Bossing It: Alistair Fitch’s Glass-Half-Full Mentality
Alistair Fitch co-founded Digital Natives in 2013, with a firm belief that social media had the potential to become a brand-building ecosystem and play a much more central role in brand's marketing and advertising.
He established Digital Natives’ social-first positioning and thinking, which has been successfully implemented across their client portfolio. Over the past decade he has driven the agencies' growth, now working with a variety of global brands across FMCG, beauty, fashion and tech.
LBB> What was your first experience of leadership?
Alistair> My first experience of leadership was just seeing what it looked like in the first place - understanding how other people behave. For most people, you don't know what leadership is until you experience it for yourself. So in that regard, it was probably from my parents, teachers, or bosses in the early stages of my career that helped shape my approach.
This was in both a positive and negative way - in the sense that you experience things that you liked or didn't like. On one hand, you receive guidance and leadership that allows you to find where you feel comfortable or you can think “would I want to be led or guided in that manner, as a son or daughter, as an employee, as a student, etc”. So I kept the behaviours that motivated me and pushed me forward whilst I ignored the ones that didn't.
LBB> What experience or moment gave you your biggest lesson in leadership?
Alistair> I think it's a bit of a cliché, but it's the defeats and the losses that tend to define you. It shows a lot more strength of character when bouncing back from adversity, whether it’s losing a client or losing a pitch, and it’s where real tests of leadership and character lie.
In the early days of Digital Natives, these mistakes were magnified because they meant so much more at that time. We didn't have so many pitch opportunities or that many clients, so everything had more of an impact. I really learned a lot about how to keep the team motivated by focusing on what we could control.
With pitches generally, there are so many variables beyond what you show the client and how you interact with them that are at play that you can't control. So I think it's about facing adversity, focusing on the controllables, responding with optimism and hunger to succeed, and being more future-focused.
LBB> Did you know you always wanted to take on a leadership role? If so, how did you work towards it and if not, when did you start realising that you had it in you?
Alistair> I started Digital Natives when I was 27 and prior to that I was working at a very fast-growth startup agency. So even in my mid 20s, I was in a position of management. I became familiar with guiding, nurturing, and getting the best out of people so it's something that I've always felt comfortable with. It was always something I did day-to-day, not something I'd been formally trained in. I was and I still am very much curious about people, their behaviours and how to motivate them. And more broadly, from a work perspective, how human motivations inform the work that we do for our clients.
I often find that when promoting people or looking for leaders within the organisation, it's the people that are really good at their jobs, not necessarily at being managers, which is sort of what I found about myself really. I just got my head down and did my job really diligently.
Ultimately, as a leader, you need to have skills you can impart onto others, as well as holding them to account to reach the standard that you're setting in the organisation. We're not a big agency with people in management roles that just do management; everyone at Digital Natives is driving direct impact and has a breadth of tangible skills that the clients are more than willing to pay for.
So for me, there wasn't a light bulb moment that went off where I felt “I am now a leader”. It just happened over the best part of a decade.
In terms of experience and the skills involved in it, early on in my career I was really lucky to be put into an environment where there were just 10 of us at the agency and it grew to 85 over the space of four years. I was exposed to working in the agency and on the agency at the same time, which doesn’t happen to the majority of people until much later on in their career.
LBB> When it comes to 'leadership' as a skill, how much do you think is a natural part of personality, how much can be taught and learned?
Alistair> I've never really been taught. I have had managers and I've had all the things I mentioned earlier, but there's never been sessions where people sat me down to teach me how to be a manager. I know there are lots of people that do, but I do think there are people that are naturally more inclined towards management roles as well.
I'm massively into sport. The analogy there is people are natural leaders and get selected to be captains of teams – not because they've had coaching to be a captain necessarily, but there's a natural, almost tribal instinct towards finding leaders. Tribes have been around for thousands of years, and they haven't gone through a management training program to become the leader of the tribe!
I think in my case at least there is a natural inclination towards leadership - as well as an acknowledgement that there's always room for improvement.
LBB> What are the aspects of leadership that you find most personally challenging? And how do you work through them?
Alistair> I think it's changed somewhat now, but definitely when starting an agency it was the impact on personal relationships.
At my last agency we had about 80 people and we were having the time of our lives. It was so fun growing up with them. You always remember those early days in agency land in London, it was a wild ride! I built some of the best friendships, and I am still very close to a lot of those people. I think about it as the heydays really.
But when you then go into starting an agency where it's just two of you on the same level, and then you start hiring and get to a reasonable scale, you're no longer peers, you're their boss, and that's a very different relationship that you have to have.
So you go from having a massive friendship group at work where you can hang out afterwards, have beers, socialise all the rest of it to a bit more distance, and it’s a bit more professional. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't have to be like that necessarily, but their challenges and your challenges aren't the same and that perspective changes because you're the boss.
Now I feel like we've found a lot more of a happy medium. We're a bigger, more established agency and I feel like we've really struck that balance between professional and personal with the team. It's not big enough to be super corporate, where we're not present (it's an open plan office and everyone gets on really well) but at the same time, you do have to respect boundaries. I can see why agency leaders say “it's lonely at the top” – because you switch from being a peer to a leader.
LBB> In terms of leadership and openness, what’s your approach there? Do you think it’s important to be as transparent as possible in the service of being authentic? Or is there a value in being careful and considered?
Alistair> I think like most things in life it depends. I think we're a lot more open and transparent with our team than where I've worked previously - and that was a conscious decision I made from learning from experiences.
This includes what we're doing from a commercial perspective, sharing financial information, what the vision is for the agency, what our growth plans are, what our hiring strategy is and what our new business plans are. We're very open and candid about all of that and try to give the team as much visibility as possible because when we're communicating the vision of what we're trying to achieve as a group, it's so important that everyone has the context.
But that said, it is a balancing act. What you don't want to do is to allow people to lose focus on what their individual contribution is. It's the layering of each person's individual efforts and targets that allows you to collectively achieve more, and become bigger than the sum of the parts.
LBB> As you developed your leadership skills did you have a mentor, if so who were/are they and what have you learned? And on the flip side, do you mentor any aspiring leaders and how do you approach that relationship?
Alistair> In the early days of Digital Natives, there came a point at which we wanted and needed support. So we brought on chairmen and advisors in the past which has been really good. We had the ex-deputy CEO of Tesco, Tim Mason, who was really valuable in the early years of our business. He is extremely revered in the marketing and advertising circles - and was responsible for the advent of the Tesco Clubcard. He also came from the client side so it was really good to get the perspective of someone that's worked with some massive agencies on big accounts.
At the time when we were working with him, he was at this interesting intersection of his career, and was looking to understand and to embrace digital and social - things that we were doing as he was transitioning away from the very retail and shopper-focused business that he was working in so many years previously. So he's seen it and had a really interesting perspective on where and how we could show up to drive value for our clients and also how to run and scale the business.
And then, subsequently, we have some great past clients that often act in a pseudo advisory role as well - because they lean in to what we're doing and they're really interested in us as an agency and often give their perspective outside of the work that we're doing together.
Some of them are no longer clients with the agency but still meet up with us on a regular basis. Rajiv Chandra, for example, who used to be a very senior marketeer at Reckitt Benckiser has set up a really impressive, direct to consumer mum and baby brand called Mum & You. Their whole proposition was around premium nappies and skincare for mums, with a positive environmental angle towards it.
It's always a pleasure to speak to him given he’s worked in both the corporate and startup worlds, and there's always something to gain from the conversation, whether that's professionally or personally.
LBB> In continually changing market circumstances, how do you cope with the responsibility of leading a team through difficult waters?
Alistair> When you're in our line of business, the impact of certain market conditions is more acutely felt. Whether that's geopolitical, economic, or pandemics!
Our perspective has always been on really trying to over communicate to the team, the impact of these things on the business, and being transparent and candid - but also approaching it with a glass half full mentality.
Without getting too stoic about it, it's never the situation, it's always about your reaction to the situation. In that regard, I think I've always tried to paint a realistic picture about the situations that we're in and what we're going to do about it. Having a bias towards action is always so valuable as well. And that's going to be measured, obviously. You don't want a kneejerk reaction to the situation, but worrying about the situation isn't going to make it any better either.
So if you can really communicate the situation you're in and have a clear plan of how you're going to get out of it, then I think that's what people want to hear.
LBB> As a leader, what are some of the ways in which you’ve prioritised diversity and inclusion within your workforce?
Alistair> There are a number of initiatives that we've done in the past and some we continue to undertake. One of those was partnering with Brixton Finishing School. They help find jobs in the creative industry for underrepresented communities and people that have had non-traditional education and upbringing. It's really amazing business. I’m on their mentorship scheme which helps mentor students through their summer programme as well as supporting them in the early stages of their career. I find the mentoring work really rewarding and hopefully it’s valuable to the mentees!
We also have our own summer internship program as well, where we look to bring students from diverse backgrounds into the agency. We're actually currently building out our own graduate recruitment program, which is almost like an extension of that summer internship program. I think as an industry, we're marketing a lot of the time to a really broad, diverse range of people, and we need to reflect their opinions, values and thinking within our own businesses.
They have different backgrounds, ethnicities, sexual orientation and you need that diversity and breadth of thinking in your organisation if you want to avoid sort of that groupthink mono culture that can emerge.
LBB> How important is your company culture to the success of your business? And how have you managed to keep it alive with increases in remote and hybrid working patterns?
Alistair> I think it's really important. Anyone that doesn't tell you that is probably fibbing, from an agency leader's perspective at least.
We've worked really hard to really embed that into our business. To be a values-led organisation and to allow them to inform everything that we do - from types of people that we hire to the types of work that we take on, and the way that we deliver work and the clients that we want to engage.
A couple years back, we did a big rebrand and repositioning piece and ramped up our marketing and we've allowed those values to seep through into that type of activity as well. Allowing the whole team to get involved so they can help live and breathe those values, not necessarily through the work that they do, but how we express ourselves as a team to the wider world.
LBB> What are the most useful resources you’ve found to help you along your leadership journey?
Alistair> There is this really great podcast called Agency Dealmasters, which I love. It’s a niche B2B podcast by Nathan Anibaba. He interviews agency leaders and talks about not just leadership, but their whole journey, what they've been up to and showing their struggles.
If I go out for a run and chuck on a podcast, it's killing two birds with one stone. I take a lot of value from listening to stories about other people's journeys and experiences.
There's a great book from Paul Cowan called ‘Connecting with Clients’. He used to work in agency land for four decades and has actually now become a relationship counsellor. It's really interesting because he's coming at it from a psychological perspective. It’s about deep-rooted human truths and behaviours around how you connect with people, what that dynamic is between an agency serving a client - is it a master-servant relationship, or do you have parity in terms of the relationship?
It's so interesting because a lot of the behaviours are very subliminal, and about actually being conscious of how those relationships are evolving. It's not necessarily limited to clients, it's also applicable within the organisation, because ultimately, it's a people-powered business and it's a service-led organisation.
I think a lot of times you can get wrapped up in the work and the product but, fundamentally, it's the people that drive it forward and without the people agencies are nothing.
