Conscious Leaders with Ruth Farenga

Skyler Mattson is President of the global creative agency, Wongdoody. She is a corporate leader with a very ‘human’ style. This really comes across as she talks about looking after a large team of creatives. I really got the impression she was ‘one of them’! Despite her leadership role and schedule, she’s still there on the ground, involved in projects and balances the corporate elements of her ro...

This month the tables have turned and I had the fortune of being interviewed for my own podcast by the wonderful Fi Macmillan. From this episode you will take away: Why I wrote my new book Next Level Leadership, nine lessons from conscious leaders What holds leaders back Memorable and practical moments of great leadership from the podcast Simple practices you can adopt to take your leadership to t...

Shanice Mears is back on the Conscious Leaders Podcast two years later to update us on how far business has come on diversity and inclusion (D&I) since George Floyd’s death in 2020. She shares great stories of leading businesses but talks through the reasons why much of this work is limited. Shanice is a young, black Co-Founder of a highly successful marketing agency called The Elephant Room who h...

Martyn got his latest business off the ground when he put himself out there, asked for help and then capitalised on those moments. As a business leader, his company, Purple Goat now uses the power of disabled creatives and influencers to create engaging, progressive and representative marketing campaigns and serves big brands such as Tesco and Virgin Media. Martyn is keen to highlight that the dis...

In my revisit interview with Jon Alexander, Co-founder, the Citizenship Project and now Author of ‘Citizens’, we dive deeper into his philosophy. Jon believes the story of us as consumers is broken. Practically, he gets organisations to ask themselves ‘what would it look like to bring the same creative energy into selling stuff, into involving people?’. He says that if you see people as consumers...

Sue McLean started in a man’s world. Some of those men wanted her to have more ‘gravitas’. She wondered if they wanted her to be more like them. Furthermore, there weren’t many female role models that she could look up to as junior lawyer. Most of them worked crazy hours, just like the men and had kids in boarding school, something she didn’t want to do. She could have accepted that and hung aroun...

John Timpson is Chairman at Timpson, well-known as a high street brand for shoe repairs and key cutting which now has over 2,000 stores and makes £20million in profit. What is it that works so well? John sought to shake up the business when he originally became CEO, instilling a key principle of ‘Upside Down Management’. This means as much autonomy for staff as is humanly possible. He says there a...

Clair has some very clear perspectives on how she manages herself and her thriving marketing agency business, Serotonin, in Manchester. In her previous life, she founded a charity called Odd Arts, which transforms lives through applied theatre, particularly in the criminal justice system. This work in prisons required her to build trust very quickly and she has honed this skill over time. In this...

Lee is clearly a true progressive leader in engineering and manufacturing world. He looks after three sites of about 800 people for Specsavers where he has had a huge impact on employee satisfaction. He took one of the sites where people were the least satisfied to getting a rating of 9.1 satisfaction. He describes the process of really listening to employees and taking on their full feedback and...

Grace is the Chief Experience Officer at Accenture Interactive. Grace is in a C-Suite job, identifies as non-binary and feels like it’s their role to help people feel included. Grace does this by implementing role-open behaviour and allowing their quirkiness to shine. They are quite comfortable being seen as different. In fact, their ‘weirdness’ factor is a good thing, it’s non-threatening and it...

Welcome to the Conscious Leaders Podcast – 2021 Highlights Episode.  This year has been about finding more great leaders who are willing to step up for their employees, who are really willing to show the human side of what they do – the highs and lows – not a surface-layer version. As listeners, you’ve told me you want to know what their journey has really been like and how they’ve supported their...

As CEO of successful baby food brand, Ella’s Kitchen, Mark Cuddigan is committed to his employees in a profound way. His leadership principles are to allow for autonomy. Instead of making decisions, Mark aims to serve. Indeed, four years ago he committed to not making any decisions at all! From that point on, he has been a sounding board, a coach and provides his input--but he will always leave de...

Cheryl Luzet is a business leader who wants to talk about failure. She identifies it is in this space we learn the most, because, in learning what not to do, we also learn what we should be doing. So much so that at her digital marketing agency (Wagada), regularly pop the ‘failure prosecco’ to talk through these moments! In this episode, Cheryl talks about her journey to CEO and being ‘of service’...

Bejay, at the age of 25, is a multi-award winning serial social entrepreneur and the youngest award winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Promotion. He is founder of Supa Network, the Business Building Club, and many more ventures. Bejay's leadership approach is extremely flexible, from where staff are based, to their employment contract, to how long a project will run. But this flexibility i...

Susan has had a fast trajectory in law, moving from paralegal to Partner in 8 years. Despite her personal achievements, Susan shuns the limelight. She’s happy that Debenhams Ottaway’s successes are reflected in her staff and is not interested in the glory. Susan really believes in the potential of others and is a particular advocate for women in the legal and business professions. Although her ind...

Since a young age, Charlotte has been trailblazing in social media. She grew up getting into the nitty gritty of platforms like MySpace and became an early adopter and expert of Twitter and Hubspot. Now, she runs her own influencer marketing agency, SevenSix, producing purpose-led campaigns that generate a positive impact. SevenSix was born out of frustration with the industry, that companies are...

Nicole Sadd, CEO at Rothamsted Enterprises has had a career in hospitality from hotels, to venues, to boats – she has been there and everywhere! One of her biggest challenges has been steering the ‘ship’ of an events and conference business through a pandemic. Nicole takes us on a journey and shares the highs and the lows. She talks about the excitement and rush of the first few months of lockdown...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 succes...

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 Elepha...

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...

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...