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Rachel Forde: trust is ‘critical’ to leadership

Rachel Forde: trust is ‘critical’ to leadership

The Media Leader interview

Rachel Forde, CEO of media agency UM UK, talks to Mediatel News about the best approach to hybrid working, ‘the war on talent’ and trust and empathy-first leadership approach.

Rachel Forde dials into our call from home waiting for a PCR result. She is about to go on a safari holiday with her family to South Africa to celebrate her 50th birthday.

Travelling, she reveals, is the reason that UM’s UK boss came to work in the media industry in the first place. She first got “a flavour of media” when she went travelling in 1996 and worked for a publishing company in Sydney.

When returning to the UK in 1998, she moved down to London from Saddleworth in Oldham with her partner and started media life at Publicis agency Zenith as a TV buyer, where she spent more than 14 years. Forde then moved into planning before becoming MD of Starcom’s Procter & Gamble business and then CEO of Publicis Groupe stablemate Spark Foundry, before being poached by IPG to lead UM UK & Ireland in 2018.

Forde says she still thinks media is the best industry and she has the best job you can have even though it’s “really hard”, there are “real moments of joy”.

She talks to Mediatel News ahead of Mediatel’s annual Media Leaders Awards, for which Forde is one of four nominees for the prestigious Grand Prix Award.

Trust and empathy crucial for hybrid working

UM, part of IPG Mediabrands, opened a new office at The Bailey in the City of London in December but they had to postpone their “housewarming” party before Christmas and employees started going in the day I spoke to Forde as the work-from-home mandate lifted.

She says: “We’re opening our doors and encouraging everyone to come back and try it, so it will be a bit of test and learn in terms of what works and what doesn’t, but also I think it’s understanding people’s anxieties around it.”

You have got to remind yourself to “meet people were they are in any situation” Forde maintains.

Hybrid working ideally should be a 50/50 split so people can “design” their week in a way that works for them and this is “a big piece” for inclusivity, Forde says, who is part of the Women in Advertising & Communication Leadership’s (WACL) mentorship programme.

“The trust piece is critical,” she explains. “Just saying, right, we need everybody back right now, five days a week is basically saying I don’t trust anybody’s doing any work at home, and we know that they’re the most productive ever.

“The challenge we have now is how to balance that productivity with focusing on the right tasks but also having space for learning.”

As she goes into more detail about in her column on Covid leadership lessons, you have to find a balance and offering flexible working with learning and development opportunities like All About You and Empowered You initiatives is how UM aims to achieve that.

Leadership ‘is not rocket science’

Forde adds that leadership is not about public speaking and a lot of leadership lessons are like active listening, having a vision and a strategy and living and breathing the values are not “rocket science”.

“Have you got the pulse of the organisation? Are you interested in other people’s opinions? Have you got a a structure of listening groups and communities? What do our teams think? What do our teams need? What do they want?”, she asks.

One such listening group is UM’s Leadership Council which was implemented over the pandemic to feed back to senior leadership on things that were important to them.

Forde also insists being open and transparent on how you are delivering on the company’s vision is important for leadership.

She comments: “Leadership is taking your responsibility really seriously. You are in service of others and an agency is only as good as its people.”

On that note that leadership being about others, she stresses never have an ego and never get blindsided.

Everyone’s struggling with the ‘war on talent’

Companies struggling to hire and retain talent, diverse or otherwise, is worrying many in the industry, enough for Ad Association president Alessandra Bellini to make it one of her key commitments of this year to tackle with a dedicated taskforce.

The talent crisis, shortage of talent, Great Resignation or ‘war on talent’ as Forde calls it is widespread.

“I don’t think we’re unique in terms of the challenges and how tough it’s got. I think all industries are facing a war on talent, aren’t they?” Forde comments.

She explains: “I think the biggest challenge is the talent drain and how do we make sure that media is still attracting brilliant people and that’s why Future Proof Academy is really important to us in terms of how to get to that grass roots of attracting talent into but I believe a brilliant brilliant industry with brilliant career prospects and the ability to to be creative if that’s what you know something you want to do.”

Also, going back to hybrid working, giving people flexibility to come back to the office and a routine will help with wellbeing and what Forde calls “anchors” in a disconcerting world.

Bearing in mind inflation and changes in lifestyle coming into play while balancing learning and development opportunities and the importance of paying someone fairly.

Do not  underestimate traditional media

While many are focussing on the Metaverse, Forde says the next thing is taking a holistic point of media from an experience point of view and seeing a place for all media.

She says UM is making “media experiences” now rather than media plans, and you should not underestimate more traditional parts of media like cinema and out-of-home which are having “the best revival they could have ever had”.

The quality of the platform, the creative, the medium, the environment and shared experience all contribute.

“Obviously, there’s other types of media that work a lot better on a smaller screen, like TikTok so they’ve all got their place, but nothing builds brands like like TV and cinema,” Forde says.

The last film Forde saw in the cinema was Spider-Man: No Way Home which made £84m at the UK box office, the second most-watched film in the cinema last year behind the new James Bond instalment No Time To Die.

These two films alone contributed 30% of 2021’s total box office figures which were £602m (nearly triple the total in 2020, when cinema revenues were ravaged by Covid lockdowns) according to BFI figures.

She adds: “The fundamental of marketing and brand building remains the same, there are just different ways to do it. You’re part of creating brands that hopefully are delivering a service that people want rather than something they don’t want but I think that’s a really exciting career to be in.”

See the full shortlist for Mediatel’s Media Leader Awards 2022, with the winners to be announced on 23 February.

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