Leadership Lessons with… James Stevens, Managing Partner at Rud Pedersen Brussels

Leadership Lessons with… James Stevens, Managing Partner at Rud Pedersen Brussels

Defining company culture, talking about feelings rather than actions, and saying “I don’t know” more. This month, we spoke with James Stevens from public affairs firm, Rud Pedersen Brussels, all about leadership, structure, and having values that represent who you are, and where you’re going. Take a look.

You have experienced considerable growth over the past few years – what would you put this down to?

We have. At the beginning of 2019, we were a startup with 5 people here in Brussels, and we’re now a team of 79. The market itself has grown, which is beneficial, but what I put it down to is the people. 
I believe that focusing on the company culture – how we are, rather than what we do – has been the fundamental driver to our growth. We may be stronger in some sectors than our rivals, cheaper than others, or more expensive; but our people are what makes us different. We compete with ourselves, not other agencies. 

Employee demands have changed, and people are now looking for more than salaries and benefits. What else do you do to nurture a great company culture? 

In those early days, the team spent a lot of time together working to define the company culture, the behaviours that were important for us to articulate and live by. It was an organic process over the first year or two, and led us to embed a strong way of working and being.
That’s something we revisit as a team regularly, ensuring we are still representing those and behaviours, but that they also still represent us. 
Losing the company culture that brought you to a place of success is a big risk for scaling businesses, and it’s worryingly easy to see a culture slip away when the demands of growth begin to take over. 

What are your values and how do you ensure the team lives and breathes them? 

Our values are Caring, Inquisitive and Driven.
We truly have a growth-based mindset within our teams, that personal and professional development will ultimately support the business.
It’s really important to provide visual and written aids – as we do – to reinforce values. We also host off-site team trips during the summer for two or three days to build up the culture, and see how it might evolve.
We also prioritise feedback, but focus on the effort and intention of others much more than outcomes. That’s crucial.

What have you seen the industry do to support an increasing focus on mental health in the workplace?

There’s a lot of talk about mental health in Brussels and in agency life. For us, we’re very conscious of that.
We use something called the ‘Scarf Model’ to help us spot whether anyone in our team is going through mental health challenges, or could be going down that road. It looks at five factors of people’s lives and experiences: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. Typically speaking, mental health challenges will often have a root cause in one of these factors. 
We used this model to help inform and influence the people management side of our leadership. We wanted to enable conversations about feelings rather than actions in a way that was safe, and equip line managers with the capabilities to have those conversations – not just about client projects and relationships, but about someone’s experience of it.
We prioritise coaching methods in our leadership, and ask plenty of open questions to encourage those conversations too. 

As the Managing Partner what do you see as your role in 2023 and how have you structured your business for success? 

You can be great, but not at everything. Having partners, associates and peers that are exceptionally different from you is key. Different in mindsets, in strengths, priorities and so on. 
For me, bringing good people in and giving them the platform to excel in what they’re passionate about is a great structure that enables collaborative working and ‘success’. I want people to feel like the firm is as much theirs as it is mine. Voicing opinions is a responsibility, and that’s something I want to encourage.
I want to say ‘yes’ – to opportunities, needs, ideas.

What do you think are the key qualities that a leader needs to sustain a positive work environment? 

Confident humility. It’s an Adam Grant concept: you know what you know, but you’re humble enough to know that there’s a whole bunch of other stuff that you don’t know. And you might need to learn, always. That’s what leadership is to me.
Something I also really try to do is to say, “I don’t know.” That doesn’t come naturally to me, but I do think that’s an important quality in a leader. When someone has 20 years’ experience, it’s easy to assume they must know everything – or almost everything. It’s almost never the case. 
Saying “my current thinking is…” gives you and others the chance to change your mind, change your view. I want to give people that opportunity.
To clarify it was Brussels that was the start up rather than RP – which was already 180 people in the Nordics and 15 years old…
The corporate website doesn’t reflect the values we’ve adopted as a Brussels company.