Bossing It: Matt Longley on Experience, Perspective, and Empathy
Matt Longley started his career working in the civil service for HM Revenue and Customs and, while there, tried everything from border control to marketing. Eventually he settled on marketing and moved to the Electoral Commission to run their marketing team. From there, he took his public sector experience to GroupM’s government media buying arm, M4C. Matt thereafter moved to Carat, with the government account in 2015, to run their newly formed government media team.
He subsequently moved to Vizeum to run the planning team for Camelot, TSB, Weetabix and Merlin before completing the client/agency/media owner triangle by joining Mobsta where he is the managing director.
He is now on a mission to make Mobsta Ltd - Certified B Corp® the most sustainable media partner on clients’ plans.
LBB> What was your first experience of leadership?
Matt> A long time ago at The Electoral Commission – I applied for a role there that I thought I would definitely get but didn't, but I did take the role six months later – where I had to quickly figure out the difference between management and leadership.
Managing people is looking at workloads and the day to day – leadership, on the other hand, is different. It's setting a direction for people to follow. Understanding this difference is massively important for being an effective leader.
Leaders don't just tell people what to do, they set an agenda and let people find their own way there and help them find their own path.
LBB> How did you figure out what kind of leader you wanted to be – or what kind of leader you didn’t want to be?
Matt> I figured out what leader I wanted to be by figuring out what leader I didn’t want to be!
I have never understood the dictatorial approach to leadership of just standing above people and telling them what to do. I really don’t like hierarchy and always had a problem with that - probably to my detriment. I just wanted to be true to myself and try to be kind and nice about the day-to-day work and let that general feeling rub off onto people, but also be honest, fair and firm when people need it.
You can’t always be everybody's friend, which is a tough balance to find when you become a leader. You want everyone to like you and that's not possible all the time. As long as you are honest and fair with people then hopefully people will respect that.
Having seen bad managers who don't do any of that helped me to realise what sort of leader I wanted to be.
LBB> What experience or moment gave you your biggest lesson in leadership?
Matt> I think about five years into managing teams, I was running the government's media buying team at Dentsu and we all moved to hot desking for the first time.
Everyone was in the office five days a week, this was of course pre-COVID and we moved to hot desking. We didn't have enough desks for a team of 80 people and so every day I sat around the corner on a high desk because I wanted the team to sit together and didn't want to take up one of their desks. I thought that was the right thing to do - give them space. After about two months we had a staff survey and all the feedback was that I was really absent and wasn't around to support people. I took that really badly. I went home and talked to my wife about it, I said “they’re ungrateful” and “I’m giving them space”.
My wife turned around and said “read that a different way and realise that people want you to be there because they respect you – they want your input and they want you to be around because you’re the leader!” Suddenly switching to that point of view, I went in the next day, sat amongst the team and vowed to never sit in my corner again and the team completely changed from just doing the job to suddenly having purpose again. I think that was when I realised the power of leadership – having a team and being present for them.
This is something which can be hard to do nowadays with hybrid working. When you're all in the office five days a week, you can be that leader you want to be but with hybrid working you can't always be present and you have to find different ways to do it. But that moment when I switched the hotdesking feedback on its head and realised people weren’t complaining about me and instead wanted me to be present was a big moment and I try to continue bringing that learning to the team at Mobsta.
LBB> Did you know you always wanted to take on a leadership role? If so how did you work towards it and if not, when did you start realising that you had it in you?
Matt> I did a coaching course 12-13 years ago, this was back at The Electoral Commission. They brought someone in to coach us, to think about our career road map and build a five year plan. Over the two days we had to work on it and present it back to the team. I went away and did a 15-year plan purely because what the coach was talking about and helping us to understand made so much sense in my head.
That 15-year plan involved getting my first management role, then moving to another company for a promotion, working on the client side of things, agency, then media. Moving up the company to running it and then eventually owning a company. I’m 13 years into that plan and now working towards a future that includes employee ownership. Having that plan has helped me stay true to myself over the years and kept me going. And now I might actually be able to turn that into something for the whole team rather than just me.
I was lucky enough to get the same coach to come in last year for the entire Mobsta team – we had 32 people at the time who went through the same training programme and we’re already seeing the fruits of that. It's amazing to see how little input it can take to have such a big output.
LBB> When it comes to 'leadership' as a skill, how much do you think is a natural part of personality, how much can be taught and learned?
Matt> I think a lot of it has to be taught and learnt. You can have a general empathic feeling about you but like I said earlier, to be a leader you have to remember not to get stuck on the small stuff and just set the agenda. I think learning to set a path for people is hard and takes practice. Doing it on a smaller scale and growing to a bigger team feels like a comfortable way to develop that skill.
When I left the Government team in 2017 we were 80-85 people. I moved to Carat Dentsu with the initial team size of 12 and that was a completely different style of leadership. A smaller team became far more about nurturing individuals than just being a general leader of a bigger group. Then coming to Mobsta and being MD, we’re now 37 people and that requires a different style of leadership again.
You have to adapt and learn on the way and I think it helps to have an empathic core.
LBB> What are the aspects of leadership that you find most personally challenging? And how do you work through them?
Matt> I think being tough was really hard at first. Things like performance management can be hard if you really get on with someone but they’re just not doing the job. And equally when you just don’t like somebody and think they’re not doing a good job; you have to temper your expectations of them as well and make sure you're not just bringing your own personal opinion into it and ensure you give them a chance.
Having disciplinary meetings with people is always tough. I wouldn't say it gets easier over time but with time you've got more experience to draw upon and you just need to make sure you’re being as fair as you can be.
LBB> Have you ever felt like you've failed whilst in charge? How did you address the issue and what did you learn from it?
Matt> There have been a couple of times when I have made a decision that didn't go well - one was a really small one before a pitch session. I told the team to bring in their laptops and take notes and we sat down, explained to the client and put loads of effort in but unfortunately didn’t make it to the next round of pitching.
The feedback that we got was that the team looked like they were just doing emails the whole time and weren't really engaged. That was totally not what I expected. I thought it looked like we were working diligently but to them it looked like we were ignoring them.
I dwell on things terribly and that stuck with me for about two weeks. I was really annoyed with myself. My CEO at the time reassured me that these things happen. I was ready to hand my resignation in! So it helped in that moment to have a good leader to look up to, someone rooted in experience, perspective, and empathy. I try to bring that to my team.
LBB> In terms of leadership and openness, what’s your approach there? Do you think it’s important to be as transparent as possible in the service of being authentic? Or is there a value in being careful and considered?
Matt> I think transparency is key. I am really open with people about who I am: my home life, what drives me as a person, I’m also really open about mental health difficulties and the emotional side of the job. I think if you want people to follow you they need to buy into you as a human and not just someone who can run a company.
I saw something on LinkedIn recently about someone saying something like: “if you want to be successful you should be a closed book - don’t tell anyone about your home life and your hobbies, just come into work, do your job and go home”. I couldn't disagree more. I don't expect my team to be able to do anything I suggest or ask of them if they don't believe in me as a person and know what drives me. So I think openness is really important, and being transparent is 100% the way to go. Maybe not for everyone but for me it's worked.
LBB> As you developed your leadership skills did you have a mentor, if so who were/are they and what have you learned? And on the flip side, do you mentor any aspiring leaders and how do you approach that relationship?
Matt> I have had two good mentors over the last five years.
The first was my boss at Carat Dentsu, Sally Silver who was the chief digital officer there and she is now a coach doing wonderful things. She really taught me about not fretting and taking things too personally and to remember at the end of the day this is just advertising and we’re not saving lives. The fact that we were working on government campaigns at the time about preventing cancer felt like we were, but even so I was just in awe of her ability to not take things to heart and just accept that people are maybe just having a bad day. She has been brilliant over the years.
The other was when I was moving over from agency to the media side, Giles Ivy. He is now a consultant for a number of different start-ups but I knew him when he was CEO of Collective. He then went to MIQ as the UK CEO. He was fantastic at explaining the difference between agencies and the sales side of things and also how to best manage a team. Having never managed a sales team before or ever worked in sales, he taught me how to adapt what I was doing from an agency side to a sales side.
Both of these people have been very influential.
LBB> In continually changing market circumstances, how do you cope with the responsibility of leading a team through difficult waters?
Matt> I drive through it and I generally plan for bad times so that we’re prepared. I think feeling good about what you do also helps.
COVID is a good example of good planning. In the back of my head I always have a backup plan and I made sure the team was really prepared for COVID. We were all reading the news in January of that year but we had a plan way before lockdown which we enacted as soon as it happened. Business shut down pretty quickly and we didn't bring any money in for three to four months but it didn't stop us from putting proactive work out and we just focused on providing bespoke insights to agencies and their brands. Helping agencies to get information out to their clients in a time they didn't have anything else to give them was key. Once things opened back up, that proactive work returned so much more to us and it has led to our success now. We’re still here as a result of that planning.
What I’m saying is this: bad times and market changes will happen but it is about planning for them effectively and this enables leadership to support teams through the challenges with confidence.
Without wanting to segue too much, we are at a similar point now when we talk about environmental sustainability. This is incredibly important to us as a B Corp and a big part of our job is to help others understand environmentally sustainable media better. Not just brands but other media owners, agencies and publishers. We’re experts in that now we understand the impact carbon emissions have on our industry and the impact our industry has on the world.
We are here to offer a stronger media solution and help people and the planet along the way. So a huge part of my leadership role is to ensure the Mobsta team is completely aware and understands the effects of carbon emissions in advertising so we can be those experts to our clients and also help brands. Knowing we have a positive role in the industry feels good to me and helps me and the team through the challenging times.
Recently, we helped Lego to better understand their environmental sustainability options when it comes to their media planning and buying. There was no promise of media spend there. We helped them because it was the right thing to do. Ultimately, if we can help more people get there faster than we can all feel good about ourselves and know we’re doing a better job at the end of it. This can be rewarding and motivating.
I was at a B Corp breakfast this morning and the CEO at one of the largest law firms was talking about how we can’t just talk about it, we have to do something about it. And part of being B Corp is doing so if we can spread that message and be there for people when they need us to help them in that journey then we’d be doing our job.
LBB> As a leader, what are some of the ways in which you’ve prioritised diversity and inclusion within your workforce?
Matt> Firstly, by being aware of it.
Secondly, by actively seeking action through variety in terms of approaches to things such as recruitment.
And thirdly, investing in policies and support services so that diversity is upheld.
When I first joined Mobsta, we were very male heavy. As we have grown we have actively sought to encourage and bring in more women to adjust that proportion and find better balance. We are now almost half and half as a team of 37 people and are one hire away from being equal in this respect.
In terms of broader diversity considerations, we are actively looking at different ways we can be more diverse. One of the things we’ve changed to support this commitment is how we recruit people. We’ve recently started working with a recruitment company called Pollen who helps place interns. Pollen typically looks for non-graduates and assesses them to help people identify skills they wouldn't normally be able to talk about. It’s a really interesting approach as they don't provide CVs, they just come to us with a skill set and written statements from candidates.
Finding creative routes to recruitment rather than traditional graduate schemes helps on the diversity front and highlights to us the need for including a variety of ways to think about talent.
We also try to offer a range of support services to uphold the diverse needs of our people. For example, we partner with Plumm – our mental health and wellbeing partner – so that we continue to be a considerate place to work.
As a media owner, diversity is crucial. There is a broad society of people we’re targeting with our advertising. We can't just be a bunch of middle-class white guys sitting here in our London or Manchester offices thinking we know what everyone wants, while actually we have no idea about the wants or needs of someone in, say, Burnley. So you have to recruit from a diverse background and invest in different ways you support people to retain that diversity.
LBB> How important is your company culture to the success of your business? And how have you managed to keep it alive with increases in remote and hybrid working patterns?
Matt> Culture is everything. It has taken five years to get Mobsta to where we are now. We shifted from a fairly old-school sales house to a really forward-thinking B Corp media organisation with clearly mapped out values and ethos.The best way I’ve found to do that effectively is to tap into what people are really passionate about. For example, sustainability is at the core of everything we do at Mobsta. So for a lot of people that work here now sustainability as a cultural heart really resonates with them. People really care about it.
I believe that being clear with your values is key. And so that cultural identity and ethos is literally on the walls of our office – we do actually have our Mobsta values stencilled on the walls: trust, transparency, bravery and being human. When we moved into our office a year ago it was really important to us to have those messages on the walls, not in a cheesy way but displayed clearly to remind people why we are here and why we do what we do every day.
Keeping that culture alive during hybrid working is vital and, of course, presents its own set of considerations. We do things like have all team days in the office when everyone comes in, and we have a Christmas party where we all go away for a few days in the UK. Just to make sure that there is a cohesiveness to the team, I suppose.
But over the last two years in particular there was quite a lot of churn from old to new and now finally we’ve had 18 months of fairly stable recruitment where no one has really left and everyone that has joined the team already shares our ethos of transparency, trust and bravery, and of course sustainability. It feels good. Everyone in the team is excited about Mobsta’s culture – who we are, what we’re about, and what we offer to our agencies, partners and the world.
Ultimately, where we are has developed from a lot of change but now that we’re here we are really keen to keep it. Part of that process now is just about me talking to the team regularly and reminding people what I believe in. We had another staff survey three months ago and someone said they wanted to hear more from me and what I believe in. In my mind I feel like I'm just banging the same drum and just repeating myself, but I need to remember not to be hard on myself and just continue to talk about what we believe in as a company and why we are heading in the direction we are going in. That culture needs constant embedding and demonstrating.
LBB> What are the most useful resources you’ve found to help you along your leadership journey?
Matt> Coffee. Talking to people and having coffee. I think most of my learning has come from talking to people, having a coffee with them, finding out what they do well and what they like and don't like about their job as well as just networking and getting to know people.
So have lots of coffee with people, chat to people, get to know the differences of opinions and the different ways of doing things. And occasionally have a good coach as well to take you through that 15 year plan!
