Feb 9

Feb 9 Gift of the Gabberer: Cassie Roma

At the end of last year, I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Cassie Roma and have done my best to transcribe her magic. Cassie is a California native who’s spent the last 17 years calling New Zealand home. She has spent the majority of her career working in & with large corporates (you know, the real big ones like Air New Zealand, ANZ Bank, The Warehouse Group and so on). But is now a fully-fledged entrepreneur, working as both Founder & Director of CR&Co, a game-changing consultancy & multi-media business. On top of that, she’s an author, keynote speaker, TEDx alumni, professional coach, mentor and creator of Kindness Warriors. All of this makes her the perfect Gabberer to chat about the things we can do to change our industry, and how showing kindness to yourself and others is an essential component of your “mind control” toolkit.

Q: In 2020, you launched CR&Co, congratulations! The ethos behind this, and everything you do, is that compassion, kindness and business can all co-exist. How did you come to form this belief?

Cassie: That’s come from 20 years of accidentally climbing the corporate ladder. Like, I never set out to have the titles I’ve had or to have the jobs I’ve had or to lead the teams that I’ve led. I’ve never been particularly strategic with things that would assuage my ego, if that makes sense? However, I’ve always chased my curiosity. Because I feel like if you’re curious and you’re passionate, then you’re able to bring people along with you in an easier way than if you’re stringent and rigid.

So, over the last 20 years of working my way up, and climbing that proverbial corporate ladder, I have seen a lot of things, and experienced a lot of moments, in which my humanity was boiled down to being a resource point. I was an hour on a clock. I was someone else’s resource by which they could tell me where to go and what to do and how to do things. And as somebody who got married really early and had a daughter when I was 24, there have always been more things to my life than getting a pay check.

Pay checks are always important, but that hasn’t been my be all and end all.

That has always been a really liberating mindset for which to go through business. After 20 years, I got to a point where my heart was just quite heavy because leadership were saying things, you know good words, but how many piffy posters can you have on a wall, while you still overwork all of your employees?

So, the business case for compassion and empathy should exist across all professions and all parts of life, but especially in creative industries. Because when your creativity, your mind and your nuance is packaged up and then productised, sometimes that just tugs at your soul. And unless a business, whether that’s agency or client side, takes someone in and cares for them and goes, “I appreciate your work and I appreciate that you’re giving your creativity to the world in the form of an ad campaign,” then it’s not hard for me to see why we have such a high anxiety, depression and suicide rates in our profession. So I want to change that. I want people to be able to be mentally healthy and physically healthy.

I want people to be able to work when they want to work.

Q: Part of your offering is a platform called Kindness Warriors. How did you land on the term?

Cassie: Kindness Warrior came a few years ago at a pretty rough time, where I was working with an organisation that was split and fraught. We had come together to do a planning day and I said, “Look I’m going to lead with kindness.” and this man, with so much hurt and anger in his eyes, he just yelled at me and he said, “You’re a fantasist. Kindness will get you nowhere. Be a warrior.” And I was like, “Ok. Well thank you for that little nugget. Kindness Warrior it is.” And I kinda took it from there.

There have been many times when people have laughed in my face for saying that “kindness isn’t a weakness”.

You kind of have to suck it up and cry and pull yourself up by the bootstraps and do it again because my goal is that someone coming after me has an easier go. That will make it worth it.

Q: Why do you think kindness scares people? Because that sort of reaction usually comes from a place of fear.

Cassie: Completely. In the workplace, we’re taught that emotionality isn’t something that we should lean on. However, when you look at the best work globally, the big blue sky creative work is always the things that give people hope, surprise and provide entertainment. And you can’t have hope unless you dig deep and you face some of your fears.

So kindness, in and of itself, people think of as “niceness”. When in reality, kindness is opening yourself up to hurt. Because when you care about people and when you love people - even at work - it can hurt if things don’t go right. We are taught that we can’t fail. But I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but failure is just “first attempt in learning”.

Q: It feels like we’re on the precipice of change as we lean further towards a focus on wellbeing. But we both know instrumental change is slow, so I’d love to know what’s one thing every agency could implement in 2021 to be a kinder space?

Cassie: I’ve worked with quite a few big and small agencies this year [2020] and the thing that I saw when we had to change fast and to do the work from home was that leadership started to go, “Shit, it’s not just about me walking the floors now. I need to somehow be able to look people in the eyes through a digital medium and connect with them”. And what I found was that, more often than not, all meetings would start with: “How are you doing?”.

So moving into 2021, every agency can just start by asking people how they’re doing.

Giving a damn amounts to so much in this life.

Regardless of if you’re in a creative agency, if you’re client side or if you’re an essential worker, giving a damn is the secret sauce for humanity and connection.

Q: If you saw someone in your team struggling, what would be your advice for how we could help?

Cassie: It depends on your relationship with that person and their comfort level with chatting. The best things I’ve ever done in my career have been to have a chat. Find a quiet space and just ask, “Hey, are you doing ok? Because I’m having a real shit week”. You know just showing that empathy and saying, “If you ever need to talk, I’m here and this is your safe space”. And it doesn’t have to be at work because a lot of the time when folks are struggling at work, there’s something going on beyond the office.

So I’d say the best thing you can do is just be present enough to know someone is struggling. People hide it really well, especially in the creative industry. We’re taught to go on and work until 2am and hit those deadlines and to quite literally kill ourselves for the project. So if you’re feeling it, I’m sure others are too.

Becoming more attuned to other people is a real amazing power.

This year [2020], I’ve worked mostly with CEOs, the top tier leaders who are afraid to put a foot wrong because they know their people are struggling and they want to be the helpful hand up. And should they say, “I need a helpful hand up too”, well they’re afraid that their vulnerability will be misconstrued as weakness. So I spent a lot of time this year actually working with Execs and going, here’s a way you can frame that because people need to know you’re having a hard day too so that they can rally around you.

For me, it was an illuminating year and just reaffirmed my belief that compassion and empathy are definitely the only way I will ever achieve success.

Q: Finally, how can we all become Kindness Warriors?

Cassie: I think the first step to becoming a Kindness Warrior, is understanding what kindness looks like to yourself. Because when you’re compassionate and empathetic to yourself, I tell you what, it’s so much easier to invite others in and be compassionate and empathetic with them.