Talking about Leadership & EQ in the post-Covid19 era with Ogilvy’s Chief Digital Officer
The Greek corporate ecosystem is characterized by a huge range of different businesses, brands, and specialties. Although one would expect that, by focusing on a specific sector, one would find a more limited diversity, in the end, one finds a variety of professionals and technicians excelling in the market. Similarly, by researching the field of advertising and communication thoroughly, specialties and personalities of exceptional ability and importance immediately emerged. In the context of ADandPRLab’s workshop “Leadership and Emotional Intelligence”, supervised by Prof. Dimitra Iordanoglou, we were invited to observe an organization of our choice from the inside, following a leading figure in their daily life (job shadowing). The aim was to map the changes the pandemic brought to the workplace and to see how the terms “leadership and emotional intelligence” are redefined in the post-Covid19 era.
Amongst so many communication and media companies, the process of workplace observation and interviewing took place at Ogilvy. Ogilvy is one of the largest and most well-known advertising agencies in Greece. The reasons for choosing Ogilvy were its countless award-winning and creative campaigns, the interest in leadership in a multinational company, and, also, there was ease of access and communication due to a team member working there. So, in consultation with the company, we got in touch with Daphni Lokoviti, the Executive Director of TEAM OTE and Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy Greece.
Daphni Lokoviti is an accomplished leader and responsible for some of Ogilvy’s largest clients. For our team, it was particularly meaningful to observe a female leader, since our team is consisted by mostly women and the observation of such a role model would better reflect the expectations of determined, ambitious Gen Z girls in a male-dominated society like the one of Greece. Daphni, however, stands out not only for her position and her relationship with her job, which is certainly impressive, but, also, for the excellent relationships she has with her subordinates. She leads a large team, which expanded during the quarantine, reaching 25 people. Managing her team under conditions of extensive teleworking and the integration of new people, with whom it was not possible to interact in person for a while, only reinforces the narrative that Daphni Lokoviti is an effective and successful leader.
Job Shadowing
After contacting with Ogilvy, on 16/5/2022 two members of our team conducted job shadowing and became “the shadow” of Daphni Lokoviti for one day, following her throughout her day at Ogilvy. The official working hours of the employees are 10:30–19:30, including an one-hour break. During this time, Lokoviti engaged in a plethora of different activities, while staying in touch with her life outside of the office.
11:00–12:00 Meeting call
12:00–13:30 Interview with us
13:47 Checking emails
13:50 She calls home to see if her son is back from school & they discuss how his day went
14:00 She orders lunch with a colleague & they discuss
14:05 Looks at emails and reads campaign review
14:15 Urgent email came in for a deadline and she deals with emails
14:20 Leaves office, walks around the site, talks to colleagues
14:50 Sends a message to colleague
14:55 Lunchtime, chat with colleagues
15:25 Chat with a colleague about the progress of a project, urgent presentation to a client
15:45 Conversation with a colleague about another project for presentation to board directors
16:00 Client meeting, discussion with a colleague to address an issue
16:10 Conversation with client
18:00 Interview via MS Teams
As busy as her typical day is, she never fails to seek the most interaction with her team, and contact her family, thus maintaining a balance with herself.
Interview
During our day at Ogilvy Greece, we conducted an interview in which we discussed with Daphni Lokoviti about:
- her career in advertising
- how Ogilvy operated during the pandemic and today, in the post-Covid19 era
- the new leadership requirements
- the role of emotional intelligence of leaders
- tips and predictions for the future
Career in advertising
Lokoviti’s career started outside the advertising industry, with studies on management. Her career started from a secretarial position, but then, fascinated by the film industry, she worked for film distribution companies as a marketing executive. This sector challenged her, as each film had a different audience, a different context, a different approach and there were many different categories of films (blockbusters, mainstream, arthouse, etc.). For a while, she found herself in a production position in a concert company, where she had to learn about a “hardcore” industry, the industry of events. Then Daphni came to advertising. The reason for this transition was her love for digital marketing, she shares with us. After all, the demand for digital was high and Daphni was already familiar with it, through the advertising agencies she worked with at the film distribution companies. In fact, she says that even though she moved from marketing to advertising, it is usually the other way around. However, to this day she is grateful that she made that choice.
So, she started as an Account Director at -then- Oglivy 1 and then moved to the “mothership”, as she calls Ogilvy, bringing in the whole culture of digital. For the last 6 years, she has been in the position of Executive Director of TEAM OTE and Chief Digital Officer at Ogilvy.
She says she is very satisfied because she achieved exactly what she was after. Her job has that evolution she was looking for, she is constantly learning things about something that is constantly changing and she feels lucky to have these accounts. Cosmote brands are some of the biggest advertisers, so she takes on a lot of projects and does great work that fills her up, always in collaboration with her team.
Covid19 & Work:
During Covid19
The quarantine imposed as a protective measure against the coronavirus pandemic caused huge shifts and changes in the traditional way of doing business globally. Their very structure and infrastructure had to respond to the new situation and, with them, the demands of leaders and team leaders changed.
Lokoviti, as the person responsible for a large number of people, had to manage not only the demands of the company’s clients, but also the fears, concerns and worries of her team. She describes the first quarantine period as a period of stress, anxiety and pressure, despite Ogilvy’s rapid adoption of technologies and the telecommuting model. Working from home blurred the boundaries between professional and personal life quite a bit, causing her and many colleagues to be unable to set a limit on their working hours and to work a lot of overtime. The work acted as an escape from confinement for many people, so there was also boundaries crossed by clients, who contacted at night and made unreasonable requests for meetings and communication materials. This phenomenon was intensified by the rapid changes in measures which also led to different demands from the brands.
“It was a roller coaster, I would say, of emotions and constantly a “but”, where the only certainty was that you didn’t know what might dawn the next day and I think that was the most important thing I want us to understand to be able to manage it.”
This situation exhausted many people, while the quarantine itself caused existential searches and triggered life decisions. During the years of the pandemic, there was a trend of intense resignation, the so-called ‘Great Resignation’, which was particularly intense in the fields of marketing and advertising. For a company like Ogilvy, which increased its staff during these two years, the challenge was not only to replace the staff that was leaving, but also finding new professionals to recruit. That’s exactly what people like Lokoviti were called upon to tackle, who had to ensure her team functioned well with fewer staff, while coordinating the recruitment of new members. Online interviews were a challenge for her.
“[…] also this process of doing an interview with someone remotely started and you had to judge and understand. Because the interviewees did an interview, but for us to be able to evaluate them we need the face-to-face contact and, of course, it’s very different so it was a huge change that I don’t think it’s over…”
In addition, the team leaders were asked to adapt their leadership styles to the new situation, emphasizing empathy, and come up with new ways to keep their team’s psychology and efficiency high.
For Daphni’s team this was done through simple, subtle actions such as establishing a call every 15 days to keep in touch, which provided an opportunity to receive feedback from everyone to everyone regarding the difficult situation they were in.
After Covid19
Some things are here to stay, even after the pandemic. Ogilvy to this day adopts strict protective measures to ensure the health of staff. Often, in fact, Ogilvy’s anti-covid19 measures are stricter than those of the goverment! The company’s leaders are responsible for following protocols and communicating instructions to employees, as role models in complying with hygiene rules. At the same time, the hybrid work model is still present, with the company slowly moving to a model where remote working is possible. Lokoviti is, however, confident that her team is just as productive from home. After all, during the quarantine, they proved to her that they can cope under difficult conditions, and she is fully sympathetic to the convenience that the hybrid model provides.
Leadership & EQ
Emotional intelligence is one of the foundations of leadership. Daphni has worked with authoritarian, punitive, charismatic and talented leaders and comes up with the following question: “Is an authoritarian and/or punitive leader, a leader?” For her, it is a matter of ethics. A leader is not simply one who is higher in the hierarchy, but one who leads his team, not commands. A leader straddles a fine line, where on the one side is his talent for the job and on the other side is his ability to lead. Therein lays the challenge when a talented person lacks leadership skills. A leader’s priority should be the development of the team. A person who does not care about the professional and emotional well-being of his team, let alone being a source of conflict and pressure himself, inevitably hampers the functioning of the whole and makes it difficult to evolve.
At this point, the question of how a subordinate can cope with an authoritarian or oppressive supervisor was raised. According to Daphni, the golden rule is to set boundaries.
“[…] I think that’s the only way there is to manage such situations so that you can tap into both the charisma and the effectiveness that they can have at work, but also, at the same time, not to take it too personally and not have it eat away at your development or the path that you want to chart.”
As Daphni mentions, the hard part sometimes is diagnosing the authoritarian leader. Such people rely too much on the need their subordinates may have, either because they want the job or because as characters they are unable to demand better treatment. However, when a diagnosis of an authoritarian leader is made then boundaries must be set. If the boundaries lead to a better environment and the creation of a framework of cooperation where there is a benefit for both sides, then the cooperation can continue unhindered. If, on the other hand, boundaries are not respected, then the only way out is to seek a new, healthier environment. Employees who are experiencing issues with their supervisors may have other options, such as disclosing to HR, if we are talking about a large company, and, of course, a serious issue.
A leader doesn’t need to have many different characteristics or extensive training on how to lead. The most important traits are empathy and sensitivity, being able to understand each team member individually and care for the development of the team as a whole. Still, a leader must be calm and have the composure to manage situations and, in this way, set an example to people on how to behave. Particularly in the fiends of advertising and marketing, things work in an emergency-culture logic where everything is too urgent and this can drag the team down. The leader is psyched and the leader inspires his subordinates to thrive in all aspects of their lives.
“[…] and this was taught to me by a leader I was fortunate enough to know. As long as I had finished my work, he would come in and get us all riled up to go out, do something and come back the next day with a desire to get back on the front lines.”
New Leadership Requirements
Questioning the new leadership requirements, Lokoviti does not stick to the changes brought by Covid19, but expands her answer with her own observations. She first predicts that authoritarian leaders and “control freak” leaders will become extinct in the next few years. Mindsets and corporate behaviour have changed quite a bit and new leaders do not need to adopt such a mindset to move up the hierarchy.
Instead, young people with a different mindset, millennials, and, more so, Gen Z will change the landscape of leadership . People will not work to the standards of the 1990s. In fact, she has found this out through the interviews she has been doing over the last 5 years.
“[…] in the interviews that I do you see a completely different profile of people who are constantly, I think, moving up into leadership positions as well, will change the landscape because they have started with a completely different mindset and society and the workplace doesn’t necessarily reward the behaviors that I mentioned, whereas in the past it may have rewarded them.”
Tips
The advertising industry and communication-related professions, in general, are open fields. Coming from a different background, she proves, as many established professionals do, that people from any sector can enter the magical world of advertising, as long as they find it interesting and have the necessary skills. This, on the one hand, increases competition in the industry, but also means that it is a highly mobile sector and gives everyone the opportunity to pursue what suits them. Especially finding a job that is not just tolerated is extremely key, as it has an impact not only on the psychology of an individual but also on their interaction within the team.
In addition, many times candidates who have experience and can demonstrate the quality of their work are preferred for a position, rather than candidates who may have degrees and postgraduate qualifications, but whose training is limited to theory.
Predictions
Of course, it was impossible not to talk about the predictions she makes for her area of expertise. The interview came to an end with some speculations about the course of social media in relation to the near and distant future. To begin with, Lokoviti believes that social media is approaching a peak and may be replaced by something else shortly. As time passes, society’s demand for content regulation becomes more pronounced, while the market itself changes unpredictably. Already younger generations are interacting in a very different way with various platforms.
At a time when innovation and ever-changing data are radically changing, the digital landscape with its fledgling Metaverse may be a harbinger of a new era for communication. New professions will emerge, but existing ones will also be augmented. After all, as she points out, there is already a growing demand for developers.
All these changes will, of course, also disrupt workplace relations, as the generation gap will become even more pronounced. The ultimate challenge for the next generation will be finding the balance between technology and life.
“I feel that all this overload that we have experienced and you are also experiencing as a generation, I believe that in the next one it won’t be so interesting it will be something different. That’s why I said before that if there is some regulation, some change in the market, or some demand from the society because we are hearing extreme things happening right now because of the fact that the content that everyone is uploading on each platform is not controlled.”
Big thanks to Daphni Lokoviti for her time, and, of course, to Ogilvy for allowing us to conduct the job shadowing in their offices!
Thanks to our professor, Dimitra Iordanoglou, for her guidance!
Team: T35
Team Members: Danae Zouli, Hara Moisiadou, Margarita Maze, Maria Perou & Panayiotis Polyzos
