Xanthe Wells, global creative VP at Pinterest, is far from your typical creative leader.
Speaking to The Growth Distillery’s Stories (Un)Told vodcast in collaboration with Cairns Crocodiles, presented by Pinterest, the former TBWA\Chiat\Day, Media Arts Lab and Google creative discussed her leadership of the incredible Pinterest creative team.
“I’m really deep into the work. I don’t lead from afar. I lead from deep within the team and I care so much about the people I work with and I really believe the devil’s in the detail,” she said.
“It’s hard because sometimes people expect you to be at a certain level or an altitude they think you should have because of your title but I’m in edits, I’m looking at experiences for Cannes and I’m looking at all the details and making sense of them and how they relate to the brand. I don’t know how to do this job without being fully in it.”
Navigating those different levels of creative responsibility is far from straightforward. However, it’s a divide that Wells has learned to straddle through her career.
“It’s a lot of context switching. Google was great training for that because I had so many stakeholders across Google because it was devices and services, it platforms and ecosystems and our worldwide CMO. It was all these different people. I became good at going high and going deep. I’m grateful for that experience. I prefer this environment where I can get into the work. I have so much fun with the team and make stuff myself. I’ve never stopped using Photoshop—even though I should be using Figma—but I’m always playing with tools, I love making things,” she said.
Well’s journey to this position, being able to lead from the front but also take a more strategic zoomed-out view has not been straightforward. In a candid moment, not unusual for Wells, she explained a career-defining moment at Chiat\Day.
“I first stared managing people when I was an associate creative director at Chiat\Day in LA. I was managing a little team, probably four people, and I was not doing a good job of it,” she said.
“I remember this lovely woman Amy Panzarasa [now head of creative services at Audible] and she sat me down and said ‘People don’t like working for you’. I said, ‘Wait, the four people?’ I was devastated. I hadn’t seen it at all. I’d been promoted because of the work I’d done but I’d failed to learn how to manage anyone. That was when I focused, basically, only on managing people. I thought ‘I have to figure this out’ because it’s the only way I can bring what I want to in this world.
“It was a big turning point… It was putting myself second. I’d been a really good art director and gotten a lot of praise and awards. But I just said, ‘You know what, I need to park that because that’s attached to me as a single person and I have to re-orient that energy to my team. You become second, it’s service leadership.”
Bridging that divide as a creative leader can be incredibly confronting. Many would do well to learn from Wells’ humility and candidness.
Stay tuned to B&T for the next episode of Stories (Un)Told featuring Sherilyn Shackell, founder and global CEO of The Marketing Academy.
