Plusnet boss Joanna Carman on modern leadership

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. Being authentic is way, way, way more powerful than emulating other people's behaviours. That's Joanna Carman, a senior executive at the BT Group, where she both leads the Plusnet broadband brand while also acting as its chief marketing officer. I caught up with her at the BT Group offices in central London, where she told me a story from much earlier in her career before she joined BT. I remember I was day two into a job and we had sort of our leadership team meeting and another peer leader came to me, second to the job, and looked at me and said, we don't wear trainers here.

1:21And I sort of looked at him and said, well, I do. And I remember being quite thrown by it actually. and then really interestingly what I saw over the coming months was more and more people started to wear trainers. I think it's a really like micro example of authenticity and a former version of me would have been quite alarmed by that comment and sort of felt the need to conform. I think in the beginning I thought I had to emulate the sort of behaviors of other leaders whereas I think in becoming a leader myself I've learned that that real kind of power of becoming truly authentic. You actually realize that by staying true to yourself whether it's trainers or anything else, you actually create a pathway for others to be individuals and that's really really really important.

2:04So I used to start seeing more people wearing trainers and I think as the generations are coming into the workforce this demand and this craving for individuality is becoming stronger and stronger and stronger and as leaders it's really important that we role model that and adapt to that. It's made me a lot happier right there's nothing more exhausting than coming to work and pretending to be something that you're not. I'm Dougal Shaw and this is the Business Leader Podcast, where we look at the stories and strategies behind modern businesses. Today I'm meeting up with Joanna Carman. She leads the Plusnet brand for BT as both, in effect, its chief executive and chief marketing officer.

2:42After what she calls a squiggly career, working in finance, holding senior roles from a young age, she joined BT Group in 2019. In this interview, I wanted to learn how she developed as a leader at a large company, how she combines roles with overlapping responsibilities leading Plusnet, and how she uses her marketing expertise to sell broadband, an essential product, but a very intangible one too, which makes it challenging to build a distinctive brand. I met up with her at the bustling BT Group offices.

3:18you've talked about having a squiggly career i know so tell me about the squiggles tell me about the squiggles um so i think squiggly and squiggly is sort of different senses of the word um obviously i i started out my career in banking and finance um accidentally it's one of those things i fell into after university um as a temp in fact not even as a permanent job and I did that for quite some time and then I sort of transitioned from that into when I moved back to the UK so I spent quite a few years working abroad in the Far East and the Middle East when I moved back to the UK I wanted to do something different so I ended up moving into telco um worked at at Vodafone and sort of a sort of startup within a corporate um and I've had a brief stint outside of that into a startup world and then sort of back into telco again I think squiggly in terms of industry and sort of remit, but there's always been kind of a constant thread of sort of transformation, change, the need to improve.

4:23I've never walked into a job in any industry or country that's sort of everything set up and it works really well and it's glorious. And if you could just run it for us, that would be amazing. So I think less so in that context, it's always got to have that thread kind of running through it. and even when I've moved around in roles internally sort of within BT they've all had that transformative element or that requirement to change something so I've really enjoyed seeing multiple industries and I actually think it's an interesting way to test kind of how you go about things or how you do things and there's loads more consistency than you would ever think doesn't really matter what industry the challenges are often broadly the same.

5:07people challenges I guess a lot of the time yeah I mean so if you think about transformation as sort of big corporate transformation there's IT challenges, there's infrastructure there's cost but the two big ones that are probably the hardest and often aren't always prioritised are your people internally and your customer so you see and I've learnt this the hard way a few times you see sort of you're about to embark on a big piece of change and if you don't and i mean seriously over invest in bringing the people that are going to be doing it with you on that journey with you explaining to people why helping people understand putting the customer at sort of the heart of everything you do and the employees it won't be successful and you see it failed transformation in lots of companies just because they haven't done that bit of it and they've just gone straight to execution or it being the fault of all kind of problems um And as I say, I've learned that the hard way.

6:05I've made mistakes, for sure. But now in sort of any job I go into, people, people, people, customer, customer, customer, has to be. And just to give us a flavor of what you do, tell me about what might happen on a typical day or perhaps interesting things in a typical week. First of all, I say there's no such thing as typical, which sounds really cliche, but it's true. So obviously, I look after sort of our Plusnet business, which is our value brand. So I might get involved in anything from sort of new propositions, customer research, how do we make things better? I might get involved in sort of pricing, commercial, those kinds of conversations.

6:42It can range from anything from sort of regulatory stuff, PR, the sort of day-to-day running of what a business looks like. So the breadth is huge in terms of topic. The one thing about this job is you never get bored because you never quite know. So even if you think you've got your day planned out, you never quite know what's going to happen. But I think that's fantastic. I love that. And focusing just on Plusnet, you have a kind of duality of roles because you're basically in charge of it. But you're also the CMO, the chief marketing officer. First of all, with your background in finance, why weren't you the CFO?

7:16That's a good question. I don't want to be an accountant, that's for sure. I married one, that's enough. I think, look, for me, I enjoy the tension between that marketing and that commercial piece. And I actually think if you think nowadays about modern day marketing and modern day CMO, it's a lot more commercial and numeric focus and performance focus than I think it ever has been. Traditionally, if you think about it being more brand and marcoms, you've now got to have quite a commercial level of understanding and acumen. all companies budgets get reduced every year and so you have to be much wised up to where you are deploying things and how you're thinking about them and I love the duality of those two things because I have to worry about sort of day-to-day P &L responsibility and what are we doing and then how are we supporting that through strong marketing and strong branding and I think if you run the two separately they become a bit too devolved from each other and I just don't think you're successful So I actually think you're seeing much more of a hybrid of those two things having to come together than probably traditionally years and years ago.

8:22And again, like in the broader business, do you have to kind of divide your time between the different responsibilities or is it all done as one? I try and do it as one. I think there's a couple of things I would say. The further apart functions operate, the more dysfunctional and the less good the outcome. And the further people operate back from the customer, the less positive the outcome. so i try and make sure in my teams that the different functions basically work cross-functionally so you don't problem solve for a commercial problem and you don't solve problem solve for a marketing problem or for a regulatory problem but actually you all sit together you understand how you problem solve for the customer and i think it's much more powerful doing it that way and you know we've got sort of methodologies and agile and you know got different ways of calling things it's really just a bunch of people with their brains focused in their area coming together and thinking laterally across the problem and we know and the data proves that the outcomes for customers and employees are much better when we work like that than if we just work in our individual silos it also means from an employee perspective they see opportunities in different areas like you know how do you know what you don't know and also how do you know where career opportunities might be whereas if you work in those cross-functional teams you might actually find something you're really interested in think oh do you know for my next move i'm going to do that so i also think about it from a engagement perspective as much as a kind of commercial and customer outcome perspective could you ever have situations where a decision has to be made and people are going to think oh hang on she's going to side with the marketing team of what they want here because she's the cmo does is that an issue i think i mean yeah i mean one of the one of the one of the challenges about leadership is making decisions right then most of your job is either decision making or enabling other people to do things that's kind of your job your job is not to dictate it's to facilitate and then sometimes make decisions.

10:14I think as long as you're balanced in how you do that, people can kind of and see and you display your logic and you listen, which I think is something that not everybody always does all the time. But I think I really try and listen to sort of rational, often quite data and insight driven discussions or arguments on both sides of the coin before then sort of saying, actually, do you know what? I think this is the right thing to do. and I think in a world where we've got so much access to insight and data actually that decision making becomes easier to explain to people as well whereas I think before if we didn't have that it would be much more emotive driven or sort of preference driven but I think yes you have to make tough calls sometimes are you always going to keep everyone in the room happy no probably not but I think as long as you can show people your thinking behind it your logic behind it and the insight you've used to get there, generally people sort of go, OK, yeah, I can get that.

11:08That doesn't mean they're not tough sometimes, right? You make tough choices. But that's kind of part of the job. Plusnet is an internet service provider, or ISP, with its origins in the very early days of the internet, when access was dial-up by modem.

11:26The company was founded in 1997 in Sheffield, originally focusing on business customers who wanted to go online. As the internet's popularity grew, so too did Plusnet, became popular with domestic customers, and it went public in 2004. Three years later, BT Group acquired it for close to£70 million. In 2018, Plusnet was brought into BT's consumer division, but it's always kept its distinct name as a popular brand with its own identity. And with broadband especially, I mean, basically, it's a utility. if you think of something like I don't know electricity or gas is it invisible and broadband is a bit similar to that that makes it harder to differentiate yourself in the market so does that mean that marketing becomes even more important in in that kind of proposition it's interesting so I think um for some of the market broadband will be utility so for some people you just want to plug it in and forget about it and I would say that's probably true in the value end of the market So the plus net, more in the plus net end.

12:26But in other ends of the market, we are doing lots to not become a utility because once you become a utility, it's very difficult to get back from that. And no one cares about water, gas or electricity, right? You care about it if it doesn't work or you feel like you've been charged too much. But other than that, you don't even consider it. I think on EE, with our kind of new EE portfolio, what we've tried to do is make it a lot more than a utility. So thinking about rather than thinking about, you know, broadband needs in a home, thinking about what do people need in the home? What does a typical family home look like?

12:58How does that operate? How does that work? And, you know, if you think about a busy family, for example, you've got parents who need to work from home. You've got children who need to game. You've got a 12 year old demanding a smartphone. You know, you've got lots of different challenges in the household. So I think our role in NUE is solving for the challenge of the family. So you don't become a utility, but you become sort of a partner to them. And I think we've started to do some really interesting stuff in that space, which is obviously a big part of it is broadband. But thinking about how we make the best broadband experiences, the best products.

13:32Some of that might be in mobile. So we've done a lot in sort of first smartphone and sort of part of our role is education and supporting people in sort of a tech world that can be a bit daunting. and I think you then don't just become a utility because it's not just a plug-in and forget situation you actually go do you know what that brand is thinking about what I need beyond just you know kind of core connectivity and I think in a market that is so deeply competitive having that position is incredibly powerful some of that will also come through a mark on so trying to speak to people in the way that you know people want brands to feel like they understand them and that some of the brands you feel most attached to are the brands that speak to you as kind of a human and i think on all the new e sort of advertising and markoms you're seeing a lot more of that contrast that there's a plus net business where actually people just want great value broadband they don't really want to think about it too much and therefore it's quite a different marketing approach the one core that sits all across it though is customer service and sort of how what do you do when something goes wrong and how are you treated when something goes wrong and i think that that will always be sort of a core across the two but it's that's why I think we were sort of playing nicely with the two brands.

14:41And when you want to differentiate yourself with a new idea in the market, thinking again about this duality between marketing and the commercial side, what tends to come first? Do you have an idea that you think this will play really well with the customer? The ideas maybe come from the marketing team. How do we make this work from a practical commercial point of view? Or does it often begin with the practical commercial possibility and then marketing has a sort of secondary role to present that to the public? So I think we go with what does a customer need? And then we say, how broad is that need?

15:16So if you identify a customer need that only happens to be my mum, we probably wouldn't develop a proposition for her. If you identify a customer need like busy families, which is millions and millions of UK households, commercially you go look at that and you go massive opportunity. You can do a good understanding of how well you're servicing that audience within the market today. and then it becomes about the marketing and comms strategy so I think you've got customer insight is like your step one then you sort of go how how broad is that in terms of audience and is it therefore something commercially that you think actually that's an opportunity for us and then you would go through to okay right now how are we going to really talk to that audience but it's always insight led rather than sort of just coming up with an idea and I think all ideas that we do and all concepts and all insights that we have we also do a lot of customer research testing because the other thing when you work in telco you can get wildly enthusiastic about something and then you test it in front of a customer you turn out they don't really care they don't even think of monkeys about it um so we try desperately to not sit in our telco towers and actually go and speak to real customers which is the most fascinating thing i think we do because you get some really brutal reality of well i really care about that or i don't even understand where you're talking to me about that.

16:29So insight, sort of size of opportunity, and then sort of execution, they all have to flow together. So how do you observe customers? Do you sort of do a formal testing exercise where you pay for people to be observed or randomised trials? How do you do it? Real blend. So my favourite ones are where you get real customers and we might get them into the office. We'll just tell them that we sort of, we won't necessarily tell them what our roles are, but we sort of tell them, you know, we work at BT, we're really keen to understand a bit more. I've done it also in business when I used to work in B2B as well, which is actually, I think, more brutal than the average consumer because it's their business.

17:05And we sort of put either products or features or ideas in front of them and we get them to work through those products or features or test the journeys or give us feedback on messaging or, you know, something like that. You know, we might put something in front of them that's sort of a piece of copy or messaging and say, what do you think we mean here? you know and we do it we did it a lot on plus net when we did our brand transformation as well you know this is what we're thinking about in terms of brand a lot of sort of insight to say how recognizable is it you know we do lots and lots and lots of different things but it's honestly the other way you can do it is which i do spend quite a lot of time doing so you go and sit in one of our contact centers because again the most valuable insight you get on one of our retail stores so i was in a retail store not that long ago speaking to our incredible guides there but also hearing from customers like what what are they really saying when they come into a store because again you can sit in a bit of a tower where you think about something and then you go to the kind of harsh you know high street reality and you go uh actually that's the problem that people want solving so a bit of a blend and just because i'm curious what's what's an example of a feature you thought this would be great they're going to love it but it just didn't have any impact i'm trying to think of one off the top of my head um we did some message testing wi-fi seven on new e and which is like sort of market first broadband and we were thinking about how we explain it um which we've now gone with some much more simplistic messaging but we had some really like probably overly complicated technology messaging because there are people in this building they get not necessarily myself but get really excited about the ins and outs of technology and you put it in front of a customer they're just like oh i don't really know what you mean by that so i think that was probably one where we pulled back and went right okay we just need to be simple about this and just really challenge ourselves on what do you actually mean by that And I think broadband in particular, there's so much more comes out there that's sort of bamboozling to people like super fast, hyper fast, this speed, that and customers just get quite turned off by it.

18:58So I think some of those are sort of the immediate ones that spring to mind and you go, all right, simplify it. Joe Corman joined BT in 2019 and took charge of Plusnet two years later, aged 35. The BT group has been led by Alison Kirkby since February 2024. I was thinking recently a guest on this podcast was Jordan Schwarzenberger who's um he's like a kind of social media influencer entrepreneur but he he was telling me that he became a leader very young he said I was c-suite when 20 because he was headhunted and obviously you're a young leader which is why I'm asking you um but he said he had to kind of check himself and he got some piece of personal feedback where he said you're kind of you're overcompensating because of your young age and he had to learn to lead from the back and just sort of calm down a bit.

19:49Because of your relative age compared to other people, have you had to learn to lead? Yeah, simply. I mean, he's obviously done it much, much younger. I think when I was much earlier in my career, so sort of in banking world, sort of director level, but sort of late 20s, um I I behaved in what in the way that I thought I needed to behave to be at that level so I would sort of either emanate what I saw around me from older leadership styles and behaviors and that could come down to the way you dress the way you act how you respond in meetings um and I think the thing that I've learned as I've got a little bit older or probably quite a lot older than that now is I don't do that anymore like I'm very much I am who I am as a person you know where what I want to work and I sort of I've got my own style of leadership and I think that authenticity has made me an exponentially better human being and leader because there's nothing more exhausting than going to work every day and sort of what I would call acting but I think we now live in a world where actually you've got the younger generations coming through i just learned there's a new one gen alpha which is news to me um coming through that look for that much more because the generations coming through more are much more down to sort of individuality everyone's different everyone's got something to bring and as a leader you have to adapt and evolve to that level of individuality and i think that that's modern leadership has had to do a lot more work in that space so i think if that's the demand and also So it's what makes me happy is being myself, right?

21:27Because it's very difficult to be anything else. So I think a younger version of me felt much more pressure to conform. And I quickly learned that that doesn't make me happy. It actually doesn't work. Whereas an older version of me, but still, you know, relatively young, knows that that's a much better way to lead. And so I think I'm much more authentic. And I don't obviously like using that word because I think it's a bit overused. But it's probably the best word I can use to describe it. I am who I am. I will I remember when I joined one company and I wore trainers and this was before the days that trainers were allowed shall we say and one of the MDs looked over to me said we don't wear trainers here and I just looked at him said well I do so and then what you really interestingly see is the moment you start to change a behavior the flow through that that has on an organization so like more people start wearing trainers really small tiny example but you need to as a leader to set that example for others to feel comfortable in their own skin.

22:22There's demand on that now from the younger generations coming through. You can't get away with doing anything else. The other reason you stand out, sadly, I suppose, is that you're a female leader. We definitely know in terms of entrepreneurs and SMEs that there's very few female leaders and amongst entrepreneurs, it's much harder for them to get funding. What's it like in the corporate world of established companies? Is it better for women there? it's got better I think would be I think if you asked a if a sort of 20 something version of me I look at some of the behaviors that I accepted or tolerated or um experienced back then you would not be able to do that now and for very good reason I think certainly where I work now so BT we are on a a huge a huge huge huge piece of work around diversity and inclusion and are we where we need to be no are we making good progress i would say yes um this company is a fantastic place to work in terms of sort of gender equality in particular that said there are still challenges and it's still you know it still is is can be an issue in all big corporates um also when i've worked in other countries in the world you get sort of quite cultural differences in terms of female leaderships there's been some quite big challenges for there for me in the past so i think we're on a journey we're making really good progress but i still think that we've got a lot of work to do.

23:44The fact now that we have a female CEO who's incredible is, I know for so many women across the organization, so inspiring. And I think part of my responsibility as a leader is to fly that flag as well. I feel a much greater level of responsibility being a female to make sure that I'm challenging wrong behaviors, pushing back and creating a pathway for other women to follow as they come up the ranks as well. So it's a real responsibility. And I think it's not one to be underestimated. So good progress. But yeah, we still have challenges, I would say.

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