Ep 405: Anselmo Ramos of GUT - "The Feelings Leader"

Fearless Creative Leadership

Here’s a question. How vulnerable is too vulnerable?

This week’s guest is Anselmo Ramos. He’s the Co-Founder and Creative Chairman of GUT, a global independent creative agency that’s headquartered in Miami, and with six other offices around the world.

Months after being named the Independent Agency Network of the Year at last year’s Cannes Lions, GUT announced it was being acquired by the tech company Globant. GUT was recently named one of the most innovative companies in the world by Fast Company.

For a company that is barely six years old, its story and success are remarkable. It’s also built on a very specific ethos.

Businesses measure success by many metrics, and as a leader, you live with most of them every day.

In most companies, seeing the leaders cry in public would be a strong indicator that things were heading in the wrong direction. Or worse. For many staff members, it would be traumatic to witness such a public display of human emotion from their leaders.

This conversation with Anselmo has made me think hard about the humanity side of the leadership equation.

How vulnerable is too vulnerable?

The answer, of course, depends on the culture that you have created. If your culture is based on deep and enduring emotional trust, you give people the ability to show up as complex, multifaceted humans, to show up as whole beings.

In a world in which Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to mimic — or more — much of what passes for ‘creative’ in inverted commas, our ability as a species to separate ourselves from the servers, will depend on whether we can unleash ‘human creativity’, that capacity which no technology can replace.

Human creativity comes from the soul. And souls have feelings.

How do you measure those?