Phil Marshall of Shoot the Moon

We work in strategic brand, creative, digital and content services. We’ve got studios in Manchester, Lancashire and Leeds. The individual studios provide distinct services, but internally, we work more as one team. We have the talents of Shoot the Moon, Eat & Breathe, Anytime after 9, JGM and now Delineo within the Group.

For example, if a client wants great food photography, they'll come to Eat and Breathe. But outside our award-winning content team, there's another 80 within the wider business who can also contribute and take a broader role, if required.

We've got a separate leadership team who run each of the studios, but it's very fluid. By the time we’ve fleshed out a brief we may have pulled in talent from a number of the studios, to answer the brief effectively.

We work across a range of sectors with specialist knowledge of food & drink, retail, leisure & lifestyle, public sector and third sector, finance, tech and we also have an increasing volume of work with clinical, healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Clinical trials have been pretty big in the last few months as we’ve done a lot in and around recruitment for the covid trials. Our clients include companies such as TUI, Pets at Home, Stoves; brands you’d be aware of, down to small independent restaurants in Manchester or Leeds and B2B brands who lead in their sectors.

There are two sides to what we do. There’s our creative / technical ability, then there’s our sector knowledge. We've got broad sector knowledge but we don't dabble in sectors that we don't understand. We can only add Value when we combine both our core skills and sector insight - we’re very mindful of that. In clinical and healthcare for example, we've just acquired another agency. As well as bringing more talent into the group, what we have also acquired is 20 years of essential sector experience.

Our industry is people, there's a lot of technology and software involved, but anybody can buy that. Fundamentally, what makes us who we are, is the team.

When we started out and had a small team, we were all working closely together and so buy-in to ‘the plan’ came naturally. As you grow the team to 20, 40, 60 and now 80, then it becomes a full time job to work with the team, nurture and develop them, and look for the next cohort to come through and drive the team forward.

Nurturing talent, learning & development; keeping the team inspired, focused, and aligning to ‘the plan’ is the challenge. But it's always worth spending time on.

The structure is whatever makes the team perform. It’s finding the balance of being aligned to your customers’ requirements, but also ensuring that the team feel engaged and part of something.

There's a structure in terms of line management, performance management, learning and development. Operationally we work in project teams, so we'll pull a project together which might be three people from one studio, two from another, and a guest now and again, because we benefit from their involvement on specific projects. What we've done is build that agility into our operational team, but not to the point that the team don't understand where they're going or where they're going to be this time next year. It's a balance of operational agility, aligned to customers requirements, and a strong service model, but also ensuring that the team are engaged and understand how they contribute.

You know you've struck the chord, when you see things happening in the business that you've had very little to do with, that feel good and you’re proud of.

You can get stuff done if you put a rulebook in place. Look at it like McDonald’s; if you want a burger to be a certain specification, you can have all the equipment and everything can be programmed, you can make a lot of burgers that are perfectly to spec and quality. But when you get into the realms of agility and creativity, then leadership comes more into play. It ensures everybody keeps to the rhythm in the business. To have the same outlook, understand why we're here, but not produce a ‘standard’ product, the team need to make judgments and more importantly, the right judgments. To me, that's where leadership comes into play. It’s about creating the culture that delivers the full proposition. When that proposition is dynamic, and when what’s right for for one customer is not right for another, the team need to assess and respond to the situation.

Leadership is about continually reinforcing why we're here, what journey we're on and ensuring that everybody understands what part they play, to the point it becomes second nature. You know you've struck a chord, when you see things happening in the business that you've had very little to do with that feel good and you’re proud of.

When you've got a small business, the leadership and culture is very much around the founder or one of the directors who sets the rhythm. As you get bigger you need to move it away from one point of reference and make it something that the team own. We spent a lot of time working on culture at Shoot the Moon, now stm_grp, making sure that the team understand ‘how we do things here’. What colleagues then start to do, is become the leadership team, because they marshal themselves, they understand how and why we do things, and then they start to refine aspects of the operation themselves.

Leadership is not something that you bring in every now and again for a bit of a ‘rally the troops’ because you've listened to the latest podcast on the way into work. It’s something that you need to do continually and it then becomes infectious. I’m not saying, don't listen to podcasts, but be very careful about how you apply new thinking to the business, and make it natural, joined up and consistent.

You see a lot of businesses where you walk into the reception and there's a plaque that talks about their vision and culture. Everybody just walks past it every day, or for the last 12 months, it’s literally been left hanging on the wall. Clearly management have gone and locked themselves away for a day and come back with something they think encapsulates something, but then has no impact on the business day to day.

Culture only works, when it's genuinely woven into the day to day. And it's a really difficult thing to do. It's something that you’ve constantly got to focus on and nurture. If you spend the time doing that, it's hugely productive for a business, because you don't then have to micromanage. It then starts to cascade across the business and becomes second nature. What you then find is you're happy to simply empower people. And the team are happy to be empowered, and to be held accountable. The team’s confidence grows because they're doing things within the culture that collectively everybody's agreed to. Improvements that you hadn’t even thought about start to spawn.

Don't get me wrong, we don't get it right all the time, but that’s part of the journey. Not getting it right all the time is ok, it's accepted because the team know that the rest of the team will always be there to catch them and put things back on track - we’ll learn from it and be better. If that's part of your culture, then it's a safe environment to develop and be creative.

We've spent a lot of time not just discussing this, but actually leaving it with the team to go and chew over. The way that we communicate it to new members of the team, isn’t actually driven by me. It’s written by the team. I've rubber stamped it and agreed with it, but actually it's theirs and it's in their words. This is far more effective than me having a stand up every week, that's not the way we do things because the culture is owned by the team, by the business itself, not just driven by me.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

- David Ogilvy

If you've developed a business with people who are always less capable than you because it makes you feel superior, you'll have a really poor business. You need to surround yourself with people who are better than you. On that basis you should let them get on with their job.

When it’s your own business, and you're excited about it, there is a propensity to get too involved. And sometimes you have to tell yourself that it's not your job anymore and that you've got far better people in the business. As much as you'd like to get your hands dirty and you love it, you need to be strict with yourself.

One of the things I've had to learn to do is to just let the team get on with it, rather than roll my sleeves up, and jump in the trenches. Part of a healthy culture is making sure that the team know they're in a position speak up, to tell you when they don't agree with something that’s developing, when anyone is not behaving true to the culture that we've agreed, that's a good thing to have.

When it's your business and you're passionate about it, and you’ve put your blood, sweat and tears into it, admittedly, it can be difficult to step back.

We should always make time for people and bring them along willingly. Short term rewards are one thing, you can get things done, but if we're talking about leadership and management you've got to spend time making sure that the team genuinely want to come with you and they see long term benefit. Being open and honest, is huge. We have something in our business called ‘brutal honesty’. If you're unhappy come and tell us - if there's something wrong, if you don't get something, speak up. You'll get a straight answer, if you don't agree with it, we’ll make time to talk about it a bit more.

Culture is a current.

It’s the things that you put in the business that create a current, like a river. It's based on genuine engagement, support, goodwill, buy-in, loyalty, respect, and a mutual exchange. That current is your culture. It carries the team with it, makes it easy to do the things right and harder to do the things wrong by swimming against it.

When you've created the positive flow within the business, and anybody who jumps in naturally gets taken along with it, the business gains positive momentum.

In tough times it’s tempting to batten down the hatches and dispense with everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Leadership is often one of those things. But in tough times we need more leadership not less.

- Quarterdeck

As much as during the pandemic, leadership is going to be massively important as we come out of the global health and economic crisis. People generally like a little bit of consistency in their lives, something to put a hand on that doesn't move, but everything's been moving over the last year. So we're needing to massively dial it up, particularly while we can't see the team physically.

That's something that we've definitely missed. We can operate remotely but operate is just functional, we really excel when we're together, that’s when more magic happens. Leadership is also far easier when you're in closer proximity, so we’ve had to innovate to compensate for this. For a performing team, solid leadership, agility and clear direction are top of the agenda.