Kerris Bright, chief customer officer at the BBC, talks through what the pandemic taught her about leading a large organization and through the five habits she credits for her own effectiveness. The habits all begin with the letter C: curiosity, context, clarity, creative storytelling, and delivery on commitment.
The most distinctive part of the conversation is her definition of growth. The BBC exists for everyone, so it cannot choose its audience the way a brand chooses a segment. Her answer is that the organization does not have to be everything to everyone. It has to be enough to everyone.
Key findings
- The crisis reconnected the organization to its reason for existing. The BBC’s purpose is to inform, educate, and entertain, and when schools closed it found a role educating the country.
- The organization did all of that with almost everyone remote. Of 21,000 people, only about 10% were in the buildings.
- The second lesson was about self-imposed constraint. The organization learned it can radically simplify, remove bureaucracy, and make decisions. Her assessment is that it had lost the belief it could.
- Growth at the BBC is defined as moving audiences who do not get enough value today into getting enough of it.
What being seen did to a team
Bright says she has never felt more connected to her teams than during remote working, because she was seeing into their lives rather than only their work. On a call with 500 people, she told them her father had gone into hospital and that she was finding it hard.
The response surprised her, and part of it stung. People told her they suddenly realized she was a human being. Others said it made it acceptable for them to take time out of their own day. Her conclusion is about the reach of humility and openness rather than about disclosure.
Curiosity, and the questions that carry it
The first habit is curiosity, which she traces to training as a scientist and to an interest in how businesses work and why people behave as they do. She extends it to the people around her: not only what they do, but where they came from and what gets in their way.
The operational form of curiosity is a small set of questions asked of a lot of people. What are we really good at. What gets in the way. What do you want me to do about it. Her warning to leaders is not to underestimate a very good question, since the pull is always toward supplying answers.
Context, and the work already in the drawer
The second habit is context. Her claim is that the better you understand the context you operate in, the better your choices are. Before joining British Airways she met all of the company’s former marketing leaders and asked them two things: how to succeed there, and what they wish they had done.
Rather than commissioning new work, she looked at existing work through a new lens. The company was not short of material: 42 segmentations already existed. Some of the best of it had left with its authors and had to be recovered from agencies. Presenting a strategy built on the organization’s own past work landed faster, and the feedback she kept getting was that she had built on what they already knew.
Clarity about where the power actually sits
The third habit is clarity of purpose in the role itself. Big jobs are multifaceted, and she says she has been most effective when she thought hard about what to focus on. Part of that is locating where a role’s power sits, which is often not headcount or budget.
Her own role is an example. She is one of the few people at the BBC who connects everything across the portfolio, while most colleagues sit within news, video, audio, or technology. She has defined the job as customer value creator and portfolio unlocker, which means deliberately downgrading parts of the brief that people expected her to lead on.
Storytelling pointed inward
The fourth habit is creative storytelling, aimed inside the organization. She describes spending the first twenty years of her career focused on creating value for customers outside the company, then learning there is real power in inspiring people inside it.
The lesson came from a merger during the financial crisis. The Dulux idea about adding color to people’s lives was working with customers. The incoming chief executive saw that the same idea could ignite a spirit inside two organizations that had just been put together.
Delivery, and what growth means here
The fifth habit is delivery: on commitments to people, and on results for the business. Her formulation is unsentimental. If you do not deliver, you do not really have a right to exist.
The growth question is harder at an organization that exists for everyone and has to create value for everybody. Her reframing is that the BBC needs to be enough to all people rather than everything to all people. Growth is then the audiences who do not get enough value today, and the work is making sure more of them do.
She closes with two pieces of advice. Growth as a leader comes from leaving the comfort zone, because that is the only way it widens. And a leader’s job is to make the reality understood and then create hope.
Scope and limitations
The five habits are offered as personal reflection rather than research, and the speaker says as much when she starts. The BBC growth definition is specific to an organization funded by a universal license fee, and she frames it that way herself.
Source
This page summarises HGS #13: Kerris Bright (CCO, BBC) talks about navigating Covid and redefining growth, by Marc de Swaan Arons.