Shownotes: 

CBE, Founder of Socially Mobile, Future Proof and several other initiatives to build a better industry. Sarah Waddington, CBE had the foresight to launch her purpose driven management consultancy a decade before others started talking about Purpose. In this episode I spoke to her about journey 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

👉🏾 The importance of shared values for great results and purpose being a commercial imperative in today’s world

👉🏾 What PR practitioners can do to remaining relevant as advisers to the C-suite in a world of flux

👉🏾 #FutureProof and the three things we need to plan for to FutureProof the industry

👉🏾 What good leadership looks like, how women lead

👉🏾 Addressing the the gender/ethnicity gap in leadership in the industry

👉🏾 The vision behind ‘Socially Mobile’ and her aspiration for it

And last but not the least what the Elephant in the Room is for her

“From a leadership perspective the elephant in the room is when people won't recognise or acknowledge their own weaknesses. I'm a flawed leader, I think we all are, there's very few people that I would look at and go they're the full 360 thing. But I know I've made mistakes and I'm human, my intention, I like to think is always right. I always want to learn and I think that's the other elephant in the room, just sometimes knowing you don't know the full picture and back to what you said earlier, when we need to listen better, all of us need to listen better.”

What is the Elephant in the Room for you? 

Listen more here….

Memorable Passages from the podcast:

👉🏾 Thank you so much for inviting me, I'm so delighted to be speaking to you today. 

👉🏾 Thank you for the lovely congratulations. I actually have my investiture in July, so I've got something very exciting to look forward to. And, you say since that news and being able to use that to launch Socially Mobile been quite a special time for me so I'm very grateful for all of that that's been happening. Where to start in terms of starting my own consultancy, well I did a French and media degree, loved it. And in my final year, I was lucky to do an internship and I went to a PR company and the rest is history shall we say. Came back to the Northeast, went into PR agency, then wanted to widen my expertise and went to PR marketing agency, developed my marketing knowledge through an MA and kept my CPD up. And ultimately I got to a stage in my career where I was running three offices for a group up in the north.

👉🏾 And the recession hits, this was about 13 years ago, and I suddenly sensed an opportunity, I was doing less of the day-to-day stuff and I was missing it. And then I had clients who wanted to work with me and weren't getting me but also didn't want or couldn't afford anymore to have agencies with big operational costs, they wanted the consultancy direct. So that's when I actually set up my own company and didn't really look back. And I was really fortunate that back at that time, I did something which was quite innovative in terms of business model, I actually set ourselves up as a remote working agency. And that seems very commonplace now because of the pandemic. But pretty much the first of my kind and I could only do that really because a lot of the private sector and blue-chip companies that I'd worked with, were doing the same and it just became much more acceptable. 

👉🏾 So I started there and then as we grew I started to be really interested in the idea of a purpose and social capital. And that's what we started to build the agency around. We wanted to only be working with organisations that were doing good in their local communities. And so that became a key strategy for us in terms of we wanted to do good and therefore the organisations we were working with had to do the same. Through that, as we were advising on purpose, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx there's was an opportunity in terms of the management consultancy. And at the same time, I was working with the CIPR and pushing very much the message that if we were to be a strategic management function, we needed to have that business acumen and the skills that go with it. And so I developed my own and that of the team, and that's how we've kind of got hybrid agency, which is management consultancy with tactical implementation skills in terms of PR and marketing so they compliment each other really really well. 

👉🏾 And I think you have the right tools in place, tech is wonderful for that and it's helped democratise things for people, I think. But I have missed the face-to-face meetings because what we've always done is gone to work in our client organisations. We can have meetings, then say can we remote work from here or we take them out for lunch and we have the meeting at lunch. So it's always been very social and very much about the relationship building and useful as it is, you can't quite get that from teams or zoom or whatever your tech have choice is. 

👉🏾 Really good question, I'm going to try and break that down at a little bit. I think purpose is really, really important, I think everybody recognises and it's right that it's at the forefront of everybody's minds right now, because of a crisis, a global crisis. We've seen that with the pandemic, we've now got the war in Ukraine, but not just that the climate crisis is the most pressing. And ultimately it needs a collective response, so that means for us individually as people, but also the organisations we work for, combined with policymakers. It's not just down to governments now, it needs everybody to respond, so I think purpose has to be top of the agenda for the C-suite and it has to be something that PR practitioners are advising on and have a really good handle on.

👉🏾 And for me you asked the question, is it important for PR practitioners to have their own purpose or just allowing the client's purpose? My view would be that the great results come when you have shared values when you're both pushing in the same direction and that, you're looking at, for example, the UN sustainable development goals, there may be some that particularly resonate with you. So I think the best results come when you find organisations or an employer that has a very similar focus and I think that's when sweet things happen. The other thing I would say is, what does purpose mean for business at large? It has to be an imperative because, a) we've got an imperative to save the welfare of future generations, and that sounds very dramatic, but ultimately that's what the mission is right now. But secondly, there's a commercial imperative because it's what the public is now demanding. If you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer and the special reports they brought out and there's a number of other industry data points that say the same, but it's not just that. So there's the impetus from public, and what's really interesting now is there's also the impetus from people like venture capitalists, who are saying, we are not going to provide the finance unless you can demonstrate to us that you're doing better within your communities. And I think that's really interesting because change only really happens when there's that push-pull effect, and there is that squeeze now, businesses can't ignore it, they can't just focus on the bottom line, they're being forced to address it because of the stakeholders around them and I think that's really, really important for the business community to recognise if they haven't already.

👉🏾 I really really hope so. Every bit of the optimist in me says that but then you look at the energy strategy that the UK government put forward. And it just, for me feels catastrophic at times, but you have to kind of put it in perspective and then use your influence in the best way you can. 

👉🏾 I think you kind of nailed it in a question. I think the world's changing every single day, every single week and its small changes, it's things that are really changing the way we work, we live, we think. And I think for practitioners the opportunity is to help make sense of change for organisations, to understand what's happening, to do that kind of forecasting of what's coming next and what organisations need in order to evolve alongside, or even leapfrog some of it. I think that's very much been the case, if you look at the pandemic. Take the NHS is a great example how that has very quickly adopted new technologies in order to maintain a health care service to the public. And it was change that was already coming, but obviously it's had to happen really, really quickly. And I guess it's a case of, I don't think we're done with that change yet. So there's an element consolidation, but looking forward and helping organisations navigate it in the best, most ethical way they can while making sustainable choices that might not feel comfortable because we've all had lots of change, lots of difficulty trading over the last two or three years, so there might not be surplus left. So making just commercial decisions that might cost a lot upfront but be better for the long term, they're really hard to do right now. So it's helping navigate all of that, I would suggest.

👉🏾 This is a just a great question and I love that you asked me this and I'm going to grab my very first Future Proof book. Now you'll know that there's six books, five crowdsourced, two of which are NHS related. But the very first one is dedicated to Dr. John White, who I respect hugely and his writing has covered this, and I'm going to quote, as I did from the book, from a paper that Dr. John White presented to the Swiss Public Relations Society in 1999. Now he talked about what the opportunity was for PR people in the industry. And he talked about success being dependent on practitioners and I'm going to read verbatim "Recognising the opportunity presented by the environment and management needs, taking steps to educate and train themselves and make full use of communication technology to provide reliable, if not indispensable, services to managers; I say seek to deal with complexity and manage successful businesses”. 

👉🏾 I genuinely don't think much has changed, it's a bit like the answer I gave before, it's managing complexity, understanding business, understanding technology and making sure that you're taking relevant information back to the board. And helping them make decisions on the back of that, even if you're not a member of the board yourself, you can still influence and I just love that quote. When you look at, what's the opportunity right now? How do we maintain the strategic position we were given thanks to the pandemic when businesses suddenly realised how much they need the communications, and that tells you in a nutshell there, I just think that it will always hold true for me. 

👉🏾 This is a really great question and for me, a great leader is empathetic above everything. I think they're in touch with society, the wider political landscape and they're forward-thinking and bring all that knowledge to the role. But ultimately they're value-driven and authentic and they're prepared to make difficult decisions, quite quickly, but obviously will take their communities on that journey with them. So for me, it's all about good leaders build social capital and I mean by that two different things one, they look at their audiences, including their internal audiences can be forgotten at times and they influence those and they bring them on the journey and they also build social capital by doing good in their communities. And I think that for me defines a good leader, they know their strengths and they know their weaknesses and they build a team around them that can thrive and that as a collective can take the organisation forward. 

👉🏾 I think this is a very interesting question. And I think the normal answer would be, oh it's about soft skills. I just think we have a different approach, a different perspective on things that might approach things very differently. I think women leaders tend to surround themselves by a real diversity of thought and people which I think really helps when you're making decisions. They will look at their backgrounds and the skillsets of the people around them and draw that in, I'm not saying that male leaders don't do that, but I see it much more within my community.

👉🏾 The thriving communities that I'm surrounded with are often led by women and they deliberately take a community approach, and I love that. I think that's really, really important. And I've always had an issue, slightly off question, but I've always had an issue with people saying, oh, we need to do more assertiveness training for women, or they need more confidence. That's not what they need, they need more support and they need more training and they need more opportunities, it needs to be more of a level playing field. Soft skills are really important in the workplace and to suggest that you need to be able to shout louder to be heard better is completely wrong, you need to actually listen more carefully if that's the case. 

👉🏾 100%. I think this is about, firstly finding a workplace that shares your values, I really do think that's really important. If you're going to thrive in a workplace, it needs to be somewhere that you can fit in or that you believe in their mission and they believe in you. And so there's a natural relationship between the two of you, but I think you have to be very specific about the goals that you want and build allies around that, so it's not just about you, it's about actually what you want to achieve on behalf of the organisation and making sure that you use your connections in a powerful way. And I would say, if it's not working for you in an organisation, you've tried different routes, I always say, and it's a hard decision, it's a tough decision, but ship in and ship out. Get out because if they're not going to give you the opportunity, there is something structurally wrong with that organisation. Whatever that might be, whether it's bias or structural racism, I don't know if there's something holding you back and you've tried a whole heap of different ways, don't waste your energy, find somewhere that will value you for what you can bring. 

👉🏾 Yeah, once you believe you'll often expend wasted energy wanting to change the place cause you believe in them. 

👉🏾 There's two things here for me, and I'm going to talk about the wider issue first, there's a big issue in terms of, we don't have diversity on teams because we don't take a long-term strategic view to it. And there's lots of reasons for that. So, we don't take a thoughtful approach to talent hire. For example, we don't think about school leavers who might not have the right qualifications, people have not had the access to the relevant training. And to try and get those people we need to be in their communities, making our industry an appealing choice and providing the training and education that's appropriate for them. And if you're an employer, obviously there's a cost attached to that. So there's this first thing about actually recruiting diverse talent, which we don't do well because employers are scared to put diverse teams in front of certain clients, or they just like to hire in their image, and we know there's bias in that regard, so we need to break that. So this first thing is about actually how we recruit people, then the second one is actually progression, we're not good at progressing for whatever reason, diverse talents, and if you look at the industry data, we can all clap ourselves on the back and say, well done, we're getting more like black, asian and ethnic minority colleagues into the industry, but actually they're not getting into managerial director-level roles, and we have to ask ourselves a very hard question as to why that is. And they get to a certain point and they leave and that's whether they don't see people in their own image or whether there just isn't progression for them. That's something we very much need to address and that's kind of where we landed with Socially Mobile in terms of an intervention that we specifically brought in to kind of deal with this. 

👉🏾 Thank you, it's been a long time in the making. So in 2015, I think it was, when I established Future-Proof and that's because I really was frustrated by the approach to public relations, which seem to very much see it as a tactical function and responsive rather than something where we actually take control and are proper advisors to organisations. So like I said it's about reinforcing the value of public relations to business and to show how it works as a strategic management function when it's done effectively. And and then through my work with the CIPR, I was seeing lots of industry data and I was just really frustrated by the fact that we were becoming a closed shop to people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and people from diverse backgrounds and I found it really frustrating, and every single year I tip up and there'll be a conference or there'll be speaking thing, we all knew this is terrible, we need to do something about it and nothing was being done. And eventually there's only so much you can start by beefing away at the sidelines and I thought you know what, I want to do something that addresses this. 

👉🏾 Initially I tried to register Socially Mobile as a charity. It took ages and the charity commission is swamped, and they're way behind where they should be. But the long and short of it is they came back and said they didn't feel that the charitable objectives were right, because the public relations industry was a fairly affluent one. Which completely missed the point of the audiences that we were trying to reach. So what we did is we changed it and we decided we're going to do a community interest company, which we've now done and which would give us a bit more flexibility in terms of the offer, and then the pandemic hit, and we had to pause because we were trying to manage businesses, lives. But it was brilliant because it gave us time to think. And in my head, what I'd wanted to do was fundraise and then connect people who would like funding to find the course that they couldn't afford and do it. That has been the original concept, but it was going to be quite problematic and I realised it was going to be harder again, to try and fundraise the amounts that we would need bearing in mind, lots of businesses had been through a very challenging time and the forecast was still going to be turbulent. 

👉🏾 So ultimately it was good because it gave us time to think and I was working with a professional fundraiser when she said, oh, you should look at this fantastic company in Cumbria, they work with ex-offenders and they provide training in order to be...