Leadership Lessons with… Kate Gomes, Head of Strategy at MHP Group

Leadership Lessons with… Kate Gomes, Head of Strategy at MHP Group

Why empathy is fundamental to strategic communications, the importance of staying connected, and the types of skills businesses will be on the lookout for in the future. We recently spoke with Kate Gomes, Head of Strategy at MHP Group all about her career in strategic communications.

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What do you think are the key qualities needed from leaders to thrive today?    

One thing that’s really changed since I started out is that leaders need to be willing to get their hands dirty. Gone are the days when you can turn up to the office, join the occasional meeting and say useful things. To be a good leader today, you need to be willing to put in the work, and to help people make their thinking better.

Secondly would be problem-solving. I work in an environment where everyone is really good at their jobs. My job is to help them when they get stuck, or when the question or solution isn’t clear. These are the moments when you can add value as an experienced leader.

Thirdly, having freedom and frameworks, and knowing which to use when. As a leader, you should have models and methodologies, but you shouldn’t always lean on them. It’s about understanding a problem, and whether the best way forward is to build something bespoke, or lean on something you’ve used before.

What skills do you think businesses will be looking for in the future?

There’s always an instinct to say, “tech”. But the requirements to understand technology will change throughout the course of anyone’s career. Advancements like AI will change things, that’s true, but we can also overegg how impactful that will be for the next generation, for whom advanced technology will be completely normal.

The continuous truth of our industry is that people skills come first. You can teach people how to write a press release, or develop a strategy. But there needs to be an inherent empathy and questioning mindset that is fundamental to how we work, and is much harder to teach.

What will also become more important moving forward is a sophisticated understanding of society – culture in all its forms, and the ability to understand others. Cultures, societies, tribes are constantly in flux and the quest to understand them has to be constant.

What is the role of a communication agency’s strategy department in the success of client campaigns?

Every comms strategy department works in a slightly different way, so there’s no universal truth. But, at its heart, strategy is really the narrowing of the funnel. As an agency, you’re given a broad challenge by clients, and strategy provides a route to help the rest of the agency effectively address this challenge. We are about managing the overwhelm, and making rational reasons for certain decisions.

At MHP Group, I think strategy plays a key role in three broad sets of challenges:

Brand strategy: what does a brands stand for in the marketplace – how does it show up authentically and differentiate itself in a way that its audiences want to talk about?

Reputation strategy: how do brands understand and address challenges to their reputation?  How do they build the “right” reputation?

Creative strategy: how do we develop a campaign that works for right now, for our brand and which audiences will get excited about?  

In the rapidly evolving world of communications, how do you stay updated on industry trends and best practices to remain effective?

I always try to stay connected with other strategists. It’s our job to know what’s going on in the world, to think about it, and we all think in different ways. I’m a member of two industry groups – these allow me to work with strategists and discover what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, and the way they see the world. 

The second is to attend events or read documents by specialist organisations that provide quantitative data or insights. They give us a deep dive into what a certain audience feels about something, how they’re behaving and what the most interesting future trends are.

The third and probably most important is about being a magpie.  Collect all the shiny things. Increasing your knowledge through noticing what’s around you, reading and listening to a range of content, and having interesting conversations.  In a world of a million potential inputs, the ones we remember and connect to tell a new story are what will make our work unique.

What do you think are some of the trends we can expect to see in the industry?

Aside from tech, I think there are a couple of big changes happening.

Firstly, as an industry we are starting to recalibrate how we think about audiences. As humans, we say our demographics don’t define us. But as an industry, we’ve been very poor at acknowledging that. Some of it is because it’s the way data has been collected in the past.  But if we really want to connect with people, we have to understand what defines them and what they are passionate about.

So I think the direction of the industry is to expand how data is collected, and determine different ways to speak with and understand audiences in a way that reflects how human beings actually are.

And related, but separate, the industry is starting to take into account more of the academic thinking about how we truly influence behaviour. We work closely with academics and partner with a behavioural science agency to bring that nuanced insight and perspective into our behaviour change campaigns.  Sometimes it’s as simple as adjusting a sentence or changing a word, while other times a sophisticated experiment is needed to discern the best approach.  But this connection with academics is a game changer.

Of the most rewarding aspects of your role, what keeps you motivated in such a dynamic industry?

I work with really nice, smart people.  That’s the basis of everything. Everything else could be perfect, but if you don’t enjoy your colleagues, its tough to enjoy your job.

Before I became a strategist, I always struggled between roles which were fast-paced and interesting, but not as cerebral as I would like, and roles that were very cerebral but very slow.  

What strategy has enabled me to do is read detailed reports, do quite detailed thinking, deal with data, but do it at a pace and with an outcome that you don’t get in as many environments. It allows me to constantly stretch my brain and develop new thinking in interesting ways.

Because there are 200 people in the agency and I work with every team, from Capital Markets to Brand and Reputation, no two days are ever the same. It’s very hard to be bored.

What advice do you have for professionals who want to work in strategic communications? Are there any specific skills they should look to develop?

Collect shiny things. Be a magpie. Spend time with people, explore, listen, watch, make unusual connections. The best strategists find the unexpected logic and a really simple way to say “this is what I’ve noticed and this is why it matters to you.”