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Debbie O’Hanlon:  Hello, I'm Debbie O'Hanlon and I'm the UK EY private client service leader and I'm proud to be presenting the first chat show to launch our Real Insights campaign. We aim to ask better questions at EY so within this video series, we'll be interviewing business leaders from private and entrepreneurial businesses to get their thoughts in their own words, allowing them to share experiences and insights with you as they continue to succeed in a really challenging business world. Within this first video, we're tackling the theme of leadership itself and we're breaking it down into three core areas, personal resilience, transformative leadership and decision making. But first, let me hand over to the business leaders to introduce themselves.

Sally Ford:  Hi, my name's Sally Ford and I'm operational resilience director at Arqiva. So, my role involves leading the safety, health and environment team, but I'm also responsible for business continuity, physical security and quality management. So Arqiva's an organisation you may not have heard of but if you watch TV, listen to the radio, use your mobile or have a smart meter, then you'll have used us on a daily basis.

Paul Baker:  So, I'm Paul Baker, founder of St. Pierre Group, which is an international branded bakery business which is based in Manchester in the UK. We have three brands in our business, St. Pierre, which is authentic French brioche, crepes, Belgian waffles, Baker Street, which is cleverly packaged, extended life bakery products, and Paul Hollywood, the star of the Great British Bake-off, and we worked with Paul to launch a range of bake-at-home products.

 

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Thanks all and it's really great to meet you. Before we go into the specific topics I referred to earlier, I'm interested to hear your headline thoughts on leadership. So, Paul, maybe we could start with you. What components of leadership are most important, do you think?

Paul Baker:  There's several things which are key ingredients for a good leader, some of these people will already recognise optimism, obviously, I backed out with pragmatism as well, those two don’t often get put together but they are very important. Resilience, we'll probably talk about that a bit more later, trust, that's very important, your team, everybody who deals with your business, you have to build trust and earn trust, so I think that's really important. Empathy, I think just being empathetic is a skill that, as a leader, you really need to understand and be able to use and, and you need to be able to listen to people. I think the other things that we bring in, generosity of spirit, generosity of time, you know, we're all busy, it's a very busy world we, we live in, but just taking the time to listen when your, your team or your customers or your partners are talking to you is really, really important.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Sally, what do you find most rewarding about your leadership role?

Sally Ford:  I think my passion within my leadership role is being able to learn new things, get involved in new areas of the business, and then use my, sort of, skills and knowledge and expertise in those new situations. And, as a leader, you're often afforded that ability to be able to get involved in areas that not, are not traditionally part of your role, so I find that really rewarding and energising.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Oh, that's great to kick us off, thank you. So let's turn now to the topic of resilience, a topic that comes up time and time again within leadership discussions. Paul, maybe you could share your thoughts on personal resilience, how important it is to you as a leader, how does this impact your business, and how has it been tested most recently?

Paul Baker:  Well, I think you can lead by example when it comes to resilience. I think you have to have a responsibility, you might be very resilient, you might work very hard as a leader, but I think you have to have emotional intelligence to take the best parts of what being a resilient leader means, and that doesn't mean working all the hours, it does mean working smartly and listening to your team about their requirements. In terms of coping well with disruption, I think if you're used to change, one thing I say is the constant in our business is change, if you can cultivate that mindset in your team, it builds resilience naturally because if people expect routine and conformity all the time and want that and seek it, in a business like ours that's growing very, very quickly, you have to accept that change is gonna happen. And so, if you build that into your leadership style, people understand it and if they trust you, which our team do, they do trust our leadership team here, then the resilience is, you're, you're naturally building it in all the time, and then it comes to the fore when you need it.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Sally, turning to you now, how have you helped build your teams resilience as a leader?

Sally Ford:  So, as a leader, I think it's really important to understand the resilience of your team members and as of your team. We've used some fairly straightforward tools in our team which many of you will have used such as Gallup Strengthsfinder and Myers-Briggs to understand the strength of team members, what energises them and what, maybe, activity drains them. And that provides a really useful common language to discuss which team members would be better and some tasks than others, and I think it allows much more collaboration within the team and empathy and understanding about who's doing what rather than confrontation and questions about why I’ve been given one task and why somebody else hasn't. And, as a team, collectively, I think that makes for much more efficient output and productivity and also team resilience.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  The constant evolution of leadership and its transformative qualities, both for the personal and for the organisation, is fascinating, I think, and particularly how you navigate in an increasingly complex world, how you connect with people and how you relate to them and think differently. So to this point, and starting with Sally if I could, how has your leadership style changed over the years?

Sally Ford:  I definitely think my leadership style has changed throughout the course of my career. I'm definitely somebody who likes to get things done, I'm, you know, love a list, get my stuff off my list so if I see an issue, I just wanna solve it and get on with it. I think what I’ve learnt over my career is my answer and my idea is not necessarily the right one or the best one. So I’ve tried really hard to be much better at listening to people and especially seeking out and listening to people who have a different opinion or view to me, just being cognizant of how people come up with ideas and giving them the time to do that. So, yeah, definitely listening and seeking out alternative views are two things that I’ve really tried to work on over the course of my career.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Paul, we've seen big technological change in businesses recently, how did you manage the transition as a leader and what are your pros and cons of this approach, do you think?

Paul Baker:  I think there's positives and negatives with the technology that we've all embraced, more in the past three months, particularly. The, the positives are that, you know, you can cross geographic areas without having to get on a plane, you know, it wouldn't be unusual for me to fly for three days for a one-hour meeting, for instance. In the future I think that'll stop, I think the past three months have demonstrated that the technology does exist to avoid having to do that sort of thing. So I think that's a huge positive, I think from our business in the UK, we were able to go to working remotely very quickly. That's probably because we'd invested, just prior to COVID, quite heavily in our infrastructure, our IT infrastructure, and that paid dividends actually, because we, we were able to move very nimbly, very swiftly to being completely mobile. So, you know, my view on that would be, any business really needs to, to look at their IT infrastructure and make sure it's, it's very capable for that sort of-, that sort of scenario. Negatives, well, I think one negative that we've only really just come across in the past, past couple of weeks, towards the end of this lockdown period, is people don’t always tell you on a video screen how they're really feeling, and as a leader, that's very difficult to navigate.

You can say to somebody-, you can have a one-to-one call and say, 'You okay?' 'Yes,' you know, 'Have you been out with your family, have you seen anyone?' 'Yeah, no, I'm fine, I'm, I'm doing okay,' they're not okay and that's become apparent to us. And it's something that's very difficult, actually, to calibrate on a video screen. And, of course, without meeting somebody face-to-face in an office or just seeing them move around the office for the day, sometimes you pick up on non-verbal communication and sometimes you just know somebody's not feeling quite right. So I think that's a negative from the technology, and I don’t think that will ever-, I'm not sure how you can ever overcome that because that's really, as a leader or a manager or a, you know, being responsible for people, that's a personal thing. Some people are good at picking up on how somebody's feeling and that's really important. So, I think that's probably one of the negatives that we've seen, we haven't seen many negatives from the technology side but that would definitely be one of them.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  So some really thought-provoking points there too, thank you. So, finally, now then to decision making. And decision making has really been brought into sharp focus in recent months, again, both for individuals and for businesses. Sally, could you talk us through your decision making process and, specifically, how important is going with your gut when you have to make a quick decision?

Sally Ford:  So, as a leader, there's often situations where there's ambiguity, where you don’t have all the information and you have to make a judgement and make a decision and I think this was really brought to light during the initial stages of the pandemic. Personally, I was having to make a lot of decisions very quickly on an hour-by-hour, a day-by-day basis, there was a lot of ambiguity. And I think in those situations where you haven't got all the facts, you have to fall back on your experience and your technical expert and then your gut does come into play and you have to go with the decision that you think is right at the time. And I think it's really important that you don’t get paralysed by that and you make a decision, not all our decisions are gonna be right, but actually making a decision and moving forward means that people have got something to work with and I think that is really important. So, it's definitely been a really good experience in the fact that it's honed my decision making skills quite a lot over the last few months.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Paul, if I could ask you, what learnings have you taken from recent decisions and what will you take forward to ensure the continued success of your business?

Paul Baker:  What we've learnt from recent decisions is there's a lot of benefits that, that are gonna come out of those decisions. Some of the things that we were trying to achieve prior to the lockdown, we achieved in the first week of lockdown. So it's incredible how, you know, necessity forces you to make some of these decisions that maybe you’ve been procrastinating about for some time. That's something that will stay with us I think probably getting down to those questions and actually enacting them rather than just discussing them and thinking about them and prevaricating about them, just get on and do them. And, you know, as an instance, you know, short, trimming the tail for us, we've got a huge product range, very quickly at the beginning of lockdown we had to be expedient and bring that product range down to the core items that people were demanding and needing. That sort of approach will stay with us. I think another element would be we haven't retreated on our spending, we haven't retreated on our recruitment, that's been a constant before COVID, it's been a constant through COVID and that'll probably be a constant beyond COVID. You know, you’ve gotta be bold and brave in business and it's not always easy and the past twelve weeks have been really challenging and we are, we recognise we're fortunate.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Sally, coming back to you now then, I know you’ve been heavily involved in business continuity planning for Arqiva, could you elaborate for us on how the pandemic has helped shine a light on the importance of this and the decisions now being made to strengthen it?

Sally Ford:  So, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Arqiva's always been great at insta management but we had a bit of work to do on our business continuity planning and we've embarked on a programme over the last twelve months to improve our business continuity planning. Some areas of the business, bit reluctant to why we maybe need business continuity plans, maybe didn't see the value of them, other areas did, and I think the pandemic response has really shone a light on the benefit of having a workaround plan, a business continuity plan, because things will go wrong. It might not be a pandemic next time, it might be something else, you know, and while we're managing the instant and fixing the initial problem, we need workaround plans to ensure we keep delivering our products and services to our internal and external customers. So I think this is really gonna help us going forward with the next twelve months of our business continuity programme because now everybody gets it in the business. So, hopefully, we'll have a really robust system at the end of it.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Finally, then, just before wrapping up, I wonder whether each of you could share some of the best pieces of advice that you’ve been given as leaders, or maybe the advice that you can share with those who are new to leadership?

Paul Baker:  That's a very easy one, actually, I’ve got some friends who've had long, distinguished careers in the military and one of them, who I went to school with and I met when I was six, and his advice to me was always, 'Move fast and stay low,' and I think, you know, I think for him, that was very, very good advice. I’ve always-, I’ve always, sort of, had that as an adage and a, sort of, at the back of my mind and it's a pretty good one, really. So, so, we do tend to do that, yeah.

Sally Ford:  So I think my couple of bits of advice for anybody who's new to leadership or, or aspiring to be a leader, I think one is, stick to your guns but know which battles to fight, you're not gonna win them all and sometimes you just need to take a step back and think, I'll fight that battle another day. So just recognising, you know, how to get the best result may not be always to fight all the battles on the same day. And I think the other point is to give things a go, you get opportunities by stepping forward, leaning in, putting yourself forward to do things, you'll get lots of experience, you might fail at some of them but you'll learn a lot on the way as well. And, you know, you will get that exposure within your organisation and people will get to know you and understand what your skills and strengths you can bring to the team that you're working in.

Debbie O’Hanlon:  Oh, that's fantastic, there's some real pearls of wisdom there for all of us, thank you. Well, that concludes our first Real Insights chat show, I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I did. Please do subscribe for our next episode of Real Insights using the link below, when we'll be talking to family business owners, and I'm really looking forward to that. See you next time.

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