Nancy Hill of Marcus Thomas
Are you taking care of yourself?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 241: Nancy Hill
Here’s a question. Are you taking care of yourself?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I’m asked to help their leaders discover their full potential and maximize their impact on the business and its people.
Welcome to the intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Nancy Hill. She’s the CEO of Marcus Thomas, and the former CEO of the 4As. She was named by Advertising Age as one of the ‘100 Most Influential Women in Advertising History’.
Nancy recently wrote an article for AdAge. The link is in the show notes for this episode. In the piece, she describes discovering that she was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Leadership is lonely. I’m hoping that we can change that over the coming months and years but for now, it’s a truth. Have a plan, know the answers, don’t show weakness. All of these are the expectations when you agree to be the leader.
And while it’s true these expectations are placed on you by others, they are even more emphatically placed on you by, well, you.
The needs of everyone else become your greatest concern. If there’s time left over you’ll worry about yourself then.
The only flaws in that thinking are that it doesn’t scale and it isn’t sustainable.
What’s the alternative? How do you build a lasting foundation for your leadership that allows you to unlock your own potential and the potential of others?
“First of all, you have to model the behavior. And if you want a healthy workforce, you have to model a healthy lifestyle and a healthy way of living. Many times I've been asked if there was anything I would have done differently in my career, and many times I have answered, “Yes.” I would've started taking care of myself a lot sooner.”
When Nancy said this to me, it immediately took me to something that Colleen DeCourcy said to me when she came on the show in March of 2022.
“I did not take care of myself. I put the work in and all the other things in front. I didn't stop and deal with, you know, my life. I just kept going, always trying to hit escape velocity where safety was on the other side. And so, no. Was it worth not having good health for a career? No. Could I have done it without compromising my health? Yes. So it's kind of a double answer. No, not worth it, but it could've been done without doing that, so my bad.”
In 1870, global life expectancy was less than 30 years.
1870 was only 150 years ago.
Today, we have reached the point that biologically, if we avoid serious disease and unhealthy lifestyle choices, our bodies are capable of lasting 150 years.
Already, the life expectancy of a child born in the West means that they will live long into the 22nd century. By the time we reach the 22nd century, life expectancy will almost certainly take us well into the 23rd.
That means children born today will have great grandchildren who will live in the era of Star Trek. Boldly going where no one has gone before.
The future is coming at us faster and will last longer.
A leadership style, philosophy, paradigm that places your own emotional and physical well being behind the needs of everyone else, may feel selfless in the moment, but is actually designed to minimize the depth and length of the impact you could have. Should have.
The era of ‘get to 60 and stop’ is over. The era of ‘get to 60 and start’ - not just a new chapter but a new book - is already here. Will you be ready to meet it? Will you be able to? Physically? Emotionally?
They say that every journey begins with a single step. For years, I believed that meant movement forward.
But what I’ve learned is that the first step for any leader needs to be to stop. To pause.
Because, if you want to make a difference, if you want to drive creative, innovative and economic success for your organization, if you want to unlock the full potential of the people and the business for which you are responsible, then step 1 is to understand what you need.
Here’s Nancy Hill.
Charles (04:54):
Nancy, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Nancy Hill (04:58):
Hi, Charles. I'm so happy to be here. I haven't talked to you in so long. This will be a really good chat, I think.
Charles (05:05):
And what prompted the conversation was the extraordinary piece you wrote, and then republished, on LinkedIn. Rather than me paraphrasing it, would you mind, for the few people I imagine who haven't heard the story, would you mind just giving us the quick synopsis of that story and why you chose to tell it, tell it now?
Nancy Hill (05:21):
So I was married to somebody who was a chronic alcoholic. I didn't recognize it at the time that we got married. I thought he just liked to drink wine, as we all do with meals and so on and so forth. But we were living in San Francisco and we were both working in the ad industry, by the way. And he and I were away on vacation, and I noticed that he was starting to look a little jaundiced. And so when we got back from vacation, we went to the doctor’s and they immediately admitted him to the hospital and through a process of elimination, he was diagnosed with alcohol-related liver failure and was immediately put in the ICU, and thus began a pretty harrowing journey for us.
When you are diagnosed with that kind of liver failure, it's basically a situation where you have to get a liver transplant or you're not going to live. Now, you'll be able to survive for a short period of time while you're getting ready to go through this. But you have to immediately quit drinking. You have to stay sober for a year. They've made the requirements for getting a new liver very strict because there have been, there were some famous people in the past who got new livers and kept on drinking and abused the second liver. So he got out of the hospital, we agreed that he was going to get himself ready to go through this whole thing, but very quickly discovered that he couldn't stop drinking. And he ended up in the hospital several more times.
But the particular incident that I wrote about was a night when he came out of the bathroom and he collapsed in front of me. And when the body is going through liver failure, the blood has to go somewhere. I don't, I don't want to get graphic, but seeing that, in your own living room with your spouse in front of you, essentially bleeding out, is a pretty traumatic experience. And he ended up back in the ICU that night, he lost about a third of his blood and they didn't expect him to live, but he did. And we continued to go down this path. He ended up in rehab more than once. Eventually he got out of rehab, I think it was the first time or the second time, and went into a sober living house and got thrown out of the sober living house because he was drinking cough syrup, which has alcohol in it.
And eventually I had to distance myself from him because he was going to take me down with him. And I had to lock him out of the house. And I had to make some pretty hard decisions about our life. At the same time all of this was going on, I was running an agency in San Francisco that was fairly successful. We had a large number of tech clients. It was called Goldberg Moser O'Neill. And the dotcom craziness was on the way up and then quickly on the way down. And so I didn't really have peace at either end of my life. I would go into the office and there was all kinds of craziness going on. I would go home at night and I didn't know what I was going to find. And there were so many times during that period where people who knew maybe even slightly what was going on would say things to me, “You're so strong,” “I don't know how you're doing it.”
And I would just nod my head. But inside I was screaming, “I'm really not that strong! I don't know how I'm doing it either!” Eventually I found my way to two things. One was Al-Anon, which really helped from the standpoint of, you're not the only person going through this. There's nothing wrong with you. There's a community here who can help you. And two, a therapist who finally said to me one day, “You do realize that you have post-traumatic stress disorder, don't you?” And I had no idea that that was something that happened to anybody, but… and police officers and maybe ER people. I mean, in hindsight, of course it makes sense, but it's really when you find yourself in such a traumatic situation that your brain doesn't know how to process what you've either experienced or seen. And it decides to shut down that part and yet relive it in either your dreams or in other ways when you get triggered.
So through many months of therapy and EMDR, which is an eye movement detection therapy that allows you to, at the moment, you're processing each moment of that traumatic experience to process it one piece at a time, and eventually get yourself to a place where you no longer are traumatized by it every time you think about it. I was able to find myself in a much healthier place. So, about that same time that, I had locked him out of the house, and decided in order to take care of myself, I was going to have to distance myself, my company transferred me to New York, and I moved to New York, and put him and that piece in a little box and sort of put it to the side. And I eventually was hired by another agency in New York. And about eight months after I started at that agency, my husband passed, and I got a phone call from his mother saying, you know, I fully expected that day to come.
I knew it was going to. But even when, you know it's coming, it's something that you aren't emotionally ready to handle. But my boss didn't even know I was still married. People I worked with didn't know I was married. Because I had put that whole part of my life in a little box. And imagine going into your boss and saying, “I need some time off because I have to go to San Francisco to deal with my husband's remains and take care of all of those things.” And the look on his face was just incredulous, of course, because he didn't know the situation. That's not to say that they weren't supportive, they were. But what I am always struck with when I tell that story now is that I had so put the whole thing in a box that nobody knew, and to then all of a sudden open up that box and have to relive that again was painful.
But it was also one of those moments where I went back into therapy and got the help I needed and then was able to go on about it. And now, 20 years later, I'm actually able to talk about it. But it was a pretty harrowing experience that I wouldn't wish on anybody else. But as I always say to people, all of that experience is something that has made me who I am now. And I don't think I would be who I am now if I hadn't gone through all that. And in some ways, makes me a more empathetic person and somebody who's much more easily able to recognize when somebody else is going through a traumatic experience.
Charles (13:30):
What do you live with today? How much of that has an impact on you today?
Nancy Hill (13:37):
Yeah. Well, it has an impact on me every single day. But not in as traumatic of a way as it did at the time. I think when you have pain like that, that pain never goes away. It's always with you, but it becomes less and less and less over time. And it's more like a little pinprick every once in a while that reminds you that that happens to you, so that you, you don't forget. But I think I was able to eventually forgive Steve, that was his name. And I was able to forgive myself for having put myself in that situation. And I think once you can get to a place of forgiveness, it makes the pain a lot less painful, for lack of a better way of putting it.
Charles (14:23):
Do you feel resentment or guilt?
Nancy Hill (14:28):
Well, I mean, listen, when you're dealing with somebody who's choosing to drink, there's a lot of resentment because you feel like they're choosing to kill themselves, which is essentially the way I looked at it for a really long time. But I remember telling somebody the story a few years after Steve died, and this person looking at me, and by the way, this person was sober, and had been sober for a long time. And this person who didn't know me looked at me and said, “You suppose that for Steve, the idea of getting sober, going through the year of proving that he was sober, going through all the psychological tests, getting a liver transplant, and then living that, living that way for the rest of his life was just too much?” And I, in that moment when that person asked me that question, I thought, wow, I never thought about it that way. I had never put myself in Steve's shoes. And once I was able to do that, it gave me a much better view on what that must have been like for him. And I started the process of being able to forgive him.
Charles (15:41):
I would imagine going through something that was traumatic is that there'd be very little room and space to be able to look at it from perspective. You must've just been in pure survival mode the entire time.
Nancy Hill (15:51):
Absolutely. Survival mode was exactly the mode I was in. And running an agency at the same time doubled that, I think because it was such a crazy time in San Francisco at the same time. And I was just trying to protect people's jobs at the same time that I was trying to deal with what I was dealing with at home.
Charles (16:10):
Well, and I'm curious, as well, because I think in the similar situation, my instinct based on my background would've been filled with a sense of, why don't you love me enough to want to fix this? Did you have that experience?
Nancy Hill (16:25):
I definitely had that experience, and that's where Al-Anon was really helpful because everybody in that room felt that same way about their parents, their partner, their spouse, their child, and was experiencing the same thing. So you start to get a better understanding that no matter how much they love you, they can't stop. I mean, and interestingly enough, Charles, having this conversation so shortly after Matthew Perry died, and if you read any of the interviews that were done with him, one of the interviews, he actually said, “I realized that my mind was trying to kill me, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
Charles (17:07):
Wow.
Nancy Hill (17:08):
It's such an insidious disease, but in the moment, you don't, you as the spouse, you can't realize that. All you can realize is, why can't you just stop? I mean, with a lot of education and a lot of reflection now I can look back on it and understand that he couldn't stop. But at the time, yeah, of course, it was, why don't you love me enough to want to save our lives, right? Or your own life?
Charles (17:34):
I was also struck reading the piece that you described coming home one night after you got him into a clinic temporarily, and just being grateful for the peace and not being, having to worry about what you were going to be confronted by. And I was struck by just the desire for normalcy, just for the mundane must have been overwhelming at times. Just give me something that is predictable.
Nancy Hill (17:56):
That's exactly right, because I didn't know what I was going to be coming home to. I didn't know if he was going to be sober. I didn't know if he'd been drinking all day. I didn't know if he was going to be passed out. I literally had no idea what I was coming home to every night. And when you're dealing with the chaos of agency life - even on a good day, agency life is chaotic, but during the dotcom up and down in San Francisco at that time, it was like there was no peace at either end. So when he went into rehab, I think it was the first time I remember going to pick up dinner and running into somebody from work, and I was picking up something with mushrooms in it because Steve didn't eat mushrooms. And my, this person said to me, “Oh, it looks like a really good dinner.” And I was just so excited that I was going to go home and have a dinner that I wanted for myself that had mushrooms in it and have peace and quiet for the evening.
Charles (18:53):
You said you've received all kinds of outpouring as a result of the piece in AdAge, and then when you posted again on LinkedIn, and that you said people have just come forward with their own stories, and told you about those. Are there themes as you hear those stories? What are you struck by when you read them and hear about them?
Nancy Hill (19:14):
What I'm most struck by is how alone everybody feels when they're going through those experiences and how they don't feel that they have anybody to talk to. Whether it's somebody who might offer them an empathetic ear or whether it's a therapist. I think there's such a sense of, as I mentioned in the piece, don't ask, don't tell, about mental health and mental illness, that people are afraid to admit when they have a problem. Whether it's a problem that's brought on by themselves or by somebody else that they're in love with, whether it's a parent, a child, a spouse, a partner. And I think that feeling of being alone, if I could say, if I could get across anything to anybody, is that you're not alone. And that there are people out there who are willing to listen and who are willing to talk, and that there are resources for people.
You know, in my case it was both Al-Anon and therapy, but there are a lot of different places for people to find that help, that you don't have to be alone. I mean, that's the thing that scares me the most is how alone people feel. And, you know, we don't know what that means in terms of how people take their health seriously or whether they might do something even more drastic than…. I never personally felt the need to take my own life. But if you're in a dire situation, you can understand where if you are, so you feel so all alone that you don't have anybody to turn to, that somebody might feel that way.
Charles (21:01):
Yeah. And it strikes me, it struck me when I read your piece, that there are at least two sort of foundational issues at play. One is the thing you described early on, which is not realizing that you were suffering from PTSD. I had a similar experience, different lens, but I had a similar experience. I was struggling a few years ago, and I was talking to a friend of mine I'm really close to, and she said, you know, “Let me lend you this book. I think you should read this book.” And the book is called The Body Keeps Score. And it describes trauma in exactly the way that you've described it. And I was about two pages in suddenly realizing trauma doesn't mean what I thought it meant.
I had exactly the same perspective you did. I thought trauma meant you had to have been shot at in a battlefield or in a violent car crash, or something physically violent had to have happened to you. And of course, that's not true. Trauma is different for all of us, and it depends hugely on the life experiences we've had. It can actually go even before that. I mean, I've done some work with people who suggest that the experiences that we have in the womb can be traumatic, for instance. And so you can just show up in the world pre-wired to respond to certain situations in certain ways, that make it very hard to cope with certain dynamics that come with living. And I think the other issue is that you and I spend a lot of our lives in industries in which impression is a really, really big part of whether you're successful or not.
And so we've been taught, and have taught others, how you show up is really important. I was talking to a client this morning about body language, which requires that you conceal anything you might be worrying about and conceal the doubt you've got and actually walk in and make an impression in a short space of time. How do you think we can best help retrain, reeducate people to understand that, A, trauma is a much more personal experience than any of us have really ever understood? And B, that being successful is actually a human experience, not just a professional one?
Nancy Hill (22:59):
So I'm going to answer that question in a second, but I want to go back to what you were saying about how we're trained at a very early age, possibly even in the womb. And I'll just give you a backdrop on me that I don't know if you even know this, Charles. My mother was born in China and raised in the Philippines, and her family was captured by the Japanese during World War II and did not get out, and the entire family was put in an internment camp held by the Japanese during World War II. And she was held in that camp from age eight to age 12. So she was 12 years old when they were released. And they came to the United States basically as refugees. My grandfather had been an expat from World War I, who never came back to the US, married my grandmother, who was Russian.
They had no money. They ended up on the West Coast, they had to find a sponsor. They moved to Baltimore. My mom found a way to get herself into college and get scholarships, and met my dad and moved to Warren, Pennsylvania, a little teeny town in the middle of nowhere. She did not want anybody to know about her background. She kept it quiet. We knew that she had been held in a prisoner war camp, but that's about it. She did not talk about it until many, many, many years later when she and some of her fellow prisoners were invited back to the Philippines for a formal apology by the Philippine government for not having intervened. She went through a cathartic experience at that moment and was then able to talk about it. But I lived my whole life in a don't ask, don't tell environment.
So I was taught this at a very early age. I think that was part of that generation, by the way, too, in terms of not talking about mental health. There's no way anybody in my family would've gone to seek treatment. My father, who is a very intelligent, very educated man, and had friends who were psychiatrists, said on more than one occasion that he thought psychiatry was the treatment of the ID by the odd. So this was sort of the viewpoint of that generation. I think in terms of that, I'm hopeful that what I'm seeing in the younger generation, maybe not so much Millennial, but Gen Z in particular, where mental health is top of mind for them. They talk about it, they talk about going to therapy. They talk about taking care of themselves and having to take a mental health day.
I'm hopeful that that's going to push us to be a lot more open about this as we move forward. And that we will be much more considerate of what treating a whole employee as a whole person looks like, rather than just what we see outwardly. And that, to your point about the impression, is also about how you're able to bring yourself to today's meeting or tomorrow's meeting, or the meeting with the client. Because we feel like we have to shed anything that's going on in our lives in order to have that impression with our bosses or with clients. And I think we have to be able to say, “You know what, today's not my day. I have to have the camera off, or I have to have another time to have this meeting because I'm, I just can't do this today.”
Charles (26:47):
I think to add to your point, there's a school of thought, one that I personally ascribed to through my own experience - it doesn't have to be true for everybody, but it is for me - that that trauma can be passed on genetically. That what your mother experienced can be part of your DNA, even though you never lived through it. And I've seen research and evidence that suggests that the biological transfer of trauma is absolutely not just possible, but absolutely a truth, I think, for many, many people. So I think people are often too dismissive of their own experiences and say that, you know, I should be able to overcome whatever it is, and I should get past that and I should be, you know, tough enough. And I think that's a reference point that, again, we've all been taught.
Just tough it out and, to the victor, the spoils. There's so much, not just language, but I think expectation around what it takes to be successful, certainly in the business world, that is so fundamentally damaging to the experience we have on a human level from a life level. And I think when you flip to the other end of life, and you look back, everything you hear from palliative care nurses about what we will care about when we reach those final days and weeks and moments, has very little to do with the professional success that we've had. All of that stuff is forgotten and really largely irrelevant. And I was present, in the last days of my mother last summer - I did a short podcast episode on it. And I can certainly speak from that personal experience that my mother wasn't thinking about the things that she had accomplished.
She cared only about the relationships that mattered to her in that moment, with me and my sister, and with people that have left already. So I think helping people to understand the totality of the experience that they're having and where some of the stimuli come from that they're responding to, is absolutely critical. I'm also conscious that, within the marketing communications industry, we tend to overlook the need to help the people who actually have the greatest influence in all of this - the leaders of companies, the leaders of the industry - to really understand their own situation and their own dynamic and their own trauma, and to understand what is triggering them. Because, you know, if the leadership is in a good place, the company is likely to be in a good place. And if the leadership is struggling, the company is struggling. From a leadership standpoint, who do you think takes responsibility for helping the leaders of organizations, businesses, and industries to make sure that they are as cognizant as they can be about what they're dealing with and how they might be being triggered and responding to certain situations? Where do we start that conversation?
Nancy Hill (29:28):
That's a really interesting question. You know, one of the things that has occurred to me since I wrote that piece, and I have had so many people reach out to me, is that I keep hearing, “That was very brave.” You know what, I'm at a point in my career where I can do this without worrying about the consequences. And that's not to sound immodest, but that's to say that I reached a place in my career where I have very little downside to me coming out and saying what I said. So I don't want to be looked at as being brave because “brave” would've been talking about this 20 years ago when it happened. And I think that what I worry about is one of the things that I wrote about in the piece, when I was being considered to be the CEO of the 4A's, and the selection committee was going through the process that they were going through, including checking references.
They called my then boss, from when I was running the agency in San Francisco. And I know he was trying to be very complimentary when he said, “Let me tell you about Nancy Hill. She was going through some personal trauma at home, and she was dealing with a chronically ill husband.” He didn't know the extent, but, “and she was running our office during a tumultuous time in San Francisco, and she came in every day and she ran that office. You would never have known any of that was going on with her.” Again, he was trying to pay me a compliment, but in hindsight, it was because I wasn't telling him, he wasn't encouraging me to tell him. We didn't have that kind of a relationship where I felt comfortable talking about what was happening. So I think no matter who you are, you have somebody you report to, whether it's a board, an outside investor, I think being willing to have the conversations about how are you doing and not letting somebody say, “Fine,” and get away with it is an important part of making sure that your leadership is healthy. And we care about whether they are diagnosed with cancer.
So why can't we care enough to find out that they might have something that they need to take care of with their mental health? And I think that's part of the problem that we run into, is that when somebody says, “I have to take care of myself because I need, I have this diagnosis that needs to be treated.” If it's a physical thing, we all nod our heads and say, “Okay, yeah, no, do whatever it is you need to do to take care of yourself.” But because we can't have that same open conversation about mental health, we don't know, and it's left unchecked between us.
Charles (32:27):
There's an urgency about this, I think, as well, which is that COVID blurred the lines between the office and home. It blurred the lines in terms of hierarchy. It blurred the lines in terms of location. Companies are struggling like crazy to figure out, what does all that mean now? And you've got people trying to do different things and different companies finding that employees are less willing to come back than they want, and how do they respond to that? And can we be a three-day-a-week business, or is it four, or are we completely virtual? I was talking to somebody a couple of weeks ago on the podcast about the fact that how you structure your work week or your work experience is going to become, in and of itself, a competitive advantage in a way that pre-COVID, it never was. Before COVID, you had an office, people came to the office and you predominantly came five days a week from nine or 10 until six or eight or whenever.
And that was the standard. Now that's not true anymore. So, that becomes a potential competitive advantage. It strikes me, too, that the more that talented people recognize that they have the right to live a healthy life, not just a successful one. And the more that companies are able to build that understanding, expectation, commitment, and support into the way that they are structured, can in and of itself become a competitive advantage. I'm cognizant of the fact that DEI comes up as a massive, societal, industry-wide theme, every, you would know better than I, but it seems like every two to five years, right? It becomes the thing that everybody's talking about. And normally it's triggered by a tragedy like the murder of George Floyd. And suddenly in the aftermath of that, agencies and brands were running around talking about, here's how we are structured and here's the representation percentages. And we're going to publish our numbers all the time.
And I read an Adweek report in June that said, the ad industry has made little or no progress on workplace inclusion since 2021. The dial hasn't moved when it comes to discrimination based on age, gender, and caregiving status. It feels to me like we have a window here where we can actually change the paradigm about what it means to run a successful company and to attract world-class talent and put them in a position where they can actually do the best work of their lives. If in fact you buy that premise that there is a window here, what do you think we should be doing or advocating, as the first steps towards creating that new kind of reality?
Nancy Hill (34:59):
So we have to attack it from a lot of different angles. And I may surprise you by saying that at our core, we have to figure out how to get paid fairly by our clients so that it's not dependent on racking up hours that then get turned into revenue that then get reported as GI so that we can meet some arbitrary number out there. Because that hours-based way of working, that many clients are not willing to give up because it's the only way they know how to measure whether you're earning your pay from them, is a lot of what drives people to overwork and feel monitored in their workplace environment. So I have always been a big believer in getting paid for the value that we provide and not making it an hours-based compensation arrangement. So I think that's one thing that we have to attack, because I think that's the thing that pervades the culture of agencies in many instances that forces people into overwork.
So let's start there. And that's one piece of it that we need to solve. But we also have to create an environment - and I wrote about this in the piece that I wrote. I joined Marcus Thomas as the CEO a year ago June, but I've been working with this agency as a consultant for five years prior to that. And I've known the agency for probably 10, because of knowing them through the 4A's. And one of the things that I've always respected and admired, and also had always been told by the employees here when I would do cultural interviews, was that they never felt like they were going to be judged if they needed to leave to go meet their son at the bus stop, or if they needed to take time off to take their kid to the dentist, or if they needed to have four or five days to deal with an ailing parent, nobody was going to judge them because they knew that everybody was here to get the work done when it would get done.
And they were treated like adults. And Marcus Thomas goes so far as to not measure how many days you take off for vacation, not measure, they call it, we call it PTO for adults. You take what you need when you need it, and we'll figure it out. And the team members will then morph around you to make sure that your work is getting taken care of. I think that's the kind of culture that works. We still have an hours-based system for many of our clients. We're trying to move away from that with as many of our new clients as we possibly can, because I truly believe it's just a more humane system. But for the most part, we do it in a way that honors our employees and not what honors the… living up to those expectations that are arbitrarily set by clients.
Charles (38:28):
I think that's such a powerful point. And candidly, it hadn't occurred to me until you said it, that that is at the foundation of the issue. I mean, if you're a world-class talent, why would you go to work for a company that gets paid by the hour? I mean, it doesn't make any sense. You don't pay for movies based on the hour. You don't pay for television programs, you don't pay for artwork based on how long it took Picasso to paint it. It might be the only industry that has original thinking at its core that then says that original thinking is valued based on whether it took me five minutes or five hours to come up with it.
One of the other things you're reminding me about actually is that, and I'm going to make a note to actually follow up on this. About a year ago, I heard from 72andSunny that they had instituted a policy of hiring people who were solely responsible for transferring work from one person to another, so that the person who originally was responsible for it could actually take time off, could actually get out of the office and go away without feeling guilty or obligated that they needed to stick around to see that project through to the next stage of completion. It struck me at the time as such an eminently practical solution to the fact that, again, the industry has been trained, taught, structured around the imperative of client delivery this date, this new business pitch this date. I mean, you've lived through that probably more than anybody. We have to institutionalize those kinds of practices, don't we? We actually have to pay for the fact that we need to build flexibility. Have you seen other examples of things like that, that you think are kind of best practices or should be?
Nancy Hill (40:11):
So it's interesting that you should say that, because we had kind of an unusual year this year. We have almost 300 people, close to 200 of which report into the Cleveland office. The rest are scattered out throughout Latin America. We have an office in Santiago, an office in Buenos Aires. But of the close to 200 who are based here in Cleveland, we had 17 people out on family leave this year. That's almost 10% of our workforce. So what was interesting was that we didn't have to hire people to cover those people. It's because of the way our teams work that we were able to provide that coverage for those people to be out for three months at a time. It's like an amoeba, it just kind of fills in around them so that they didn't have to worry about that, and that they could take their time and then come back when they needed to.
It's funny because we've just gone through this last month of welcoming back the last group that was going to be out. I think we have maybe a couple more that are still coming back. But I think when you have an organization that culturally cares about each other, that you can make that work without having to formalize it. I think it's great that 72andSunny did that, but I think you can also find other ways to make that feel like it's going to be okay if you take time off, and still make it work.
Charles (41:45):
And I think one of the things the industry doesn't do as well as it could, I talk about the creative industries that are euphemistically, but I think the thing that these industries don't do as well as they can is share insights and information. I'm always surprised when I'm talking to a client about a situation they're dealing with, and I reference something that's publicly available about somebody else. And then I make a suggestion, why don't you reach out to that person? And they sort of look at me incredulously and say, “Well, why would they talk to me? They work for a competitor.” And I said, “Because most of the people that I know in this industry, regardless of where they work for, are very willing to share their experience and actually want to help each other.” And you find that to be true, as well.
Nancy Hill (42:23):
I have to tell you, it was one of the most rewarding parts of the job running The 4A’s for almost 10 years, is just how much people are willing to share. Listen, I'm long gone from The 4A’s, so this is not a plug for The 4A's, but the one thing The 4A's does probably better than any other organization, is convene and to bring people together to talk about those things that otherwise don't get talked about. And I would strongly encourage people to do what you're describing, which is, pick up the phone and ask somebody. Because I also have found over the years that this industry is very generous in terms of being able to share. I think you may find some of the unnamed, bigger competitors unwilling to share certain aspects because they believe that they have a competitive advantage in one way or another. But I do find, especially among the independent agencies, that everybody's in the same business. Everybody's in the same boat. So picking up the phone and calling those people is definitely worth your time because nine times out of 10, they're going to be willing to share.
Charles (43:32):
Yeah, I think that's true. I also found when we were building our film editing company, actually, which was, you know, world-leading in many respects, we had people who worked for me who said, “Oh, we shouldn't tell people how we do this.” I always say, tell anybody you want, give them the blueprint, because it's our culture that makes it work. It's the way that we do it. It's not just the tactical steps that we're taking. It's the spirit and the energy and the humanity that goes around it. Elon Musk has many critics, justifiably, but he said something early on during the development of Tesla, when they opened up any number of patents that they had established, to the free market. And he said, you know, “We want to create pathways through the jungle, not create walls in the jungle.”
And I think as a mindset, it's the old adage of, you know, a rising tide lifts all boats, but there's so little of that mindset these days. And I think when you strip it all back and you get down to the fact that what we're really talking about, I mean, what your piece triggered certainly for me and clearly so many other people, is it's a reflection on the life that you want to lead. Which at the end of the day is far more important than any of this other stuff. I mean, all these choices we make about what we do and where we do it and how we do it are the choices we make about how we live our life. And I think we need collectively to make more emphasis on the importance of that, because that actually is sustainably what matters ultimately, and defines us as a person. So the notion, I think, that there is a lot more information that's available, expertise, experience, empathy, to your earlier point, support, understanding. And in many cases, all we really have to do is ask. And if the greatest fear we have is that somebody might say, “No,” it's probably worth the risk of that.
Nancy Hill (45:13):
I think it also goes back to the fundamental thing you asked me about what can leaders be doing. First of all, you have to model the behavior. And if you want a healthy workforce, you have to model a healthy lifestyle and a healthy way of living. Many times I've been asked if there was anything I would have done differently in my career, and many times I have answered, “Yes, I would've started taking care of myself a lot sooner.” Because I think that at least for my first 20 years in the business, and I won't go into how many years I've been in the business, but for my first 20 years, I didn't take care of myself. I worked myself to death. It was not unusual to work 70 hours a week and to not have the good, healthy relationships in my life that I needed to have with my friends, with my family.
I mean, I can remember times when my holidays were shot because I was taking care of client needs over my family's needs, or my ability to enjoy the holidays with my family. And so I think if we as leaders can model the behavior that says, you know what? I'm blocking off my calendar at this time because I need to go to the gym, or I need to go to the therapist. And by the way, make it transparent so that people can see what it is that you're doing and know that that's okay. That's the only way you're going to model that behavior for everybody else, for them to know that it is okay to take care of themselves.
Charles (46:45):
Yeah, I think that's so right. And actually, it's interesting that you make that point specifically. I interviewed Colleen DeCourcy last year, who is literally the most awarded creative leader in history. I mean, creative leader of the decade, line of some market award winner. I mean, the list is endless. And I asked her, “Do you have any regrets?” And she said, “Yes, I wish that my career hadn't had such a significant physical toll on me.” And I think as we move forward and help to guide, inform, offer insight to the incoming generations, I do think that that's part of the responsibility, is to help them understand, you know, again, not to belabor the point, but this is life. And the choices we make about how we live it are fundamentally the ones that are actually the most important. As you look back now, if you look back to the beginning of that nightmare and you could sit down with that version of yourself today, what would you want to tell her?
Nancy Hill (47:45):
Hmm. You know, my particular trauma was so centered around an alcoholic and his alcoholism that I think it brings its own set of circumstances that are particular to that. And so it's hard to separate that for the moment. But what I would say is that it's okay to ask for help, and it's okay to say, I need to take a break and I'm going to need to take some time to take care of myself and my family. So if I need to step away from the agency in order to do that, then that's what I might have said to myself in terms of taking care of myself. I don't know if it would've made a difference, Charles, to be honest with you, because if you know anything about alcoholism, there wasn't anything I could do to help him. No matter how hard I tried, which, you know, at the time, the part of the issue with somebody who's married to or in love with somebody who's got a substance problem is that there is nothing you can do. And that's a really hard thing for somebody who's used to being able to fix things. But I would've definitely said, “You're going to break if you keep moving the way that you're moving right now.” And I came probably really close to breaking without even knowing I was breaking. Through some stroke of fortune, I didn't break and I actually was able to put myself back together again, eventually, but easily I could have broken and who knows what might have happened.
Charles (49:26):
What did you have to overcome to write this and put this out in the world? I know you said that you were at a point in your career where you had, I think you said, nothing to risk, or less to risk, but it didn't come without a price. It didn't come without effort. What did you have to overcome to say, “I'm going to write this down and speak about this,”?
Nancy Hill (49:43):
To tell the whole truth. And, you know, many people knew I lost a husband. Many people knew that I had had… people knew pieces of the story, but they didn't know the whole thing. And they certainly didn't know that I had been treated for PTSD. Literally diagnosed and treated with PTSD. I think that's the other thing that's really important. People throw the term “PTSD” around a lot, and I do think that if you suspect that you are suffering from PTSD, that it's really important to go get professional help and not to think that it's just the diagnosis du jour, because you really do need to work through the trauma, and how to process it yourself. It's different for everybody. But I think for me, being willing to sit down and tell the whole story, by the way, I wrote that piece pretty quickly once I made the decision, because it just came out of me. And I do think that once you make the decision to come forward with something like that, it's amazing how healthy you feel after you put it on paper.
Charles (50:58):
Yeah, I think it's a really important point that PTSD is real and it wires your brain. All trauma wires your brain, specific physically hardwires your brain. And what we've learned in the last decade, especially about neurobiology, is that neurobiology is infinitely adaptable, and that you can actually consciously, proactively rewire your brain. And I've certainly had experience of that myself in the last 12 to 15 months. So, no matter how afraid or alone or lost or scared or angry you feel, it is possible to get through all of that, to understand where it comes from and to see the world through a different lens. I want to thank you so much for, A, for writing the piece, and then being willing to share it so openly throughout the world and in this conversation. I don't think there's a more important topic in the world today. I really don't. I think mental health issues are everywhere.
I've said on this podcast before, I think we are all suffering from massive undiagnosed PTSD as a result of COVID, where we were forced into behaviors that were completely alien to us. And some of us were able to experience those in a better way than others, but fundamentally, separating the human race from each other for the better part of two years, it had a lasting impression after lasting impact on many, many people, if not everybody. So I want to thank you very much on a personal level and on behalf of everybody who's been affected and touched by what you've written and your willingness to share.
Nancy Hill (52:20):
Thank you, Charles. You know, it's very important to me that if one person took something from this and doesn't feel like they're dealing with whatever it is they're dealing with alone, then it was worth it to me.
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