Conscious Leaders with Ruth Farenga

A forward thinking, responsible and caring business | Phil Wild

Phil is the CEO of ‘James Cropper’, an engineering and advanced materials business based in the Lake District. You may not have heard of them but they employ over 600 people and work for big brands such as Burberry–producing high-quality paper, technical fibre and smart substitutes to single-use plastic.

Phil is on a journey to allow more autonomy for employees. He wants leaders in his business to look further into the future. He wants them to think about the bigger questions the business has and allow them to delegate responsibility for tactical issues, giving more empowerment to junior staff.

He has been keen to separate James Cropper into its three core businesses, allowing each one to take more control over how they deal with day-to-day challenges. The overall goal brings less overarching policy and more personalised leadership.

James Cropper is a predominantly rural business, which often contains multiple people from the same family. This brings new opportunities around supporting the local community and building a strong brand to attract engineering talent.

This is a business that listens. Enjoy learning about how they got to where they are now

Becoming an employee-owned business | Guy Singh-Watson

Guy started out in management consulting and despite his rapid success, became drawn to other sectors and ways of working. Having grown up on a farm, he turned to organic farming and ‘grew’ a business from a sole-trader in 1987 to the Riverford company we know today, with 1000 employees (as of 2021). Riverford is a household name as the biggest fruit and veg box provider in the UK.

Two and a half years ago, Riverford became employee owned and Guy effectively gave away £15 million worth of equity to his employees, now called ‘co-owners’. 

They have achieved great heights–recently becoming a ‘B corporation’ (demonstrating their ethical standards) as well as entering the Sunday Times top 100 companies for employees.

Guy has seen remarkable behaviour change, not least with himself, but with the senior management team as well. They started a journey of self-awareness, which had a transformational effect on everyone involved.  He has also seen how the employee co-owners often put the interest of the group over their own self-interest. He finds this quite incredible compared to the kind of behaviour he sometimes saw in the City.

Riverford have achieved huge success during the COVID-19 pandemic and are now looking at how to invest their money in more progressive outlets, such as climate-friendly methods.

Guy and Riverford are clear leaders in ethical business.

The game of people | Steve O’Brien

Steve has a passion for the human brain. He understands that people are complex enough without enforcing all sorts of HR policies.

At his technology company, Newicon, Steve is interested in setting up an effective ‘game’ for employees. This means establishing boundaries or rules, such as principles around sharing feedback, that employees should adopt. By being clear around behaviours, people have a better idea of how to act effectively as a group.

Steve has a strong sense of self-belief and understands that others also need him to trust in their capacity. He enables people by allowing them to learn and develop their skills and encourages their wider abilities. This might mean making a loss or breaking even on some projects in order to give staff the space to grow.

He wants to invest in staff thinking and creativity. For example, Newicon promotes energetic, stimulating working spaces so staff can spend more time in areas they enjoy.

This applies to clients too. Newicon empowers clients by creating a ‘game-like’ environment where they have a safe space to play and explore. Steve brings out their creativity as part of their software creation process. He’s also keen to hide in the background allowing others to lead--keeping his mouth firmly shut!

Steve is extremely humble, intelligent and down to earth.

 

To learn about his company, Newicon, visit their website: https://newicon.net/

Ultimate service to people and planet | Jean-Baptiste Oldenhove

Jean-Baptiste brings a true sense of service to his work. Tangibly, he wants colleagues to go into a meeting asking what they can do to help the other person, not what they can get out of it.

This applies too to his wider company, Estari Group, which sits at centrepoint between investors and entrepreneurs who want to contribute to large-scale programmes around sustainability such as electric bikes for healthier streets or food technology to reduce disease.

His company brings together capital investors with the best innovative ideas to create lasting change in our society for people and planet. They deal in multi-million dollar investments sourcing capital from private, individual and public funds for a common goal.

To this end, Jean-Baptiste is facilitating big change in society with ethics and human connection at its core. He is humble, grounded and a pleasure to learn from.

 

For more info on Conscious Leaders who produce this podcast visit: www.consciousleaders.org.uk

Business purpose and focus | Hephzi Pemberton

Hephzi Pemberton has an extremely strong ethical background. Her parents were missionaries and she grew up in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). She has witnessed just how diverse the world is, and yet she is keenly aware just how limited the western world is (and her own previous investment banking industry) when it comes to professional diversity.

Following the co-founding of a successful financial headhunting firm, Hephzi combined her passion for diversity and research into her latest venture and founded a diversity and inclusion strategic consultancy, The Equality Group. The focus of their work is helping companies hire diverse leadership talent and embed inclusion and diversity across their organisation, including strategy, data collection, process redesign and inclusion education.

Hephzi is an enabler: she facilitates open communication with her team. She wants ongoing dialogue on things like performance discussions. Through this, she explains how we can avoid ‘peak bias’ (focusing on just the high moments) or ‘recency bias’ (focusing on the immediate past). 

She has worked on herself a lot as a leader through coaching, therapy and her advisory board. All this means she has a very supportive community around her.

Hephzi is someone with a big vision but who also exposes her team to strategy and helps them achieve what they want personally out of life as well as professionally.

2020 Highlights Compilation

Listen to some highlights of the Conscious Leaders Podcast from it's first year broadcasting. You'll hear themes around freedom at work, collective (and yet effective) decision making, black lives matter and being candid with employees.

You'll hear snippets from :

• June Cory, Founder, MyMustard
• Daniel Hulme, CEO, Satalia
• Tom Tapper, Co-Founder, Nice and Serious
• Shanice Mears, Co-Founder, The Elephant Room
• Andy Woodfield, Partner, PwC

Enjoy!

We're also rebranding so soon you'll be able to visit us at www.consciousleaders.org.uk

 

 

Taking compassion to the next level | Pip Jamieson

Pip Jamieson is the Founder and CEO of The Dots, a professional network for creatives dubbed “The next LinkedIn?” by Forbes.

Pip brings a very compassionate leadership style and truly cares about her employees on a deep level. She demonstrates this, not only through her own behaviour, but in the rituals and practices the organisation undertakes each week to support each other and the business. She knows that happy staff equal productive staff and so works tirelessly to support their happiness.

They recruit employees based on values as they want a collective, caring, positive approach from all team members. Pip also does not tolerate gossip and will stamp it out at the slightest sniff, believing it leads to tension. She’s learnt partly from her father as a leader and from the (good and not so good) practices she’s experienced throughout her career.

People as citizens, not just consumers | Jon Alexander

Jon Alexander spent 10 years in advertising, completed three masters degrees and takes a very philosophical approach to his work. A previous boss once said to him about his job "people are receiving about 3,000 advertising messages a day, your job is to cut through them". This left Jon deeply unsatisfied. It led him to explore deeper ethics in advertising and ask the question "what if people were more than just consumers?", and, "what if we brought the same kind of energy into selling stuff into involving people?"

On this podcast, you will hear a deep sense of philosophy but also a very practical approach into exactly how you involve and empower people in commercial and public sector projects. Jon and I explore how we get people to truly participate in the solutions we need in society.

Shaking up the advertising world | Shanice Mears

Trailblazing in the advertising world | Shanice Mears

At 26, Shanice is a trailblazer in her industry. Growing up in Birmingham and having studied Dance Performance, she landed in the advertising world and was spotted by her then CEO (Dan Saxby) as having great potential. She was driving initiatives around inclusion and hasn’t stopped since. Shanice and Dan decided to set up a new agency together—The Elephant Room—to embody the inclusivity they want to see in their industry. This is even more relevant today, with the Black Lives Matter movement, and Shanice is strong in her criticism of perceived advances in diversity, especially in advertising. Since launching The Elephant Room, Shanice has set the bar high and they have worked for big brands including Converse, Uber and the Prince’s Trust.

What you will hear from Shanice is a deep sense of faith in the talent around her and her desire to enable opportunity like she once experienced. She believes in community and facilitating others’ growth even if that means taking risks.

A start-up mentality in a medium sized business | Ciaron Dunne

Ciaron describes himself and the business as resilient, self-indulgent and opportunistic. He’s cultivated a lively start-up culture built around autonomous teams who drive a variety of ventures. Hence the company name, Genie Ventures.

He protects his people and shoulders the big issues to support the inevitable volatility of the tech world—but he doesn’t find that shouldering it is a burden. That pails into insignificance compared to the death of his older sister when he was 25.

He wants to see his employees taking responsibility for their learning, being proactive. Indeed, they teach each other at Genie Ventures through their own academy.

His company has a lean and fun approach. They pick up new ideas, evaluate them and if they’re viable, run with them. This means that the environment is empowering, facilitated by agile methods and a proactive, ‘start-up’ mentality.

It sounds like a lot of fun and Ciaron couldn’t be more down to earth as a leader!