Ep 378: Emma Armstrong of FCB - "The Responsible Leader"

Fearless Creative Leadership

Here’s a question. What are you responsible for?

This week’s guest is Emma Armstrong. She is the CEO of FCB New York. Most recently, the office was named Agency of the Year at the Clio Awards. Both as an office and as a company, the last few years have been stellar by anyone’s standards.

There are always many reasons for a company’s success, particularly when that success is sustained - the hardest kind to achieve. In my conversation with Emma, she described client relationships in a way that stayed with me long after we had said goodbye.

Unlocking creative thinking and innovation is hard to do when you are in a vendor-supplier relationship. Because, while creativity is the most powerful business problem solver we have, it requires conditions and an environment not always present when one side is telling the other what to do.

Creativity and innovation are fueled by trust. And trust happens when you believe that the person on the other side of the table, or the screen, cares - genuinely cares - about your well-being.

The creative industries have many people who do not engender trust. They demand more for less - more output for less money. More commitment for less respect.

But the true and full power of creativity is unleashed when all parties take seriously the responsibility that each of us has to the person across the table.

Brand, agency, employer, employee. Parent, child, friend. When both of us can put the other person’s interests first, well, that’s when the world is changed.