Bossing It: Empowering and Uplifting Those around You with Elisha Pearce
Elisha Pearce is a highly experienced business leader with more than 18 years of agency and client leadership experience. She currently takes the role of joint managing director of Iris London, after her move from managing partner after 16 years working across a broad spectrum of clients, including Starbucks, ABRDN and Pizza Hut.
With a long history at Iris, Elisha’s strength in creating effective brand-led comms has resulted in award-winning work, including ‘What’s your name’ for Starbucks, which won the Channel 4 diversity in advertising award and subsequently 21 awards for the agency, including a Cannes Gold Lion.
As well as overseeing the agency’s client base, Elisha takes joint responsibility for strengthening Iris’s social capabilities with the launch of a new ‘social-first’ proposition designed to plug the gap between social specialists and traditional agency models - ‘Iris Inc’ which stands for 'Igniting New Creators’.
LBB> What was your first experience of leadership?
Elisha> I’ve been lucky enough to manage people since the very start of my career, which actually makes things easier as I don’t know any different. It’s like being an older sibling or a carer as a child, it feels heavily ingrained into your nature. I’ve never shied away from taking the lead or being in control. That said, coming back after my second baby in 2018 and stepping into a new role (which I was newly promoted into) felt huge. It was a new account for Iris, super-fast paced, briefs were flying in and there were opportunities everywhere. However, the limited process from the client and the ever-changing requests/landscape meant my team was close to burnout.
That was a sink-or-swim moment.
Everyone was looking at me to give them reassurance, the solution and a plan - all in one go - and within my first week back. I had to really think about if, and how, I could be the leader they needed me to be. That is where I needed to bolster my natural leadership qualities with a much more structured and intentional style. I needed to make sure no one got lost (myself included).
LBB> How did you figure out what kind of leader you wanted to be – or what kind of leader you didn’t want to be?
Elisha> It was on that account that I started really shaping what type of leader I wanted to be. I have been on the receiving end of a diverse range of leadership styles from both agencies & clients – so took learnings from different scenarios throughout my career. Some of the biggest complaints people have about leaders are that they don’t do what they say they will do, they don’t empower their teams to be able to make decisions, or there is no clear vision of what they are trying to achieve together.
I believe when you care about who you work with and make them feel 100% supported in and out of work, then they will feel truly empowered. And when people are empowered, they are motivated and more often than not, high performing.
But it took me around six months to find my feet in the role and a lot of trial and error in the different approaches I took.
LBB> What experience or moment gave you your biggest lesson in leadership?
Elisha> I had someone working on my team who started off really strong, with a real spark and talent. For various different reasons though things started to slip and they started to underperform. This had an impact on their confidence and was on its way to impacting the client and team around them too. But I still saw the potential. I knew it was there. I didn’t want to take the easy way out and exit them so instead I worked really closely with them on a PIP plan. Their confidence returned and so did that potential we first saw. I also saw an opportunity on another account that they were much more suited to, and from then on they’ve never looked back. I’ve watched them grow and grow and continue to smash it. And whilst that meant losing them from my team, I am incredibly proud of the part I played in their progress.
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?
Elisha> I actually felt like this was my sweet spot. I knew I could run highly successful, motivated and empowered teams, but I was looking for the opportunity to do that at scale. I first had to navigate the tough years of AD, GAD and BD where this isn’t necessarily what’s expected of you – they are more after your strategic and creative acumen which I had to craft first.
I'm also a mother of two so even if I hadn’t been a natural leader, my two girls would have got me up to speed. I take a lot of practice from work at home and vice versa. Both parenting and leadership are about understanding people’s individual needs and motivations and reacting accordingly.
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?
Elisha> If you have done the personality test, you will understand that there are many different types of leaders - all with our pros and cons. Listening and empathy are a big part of successful leadership but so is assertiveness. The best leaders, I believe, possess a wider spectrum of colour at the start, as you often find that means they can tailor and adapt themselves to the environment that they are in to get the best out of people. For me, that is mostly a natural personality and the skills they execute their leadership with, are taught through learned experience.
LBB> What are the aspects of leadership that you find most personally challenging? And how do you work through them?
Elisha> The more logistical people make decisions without a doubt - promotions, pay rises, critical feedback, exits, etc. I think most would say the same about me because it’s impossible to not care about the team of people around me who are working their arses off, and the impact your decisions make on the quality of their life, or their future. It can feel huge.
However, you have to make tough decisions that are not just right for those people but also the business which can sometimes result in an internal conflict.
I have to be more buttoned down on the vision of where I want to go, and the impact on both.
LBB> Have you ever felt like you've failed whilst in charge? How did you address the issue and what did you learn from it?
Elisha> Yes, when we lost a big client on my watch when I was a BD. Although it was a joint responsibility, you can’t help but be hard on yourself and really question what you could have done differently.
Some time has passed on that now, but the reality is that we should have been firmer on the issues on their side that continually weren’t addressed and backed ourselves and our people more. That’s easier said than done. But it really is important to deploy radical candour and face tricky situations, no matter the size and importance of the account to the agency.
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?
Elisha> For people that know me, they know me to be honest and transparent – as I do want to be as authentic as possible. However, as you climb up the ranks, you are privy to more information and have to be more careful and considerate.
It all goes back to radical candour for me. Radical candour is what happens when you show someone that you care personally while you challenge directly, without being aggressive or insincere. It really just means saying what you think while also giving a damn about the person you're saying it to. This isn’t always easy and reflecting on my relationships with some of my clients over the past 15 years, radical candour hasn’t always happened. You can have a great relationship with most of your day-to-day clients, yet fear can mean you never really lean into the conversations that matter.
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?
Elisha> I was at a talk in Cannes last week where the speaker questioned the need to have a mentor because your scenarios/backgrounds could be so different. Could a mentor who doesn’t truly know you, help give sound advice to your situation? I have found it really valuable to have multiple mentors at the same time who are a lot more senior than me, both male and female and who have challenged me with different perspectives. I don’t tend to discuss immediate day-to-day things with them, but more long-term career questions or blocks I’m trying to work through. They have had the ability to make me remove myself from short-term goals that I was getting hung up on and really start to look at the bigger picture. It sounds simple, but by changing the way I think and approach my goals has been a game-changer for me. It’s made me feel more empowered and more in control, which in turn has allowed me to remain really motivated now that I understand the path that I am on.
LBB> It's been a really challenging year - and that's an understatement. How do you cope with the responsibility of leading a team through such difficult waters?
Elisha> I have always put a focus on my mental and physical health. Exercise is key.
A cycle ride is like my own mindfulness time where I decompress and process things, without this I would go mad!
However, I don’t always get the balance right.
As a point of my promotion - which was a huge proud moment – I broke out in a nasty stress skin rash. I mean doing a house renovation at the same time and living in it with two small kids, was probably slightly ambitious, but it was my body’s way of telling me that I needed to ensure I was carving out proper time for myself.
LBB> This year has seen the industry confronted with its lack of action/progress on diversity and inclusion. As a leader how have you dealt with this?
Elisha> I’m lucky at Iris in that we have been fully committed to creating a more diverse and equitable workplace for quite some time.
We still have more to do but seeing the difference in the last few years is already pretty inspiring and motivating. We've changed our hiring systems, created networks to empower everyone within Iris and put in place an incredible amount of training around biases. For me, a huge part was launching enhanced policies around paternal and maternal leave, a menopause policy, a period policy and policies around fertility and adoption. It's also inspiring to see the new talent coming into the agency and up the ranks.
We’ve just launched our new grad programme ‘The Door’ – that’s what’s been missing since the pandemic, we stopped recruiting young, diverse talent. And our partnerships with Stonewall, Creative Equals and Brixton Finishing School (amongst many others) mean we are getting the best possible advice and direction from people that know more than us.
LBB> How important is your company culture to the success of your business? And how have you managed to keep it alive with staff working remotely in 2020?
Elisha> I believe the relationship and culture within agency life has dramatically changed since covid-19 and it’s definitely become more transactional as a result. The biggest challenge is creating a culture and environment that people want to be part of and thrive in when they are in the office (which is no longer five days a week). We have over-invested in creating that same feeling we had in the office pre-pandemic, and at the same time we understand that those days when people are working from home aren’t written off when it comes to culture.
On one hand, you do have the existing employees who are so grateful to have a 3/2 day split and understand how great that is in comparison to pre-pandemic, but then you also have new recruits who have never known what it’s like to work in an office five days a week and may be struggling to reconcile why they need to go in at all.
But culture isn’t about parties and socials. It is about how a company makes you feel and how you invest back into it. Culture is supporting mental and physical health, DE&I, learning and upskilling, and career development opportunities. Whether a company is hybrid, remote, or fully onsite – all of these things need serious investment.
LBB> What are the most useful resources you’ve found to help you along your leadership journey?
Elisha> Manifesting. Yes, yes, I know how I sound right now, but honestly, it changed everything for me. I found myself manifesting in a particularly dark time last January. My husband slipped a disc in his back the previous October and was rehabilitating. We all had covid-19 over Christmas and New Year, so all plans were cancelled and I was left running the house, two kids and my full-time job.
Manifesting allowed me to carve out time to be ‘selfish’ and really think about what I wanted to achieve, how I wanted to feel in my job, and my life, what that looked like and by when.
Once I had this vision, I then started working through the different techniques - but the absolute biggest shift was working through my limiting beliefs and those little niggling doubts that creep in. Addressing where they come from and working through it, feels like unlocking a superpower.
But the proof is the pudding. Everything I put on that vision board to achieve in two years, has happened within 18 months.
