Leadership Lessons with…Victoria Dean, CEO at Portland

Leadership Lessons with…Victoria Dean, CEO at Portland

This month we interviewed Victoria Dean, CEO at Portland. Victoria shared her thoughts on nurturing a thriving company culture, diversifying recruitment in the industry, and the key role of a CEO in 2023.

What do you see as the key role of a CEO in 2023?

The job of a CEO is to lead your team. At Portland we don’t build anything or have a supply chain, but what I do have is a brilliant set of brilliant people and their minds, and so my entire job is to ensure that they are motivated, happy, learning, and growing, so that they stay here and continue to provide their brilliance to my clients.

There’s another piece to the role that is about making sure we’re selling our services, but fundamentally, making sure we have good people who want to be here, and can be at their best selves at work, is my job.

The people who work at Portland are bright, brilliant, ambitious, demanding, motivated, thoughtful, challenging – and they challenge me. My job is to keep tending all the time to a culture and an environment, and an ecosystem that people who do this kind of work want to be in.

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

I think fundamentally you have to believe that leading people is the job and the thing you’re here to do, and you also have to care deeply. My vision of being CEO of this company is that I really care about people that care about the brand, I care about our values, I care what others think, I care if we win – that is what drives me.

That being said it’s not enough that I turn up and care deeply. Whilst that is an umbrella for the rest of it, you also have to have a really clear vision for your business – preferably one co-created with others – and you have to be steadfast in sticking to that.

What do you think some of the key challenges are for leaders in 2023?

Particularly in the comms industry and particularly now, finding and retaining talent is an ongoing challenge. Post-pandemic we definitely haven’t figured out quite what the new normal is. We have a lot of brilliant young people who work for us and for quite a lot of them their relationship with an employer is one that came from the pandemic, which is a completely different experience or world to anybody who has been in the working world before Covid. As a result, their expectations, fears, and anxieties are quite different. Brilliantly, I find that young people are much more demanding of their employer than they were when I was young. It’s definitely another set of things for me to think about and address and be thoughtful about with them and for them.

We are also in uncertain economic times, and we have also been in political uncertainty for some time. In our industry both of those things make it difficult to win clients and persuade them to part with their budgets. It’s also tough to get clients to change; it feels like people are uncertain and so choosing not to make decisions.

The other thing that’s hard right now in our sector is that the landscape looks quite different than it did a few years ago. There has been a real fragmentation in PR services in a way that there hasn’t really been an advertising, for example. We love being able to do this deep, tailored work in the mid-sized space, but we also want to grow. I am currently trying to find new ways in which to make mid-size brilliant!

What do you think the future of hybrid office working is? And how have you and can you still create a thriving culture?

It’s hard, which means we have to work harder at it and think differently and creatively. In our offices, we now have a truly flexible working policy which is designed to suit us all. Clients are asking to see us again in person much more and those expectations will change things for us as an agency.

One challenge we do have is that our brilliant juniors used to learn by being in the room with loads of other people and listening to how other how other people did things. It’s much harder and more clunky when done remotely, and for that reason I’m very pro people being in the office regularly in order to achieve that osmotic learning.

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?

Portland has always had team drinks once a week in the London office and that’s a steadfast part of our weekly diary. My favourite thing that we do is host afternoon tea with a speaker – and those speakers really vary from session to session from journalists and key political figures, to a Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer and Holocaust survivor. The idea is to stimulate people by having a perspective offered up to them in a very accessible way.

I would also like us to do much more cross team collaboration and for there to be more touch points. I want us to do things that are relevant to our business when we come to work and that aids our growth and development. We have lots of training programmes, and one of our challenges is that we have more training opportunities than people feel able to take up.

Furthermore, we’re trying to make sure that our senior leadership team members and I rotate where we sit around business and we just did our inaugural new joiners coffee morning yesterday, which means that I’m physically meeting every new person that comes to the business in a small group setting.

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

I think in our industry we are getting better but we’ve been late to the party. People work really hard in this sector in very fast-paced environments where you are often pitching, competing and chasing, and that can be bit of a roller coaster and create a lot of pressure.

Because of all of that I think it’s particularly bad as a sector that we’ve been slow to address mental health. We talk about it in our business, and we have support networks in place, but I think there is still work to be done in the wider sector on catching things before they happen.

What skillsets do you think businesses within comms are looking for in 2023?

I don’t know if the answer is about much deeper specialism or much broader strategic thinking so that we can do more integrated work. In my view, comms is now much more about asking what is the client’s problem? What are they trying to achieve, or solve? And how do I build the best team around them to fix that? So, on the one hand, what you need is an agency that is full of brilliant specialists, but alongside that you need people who are passionate about solving comms problems for clients. I think my conclusion is that there is space and a need for both.

What do you think leaders can do to help with diversity and inclusion in the communications industry?

This was the first agenda item at my board meeting today and that in itself is the first thing that I can do. We have a brilliant DEI committee here, run by staff who are volunteers and where I am the champion for it – and that’s incredibly important to me as the CEO. Demonstrably taking it seriously and yet making sure it doesn’t come solely from the top is really important.

Some of the solutions to improve DEI in the industry are introducing processes; for example, from now on if a recruiter or headhunter sends us a shortlist that is not diverse, we’re going to refuse to look at any of the candidates in order to hold ourselves to account.

In the longer term, we are talking about changing our internship scheme so that we can offer different time durations. We’re also revisiting apprenticeships and which university milkrounds and tours we go to. I think the fastest way you can make the change is in your hiring.

At Portland we are doing a really good job of raising awareness by celebrating a whole series of diversity moments. We also now have a menopause policy, an IVF policy and a miscarriage policy – all of these are steps in the right direction, but there’s much more to do.

There are increasing expectations on companies around sustainability – what things have you been doing to get on board with that?

We’ve just started to think about the B Corp movement, and I think that is increasingly going to become the benchmark. We work in a building where all of our office services are mandated by our owners. As a result, all of the agencies operating out of this space live under the Omnicom sustainability policy which, as far as I can tell, is very good.

We are starting to also look at other behaviours which are more specific to Portland. For example, we donate to a number of charities every year, and we are discussing whether we should insist that each year one of those charities is a sustainability or climate change organisation. Maybe we could do things that are a little bit more useful or helpful on our away days. Small changes send a signal to the team that these things are important.

The really difficult one is around clients and that is the unanswered part for us right now. Providing sustainability comms is probably the most impactful thing that Portland can and will do going forward.