Bossing It: Strong Teams = Scalable Superpowers with Heath Campanaro
One of the most highly regarded leaders of major events and immersive experiences in Australia, Heath Campanero has spent the last 20 years heading-up the Australian office of a leading global event powerhouse. Heath was the youngest ever creative director at Imagination, the youngest general manager and then director - and he helped grow the agency from 4 to 120+ staff in Australia, delivering some of the most inspiring, exciting, ambitious experience and digital projects ever seen in Australia.
He has spent his career building brilliant creative teams and delivering the biggest and most important live projects, leading major public events like Sydney New Year’s Eve (2011-2018), the Centenary of the Royal Australian Navy, flagship installations at Vivid Sydney and the Spirit of Anzac Centenary Experience, the largest ever touring multimedia exhibition in Australia.
Heath is well-regarded as a both a creative and cultural leader, and is trusted by C-suite. brands and institutions to deliver their most important projects at the highest level… every time.
This year Heath stepped out to create Supergiant. Supergiant is about delivering the kind of work and projects that people love. Experiences they choose to do in their free time with the people they love. Things they save for, travel to go to and remember forever. Immersive live entertainment experiences that bring design, music, lighting, tech and content together in new, huge, beautiful and unexpected ways.
LBB> What was your first experience of leadership?
Heath> I landed in leadership positions early in my career. Probably the right place at the right time, but I was promoted to creative director at 29, then GM at 30 - both roles I was completely unprepared and underqualified for.
But I had the support of our team, our clients and the global board so of course I jumped at the opportunity... who wouldn't. I guess they could see that I cared immensely about the work, about our people and about delivering the right outcome. So perhaps they knew that I was going to do whatever it took to not let anyone down.
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?
Heath> I always consider myself an accidental leader. I had no training, no tools, an overseas management team and board, and no real understanding of the type of leader I should be. I just focussed on being honest, working my guts out, and caring a lot about what we did and who we did it for.
My approach was to stay really close to the work, the team and our clients, and always be 100% accountable for the good, the bad and the ugly. I'd seen so many leaders drift from their teams and become disconnected from clients and the work we deliver for them... and I knew that wasn't a leadership style that was going to work for me.
LBB> What experience or moment gave you your biggest lesson in leadership?
Heath> I guess like so many of us, we learn our most important lessons through blood noses. In my previous role, we'd experienced 5 years of rapid growth, then in one 6-month period three mega, multi-year projects finished - between them holding over 50 staff.
Perhaps because I was too close to the people and wanted to do the right thing by everyone, and maybe because I hadn't experienced that kind of contraction before, I naively thought I could fill what was a multi-million dollar revenue hole with new business.
We fell short month after month, and before we knew it we were in a massive hole. We cut too slowly and the process of rounds of redundancies created fear, distrust, and impacted our culture in a way I couldn't have predicted. I felt like I'd failed the business, our team, and definitely myself.
In hindsight, too much empathy can be damaging too. Sometimes being decisive and immediate can be a more effective leadership trait in tough times.
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?
Heath> I think people can be taught to manage, but I believe most leadership behaviours are innate. You can pick a leader in a playground, in kids sports games and most of the way through high school - and often really early on in the workplace.
Sure there are aspects of leadership that are skills and can be taught or even mimicked - but there is something unique in leaders that shines through, often in the most stressful or uncertain times. It's a wild combination of instinct, fearlessness, compassion, determination and a certain clarity in decision making that don't necessarily come naturally to others.
Great leaders also have the ability to communicate authentically. They connect with people in a way that resonates, engages and makes others believe in and want to follow the journey you're on.
LBB> What are the aspects of leadership that you find most personally challenging? And how do you work through them?
Heath> I've never been brilliant at the management side of leadership. I'm not excited by detail, I'm terrible at follow-ups and career conversations, and I don't always bring people on the journey of how or why I decided on something. I've been fortunate enough to have brilliant people around me that help fill in these gaps, and I put processes in place to help me close the loop on communication - but it doesn't come naturally.
LBB> In terms of leadership and openness, what’s your approach there? Do you think it’s important to be transparent as possible in the service of being authentic? Or is there a value in being careful and considered?
Heath> I am a very open leader. I've always felt that people should see the good, the bad and the ugly as it plays out. When communication is honest and regular, people stand taller with pride in good times, or step-up and want to be part of the solution when things aren't smooth sailing. Keeping secrets, avoiding the conversation or sugar-coating the reality only causes distrust in the long-run and just isn't worth it.
LBB> In continually changing market circumstances, how do you cope with the responsibility of leading a team through difficult waters?
Heath> Honesty, integrity and don't be scared of showing vulnerability. These last four years have been the strangest in living history. There was no playbook for what we've been through, and there's no doubt leaders got as much wrong as they did right trying to get through in one piece. And I still don't think we're clear on what the future holds for our businesses.
The nature of work has changed, consumers, employees, culture itself has shifted forever, but I'm not sure any of us know what tomorrow looks like... but it's OK to say that. It's OK for leaders to be honest and tell their people that they don't have all the answers. It's OK to ask for help, to admit that sometimes you've gotten it wrong. Be open. Communicate regularly. Ask for help. Strength in a leader is a virtuous trait - but strength in a team is a scalable superpower!
LBB> As a leader, what are some of the ways in which you’ve prioritised diversity and inclusion within your workforce?
Heath> I started my career in traditional advertising in 1999. When I reflect back on it, it was almost a monoculture of middle-class white people. But I was young, and it was really fun. We were friends, we wanted to drink together, we all loved the same things, and mostly thought the same way.
As I eventually made the leap to major events, I was surrounded by a completely different group of people. The event world is completely different. It's diverse in age, background, skill-sets, and a muck-in, hard-core mindset of 'makers' that are working against the clock to get stuff done.
There are the usual office roles of course, but once you get to site, there are builders, riggers, nocturnal lighting designers, scenic artists, set-designers, programmers, labourers, and teams of people that sit in dark rooms quietly, competently making magic happen - most of whom to this day I don't really know what they do. It was eye-opening and so refreshing. Was it classically diverse in terms of ethnicity... maybe not, but it was completely diverse in every other aspect.
I learned that hiring people who were completely different to the stereotype I'd come from became our most powerful weapon. Viewpoints and creative input from completely different professional experiences and personal backgrounds created this incredible melting pot of ideas that invariably made us better creatively, and culturally.
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?
Heath> Culture is everything. It defines what we expect, what we accept, what we value, how we behave and how we treat our people. Culture is this invisible glue that binds us to an idea, to each other or to a place. I've seen culture at its height - where the energy in the business feels electric, where everyone is in lock-step, aligned and absolutely committed to be at their happiest and best. And it almost always aligns with an agency doing its best work and being its most successful.
But culture is also extremely fragile. It's almost impossible to keep positive cultural momentum forever. One bad hire, one poorly handled situation, a client loss, a string of pitch losses - they all have a major impact - and a downward spiral can be really hard to arrest.
There is no doubt it's been harder to keep the level of collective energy and culture up since Covid. I'm a believer that great, trusting relationships are forged in adversity. Cracking a challenging brief, meeting an unreasonable deadline, collectively delivering an incredible outcome against all odds... and in our case in the world of events - during those long days and nights bumping-in, trouble-shooting shit that isn't working, running stressed-out rehearsals, and eventually delivering something extraordinary.
So my tip is, ensure the team is together in the gnarliest times - the times when we need each other the most, and where we learn to trust each other as a result. Pitches, presentation rehearsals, client feedback sessions, onsite, on set, and at the pub after all of them!
LBB> What are the most useful resources you’ve found to help you along your leadership journey?
Heath> Family, friends and an open, honest leadership team. I find that more often than not just talking about things with a range of people helps you consider situations from new angles.
My wife is a journo, so I'd get this honest 'pub test' response from her that invariably focussed on how our people would feel about this or that thing I was doing. Mates from other industries who have a completely different take on leadership would give me new ideas and perspectives. And being able to canvas a leadership team who represented all parts of the agency, in an honest, trusting environment was always my most important resource.
Oh... and making time for a third space. For me it was on the bike or in the gym. That hour or so of time in my own head to play out scenarios has always been sacred for me.
