspectives by ...This has come up a few times on the podcast, that that listening piece isn't just about listening to what you want to listen to. It's actually listening to the tough stuff and listening to opinions that you might ordinarily think, "I don't kind of agree with that, but they're coming at it from a different angle." So it broadens your perspective as to what's going on out there as a leader, as a human. So yes, I think that's a very valid point.
Michelle C.: What else would you say that people need to be doing from a comms perspective then?
Chris Lewis: Well, I'd also suggest that they get themselves up to speed on automation, so look at website bots, look at Twitter bots. It's not difficult to program Twitter to pick up a particular string that people are concerned about, a hashtag, and then respond directly to that in an automated way in order to direct those people to the information that they're looking for. Not enough attention is paid to that. There's not enough senior people using aggregators either, like Hootsuite, so that you can see across the board a large number of issues that are being tracked. Because again, with this listening notion, there are a lot of CEOs that have a tendency to approach a problem, every problem, with an open mouth, and that's very dangerous if you don't know the tone of the conversation. And sometimes if you listen to the conversation around a particular subject, you can work out what it is people are concerned about and you can also work out who some of the big opinion formers are even before you engage in that conversation.
Chris Lewis: That brings me back to this theme of using social media to listen to people and gauge their feelings. Of course, it's not the only source that you need to draw information from. You can walk around and talk to them as well, because people sometimes are a bit more circumspect in the flesh, because they'll use social media and sometimes in a disinhibited way, so they appear to be more angry than they actually are on certain subjects, and that's ... also inhibits other people from using social media because they interpret everybody as being angry. I've met people in the flesh who on social media appear to be very angry, but they're as nice as pie over a couple of drinks.
Michelle C.: Yeah, and I think that goes two ways as well, because there's that aspect, but there's also ... It's interesting when I was speaking to a couple of people when they were talking about ideas and innovation that have come from listening and by tuning in to employees, into people that they ordinarily wouldn't have the opportunity to tune in to, great insights have been learned. And to the extent that it's kind of like, "I would never have had that conversation, yet it's a brilliant idea, and we can do something with that." And it's almost a little bit of a hierarchy buster in some respects because if there's permission within an organization or if a leader is listening to the followers and there's a real conversation going on, does that permission to engage, connect ... It becomes a little bit freer.
Michelle C.: I mean, people are concerned about that, often, the freedom of what can be said, but there's a light and shade to everything. There's also that opportunity that people that ordinarily may not step forward feel okay about sharing an idea on a message rather than actually making themselves visible and coming to the front of the room. So it kind of swings a bit both ways, doesn't it?
Chris Lewis: Yeah. I think sometimes people forget that the four most powerful words in leadership are, what do you think?
Michelle C.: Yeah.
Chris Lewis: I mean, leaders don't have to follow the advice, but if you want to get people to engage, then you need to know what they're worried about, and sometimes ... I mean, for instance, if you're in a meeting with men, you never short an opinion. They don't have any problems coming forward with opinions because they tend to have overconfidence, which is maximized, and skill sets which are relatively minimal, whereas in terms of getting female engagement, it tends to be the other way around, and you actually actively have to seek out an opinion. And quite often that is very, very much worth the effort.
Chris Lewis: I think the point that I would make also in terms of innovation is that in my first book, Too Fast to Think, which was very much around creativity and where that came from, I interviewed 40 people and asked them their principles, but where their best ideas came to them, and they said three things. They said they are seldom them at work when the ideas come to them. They are seldom with other people. They're often on their own. And thirdly, and the most interesting piece, is that they weren't trying. They weren't trying. They were were switched off. They absorbed a lot of information, but they'd taken time to switch off and then they were suddenly hit by the sort of great epiphany.
Chris Lewis: And as much as ... As important as it is to listen to other people, it's also really important for people to understand that the creativity and their success and all of their potential is entirely within them. It is not something that's going to come to them with one piece of information from the outside. You have it all already there. You have to decide that you're going to give yourself some space for that to come to you. And so that level of creativity and that level of innovation is something that you have to permit yourself. You have to be able to create the space to do that, and then have the faith and the belief that that will come to you. There's an awful lot of people that infuse their entire day filling every last minute with every aspect of social media, and that denies access to the engine of genius, which is within you.
Michelle C.: Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree more, that people talk about, "Oh, it's a digital detox," but really, it needs to be more of a balance, doesn't it, that we have this time to think, this space, this downtime, and use and step in and out of the channels as a tool, as and when we want to. We don't need to be always on. In fact, it's detrimental.
Michelle C.: Chris, just a little bit about your activity then, because you've written extensively around the communication side of this and indeed around leadership and the future of leadership. What about your own practice within social media? What's your balance? You know, you just talked there about not having this always-on mentality, but, well, how do you actually practically use social? How does it fit into your life as the CEO of your agency?
Chris Lewis: Well, I'm a sort of a bit of a news junkie, so I start my day with about 400 RSS feeds coming into an aggregator around specific subjects that I really want to know about, that I'm particularly tracking. I am @largeburrito on Twitter.
Michelle C.: Yes.
Chris Lewis: It's kind of a derivative because Grand Enchilada, my job title, was already taken, so I had to put up with being a large burrito. Again, a lot of senior people hide behind these massive job descriptions. I found chief executive officer, which is my official title, to be a little bit pompous and sometimes would inhibit people approaching me, so I decided to be a Grand Enchilada and a large burrito.
Chris Lewis: First of all, I start the day looking at every one of my RSS feeds, and then I move into HootSuite and then look at the aggregation across Twitter, and so I use that every day to get a pretty good idea before breakfast exactly what's been going on. And of the journalists that I ... On the media people that I follow, I follow about 4,000 people, so I've got a constant stream of really, really great journalists and all sorts of voices from both sides of the political spectrum, because I just want to find out what people are talking about, and sometimes the great ideas can come from both right and left. And that's probably where you build up a better understanding of what's currently going on.
Michelle C.: A hundred percent. And how is it ... I mean, you're a communications agency, a very successful global communications agency. Is it something that you allow everybody in the organization to be engaged with as part of their role? You're doing it, so it gives permission to everybody else to be on there talking, engaging. Is that something that's embraced throughout?
Chris Lewis: Yeah, I think you've just got to trust people that if you trust them with the responsibility for something, then the authority must go in equal measures in that respects.
Chris Lewis: The point about leadership granting permission is a very important one, Michelle, because sometimes when you're trying to get creativity out of people or you're trying to encourage a certain type of behavior, then it really helps if the person in the leadership role taking responsibility is prepared to make themselves look stupid, to come up with big and stupid ideas, because all ideas create other ideas.
Michelle C.: Yeah.
Chris Lewis: And that's kind of an immutable rule that if you're prepared to go out there with a big stupid idea, and sometimes people will follow that example, and they'll respond by taking creative risks that they wouldn't ordinarily do. And that usually begins with a question that starts with the two words, what if?
Michelle C.: Yeah.
Chris Lewis: What if we were to do this? And again, that is a key way of thinking about leadership in that you don't actually have to tell people what to do. You can just say, "Well, what if we were to do this, and explore the consequences of that particular contingency?"
Michelle C.: Yeah. Do you, from a blend of the social ... We're now in a very much a digital age. People talk about digital transformation, digital disruption, but digital is inextricably ... It's kind of part of what we do. It's how we communicate and connect. It's changing all sorts of industries and the way that we ... and behaviors. So from a leadership perspective, what about those leaders that feel a little bit, and still feel ... Because I still hear people. There's a lot of fear. They don't want to lead by example because they don't feel competent with these technologies. Some of the people I've interviewed on the podcast have said, "Well, these are part of the role now. These are the tools." What's your view on that?
Chris Lewis: Well, I think sometimes people are afraid of what they might say, but the usual response when leadership is communicating with the team is most frequently ... most often it's just silence. If people have got something to tell you, they'll tell you, very probably, or they'll let it be known.
Chris Lewis: But silence is okay. I mean, people just don't wander around every day, saying, "Thanks for paying my salary today," or they don't go to the IT director's office and say, "Guess what? My computer worked perfectly well today. Thank you very much," in the same way that you don't go and thank your parents for all of the stuff that they did for you day in, day out. There's a certain amount of acceptance of that. So you don't have to be on social media to go and broadcast who you are, but you should be there just as another avenue for listening. You don't have to be out there talking every day. I mean, the human being only has two modes. One is listening and one is talking, and so it's perfectly okay to spend the balance of your time listening.
Michelle C.: Yep. Yep. Perfect. And is there anything that you, with both your experience within what you're doing with your clients and also your own experience, that you would say to other ... you think, "Oh, I wish I'd done that at the beginning," or, "I wish I'd known a little bit more." Is there any advice that you would give to somebody, to maybe another CEO or a leader who is setting out and thinking, "I want to engage with these channels a bit more. I want to engage." I'm assuming you're going to say, "Just start listening," but ...
Chris Lewis: Well, I think this is something to say, "Well, what have you got to lose by listening?" You don't have to take it all on board, but also recognize social media isn't necessarily representative of everybody. It's a narrow sample. And it will never get away from the importance of going to just to talk to people, to give them some time, because you find out things which are very important but they often tend to be social rather than related commercially. And from a leader's point of view, one of the things that's caused such a great tragedy and such catastrophic leadership failure is their inability to take responsibility. They're either unwilling or unable to take responsibility, and that's one of the things that we really need to change because the message to anybody who wants to be a leader out there, just take responsibility for something.
Chris Lewis: And that doesn't mean ... That's just not the job for prime ministers or presidents or CEOs. You can do that at every level in any organization, which is to take responsibility for what you do and own what you do.
Michelle C.: Yes.
Chris Lewis: And that can be at every level. I have no idea why we don't teach that leadership right the way through our university system, because we seem to have this idea that somehow if you get really good at analyzing things and get yourself a degree or a master's degree or a PhD, that somehow you're going to be very successful.
Michelle C.: Yeah.
Chris Lewis: I feel strongly that one of the things social media allows you to do is to substitute and to augment that and analytical capability with something that allows you to look across-
Michelle C.: Yes.
Chris Lewis: So not just so drill down, but look across. Not so much analysis as parenthesis.
Michelle C.: Yeah, love that. Brilliant. And I think that that is ... I spoke to Professor Patricia Hind, who is at the Ashridge School of Management. She was saying that these technologies now are all changing the way we're going to have to teach leadership. We need to change the skillset. We need to be bringing in aspects. And she very much talked about this responsibility piece.
Michelle C.: I like to end, Chris, with a few quick-fire questions, just a little bit about you. They're quite big questions, but it's just top-of-the-head stuff that that comes to you so we just learn a little bit about the leader. I'm going to find these at you. Is that okay?
Chris Lewis: Sure, yeah. Go ahead.
Michelle C.: Perfect. If you could change one thing in the world, Chris, what would it be?
Chris Lewis: I'd give people good manners. I mean, it doesn't cost anything to say, "Thank you," to people. It means the world and it doesn't cost anything. Just good manners. Yeah.
Michelle C.: Yeah.
Chris Lewis: It could just make the world a lot easier. Just show the common courtesies. Good manners cost nothing.
Michelle C.: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And as you would think quite a simple fix. Like you say, just costs nothing. It should be pretty simple. But I love that. And what about books? I know you spend a lot of time writing books, but what about books that you read? What have you read recently that's inspired you?
Chris Lewis: Well, I think ... One of my daily reads is the Viz Profanisaurus. I have to say I always get a kick out of reading that and other people's stuff that you couldn't ever mention on a very serious and respectful podcast such as this. So yes, the Profanisaurus.
Michelle C.: Love that. And what about the best piece of advice that you've ever been given to date?
Chris Lewis: Well, I think there's lots of people that can give you advice, but really the best thing that you can do in all aspects of what you're doing is just take responsibility, but people won't tell you very much about that. You don't hear that advice being given. But wherever people are taking responsibility, you'll see leadership-
Michelle C.: [crosstalk 00:28:05].
Chris Lewis: ... and so I can't think of any one person that's given me that piece of advice, but I would also just trust your judgment, trust your own thoughts, and if you can get centered enough in order to get the ideas and creativity we talked about earlier.
Michelle C.: Yes.
Chris Lewis: And also I do believe that within that, that you get some guidance there as to what to do to get it right. Now, that's the difference between leadership and management. Management is about doing things right. Leadership's about doing the right things.
Michelle C.: Right things. Yup. Yup. Perfect. Well, on that, Chris, I'm going to say a huge thank you for being part of the podcast. It's been an absolute joy to have you on the show as such and to tune in and get your insights and advice, so thank you very much for being part of it.
Chris Lewis: Thanks Michelle, and thanks for taking the time today to do this. It's been great fun.
Michelle C.: You've been listening to the Get Social Connected Leader podcast. Thank you to my guest and, indeed, thank you to you for tuning in. Please do feel free to share the podcast with colleagues and friends who you think will enjoy it and, indeed, subscribe to tune in for more episodes.
Michelle C.: You'll find the podcast on all the usual platforms, and all episodes are also on our website, carvillcreative.co.uk/podcasts. You'll also find some really useful digital and social resources on that site too, so be sure to check those out. For now, from me, Michelle Carvill, your host on the podcast, thank you so much for tuning in, and goodbye.
Michelle C.: Oh, P.S., if you're a business leader with something to share around digital and social technologies, and you're keen to be a guest on the podcast, then I'd love to hear from you. You can email me, Michelle@carvillcreative.co.uk.