Why The Best Leaders Don't Need To Prove Themselves | Hetti Barkworth-Nanton

0:00Hi, I'm Hayaatun and welcome to What We Don't Know, all about better leadership for a Celtic world. And I'm in a very unusual setting, which is the Rainforest Dome here at the Eden Project, because we're doing some recordings as part of the Anthropi Conference. We've got a really extraordinary guest today, Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, who has sustained a dual career, on the one hand, in corporate life and most recently at Ploughshare, which is an organisation that helps take innovations that have come out of the military defence into civil applications, into the world at large. But she's also at the same time been a really extraordinary campaigner for domestic abuse.

0:39So we are going to be talking about some topics here which are going to be difficult for some people. And if that's something that you're worried about, then please do feel free to skip it. But I hope you won't because we've got loads and loads of great stories about leadership drawn from those two domains. We're going to hear how you can take an alphabetical approach to choosing which company to work for, why a strawberry field can provide you with one of your best leadership lessons. Yup, you heard that right. And also we're going to explore how you take innovations from the battlefield to the football field.

1:12And we're going to have our traditional animal story, but this one is a bit different. It's more emotional. Hetty, welcome. It's an even warmer welcome than usual because we are here in the Rainforest Dome of the Eden Project. We are here at the Anthopy Conference and we're going to take the opportunity to have a chat with some of the other wonderful participants who are here, including you, Hetty. So thank you for joining us here. The sound effects are a little different from usual. The humidity is going to be an interesting challenge. It's going to be very interesting. But I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

1:46And likewise, thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. So we usually start by getting an understanding of what someone is currently doing. And you've got two very interesting and very prominent leadership roles. Could you tell us what they are and what they're about? Absolutely. And before I start that, I guess I'd say the common theme between these leadership roles are very much about driving fundamental change and impact in the UK for the good of society. that's what gets me up in the morning excellent so plowshare where i've been ceo for six years is fully owned by the ministry of defense and we take innovation that's been done in defense and we spin it out for other markets we create startup companies we work with industry we work with investors but let me give you an example so we had some work that was done in the Ministry of Defence to create technology to protect uniforms from having chemicals seeping into them.

2:47And I'll leave the audience to their imagination around why that's so important. That was then spun out into a company called P2I. And amongst other things, they use that technology on all Samsung phones across the world to protect those phones from liquids that they might get in touch with. This is a really simple example of the kind of work that we do. That's fascinating. And I've got loads of questions about your role at Plow Shep, and I'm going to pace myself. So tell us about your other big role. And I'm also the chair of Refuge, the largest specialist provider of domestic abuse services, again in the UK, and they also run the National Domestic Abuse Helpline.

3:23And I've also been chair of Refuge for six years. I also am the founder of another charity, the Joanna Simpson Foundation, which looks at children affected by domestic abuse. And I also do campaigning for law change around criminal justice and equity. So two really important and very different strands of your career who stay united by that sense of social purpose. But I think I'd like to start by rewinding and getting a bit of a sense of your upbringing, your family life and how that has influenced the leader that you've become and the causes that you've chosen to align with. Thank you and again I'm a big believer that we cannot be authentic leaders if we don't understand ourselves and it really starts with you and understanding yourself which for various reasons I've been forced to do a lot of so I was brought up in Lincolnshire a very rural upbringing in many respects a very privileged upbringing I went to the local comprehensive school so it's really grounded but you know we we lived in a big old vicarage with no heating I have to say and no carpets another story on that actually I'll tell you in a minute but um so that was sort of my upbringing you know I was very uh I was one of four girls I was number three um and but we were quite feral I mean we were country girls you know like we used to just go I used to go riding for a whole day and there was no way of contact no one knew where I was I mean that was the freedom we had in those which was lovely but I was number three of four girls and that meant that it was from an early stage I kind of had to fight a bit to be noticed um and I was also considered the really stupid one in the family it was that your self-perception or was that something that people told you a bit of both I think that I don't know which came first chicken or the egg yeah um but my sister just older than me was incredibly bright at school and i was incredibly not bright at school um and so i was always compared to her it's interesting how much of one's identity as you know in the family context is defined by comparison with somebody else yeah particularly a sibling yep exactly exactly um and i remember you know a teacher saying to the school teacher saying to me when we were doing mental arithmetic which i hated yeah and i'd go up to her and i'd show her and she'd go charlotte would never have done that oh god i'll never forget about seven yeah no age so so there was always that sort of i had to fight to be noticed um and all of that but but you know it was a wonderful upbringing carefree and then my father died very suddenly when i was 14 of lung cancer but it was in the days when you didn't tell children that someone was going to die they didn't prepare them and there was certainly no therapy afterwards so you were just thrown into a very traumatic death that didn't need to be traumatic um and there's no doubt my childhood ended when i was 14 and i started focusing on looking forward not backwards and being very driven and very much needing control because when something like that happens particularly as a child everything that you see as safe disappears and something's happened that you have no control over yeah um so i i would then went on to um go to university by some miracle actually i went to poly let's just name it i went to polytechnic um to do a high national diploma in business studies um but i managed to get transferred to the degree at the end of the first year which was great because i got two d's and an e in my a levels i mean there's just like not worth writing home about really in amongst all that um you know if you like lack of thriving educational context and you know adversity in terms of the emotional journey that you had to navigate as a teenager did you have self-belief did you have a sense that you could still be something if you didn't know what it would be what it would look like um for a while i didn't but the moment I got self-belief was when I basically between school and going to Polytechnic I worked as a temporary secretary right and I went down to London I'd met my now husband then boyfriend like six months earlier I went down to London to spend time with him and I worked as a temporary secretary having sort of learnt to type at school and And I did job after job after job.

8:10And I started to realize I was quite good at it. And I started to see that the business world was one where I could potentially thrive. And once I saw it, I believed it. Interesting. But before then, I'd not seen anything. Yeah. And in fact, I was brought up in an environment where there was no expectation for me to have a career. It was very much the belief that I would, you know, become a secretary and then marry somebody. I would have been, well, I did obviously marry someone, but I would have been a disaster as a kind of stay at home wife. I can definitely identify with that, as can my family.

8:49So in that sort of early stage of your, I suppose, pre-career, did you have any experiences that you would identify as being relevant to leadership? Are there any moments where you felt I'm somebody that's happy to take responsibility? do you think anyone else around you thought yes she could grow into that kind of you know leadership role in the future um two two little stories i'll tell you the first um is one of the things that is deeply ingrained in me is one around commitment if you've committed to something you need to take responsibility of your own commitment and follow through on it and when i was 15 i think um we my mum's friends had a field and they'd planted strawberries in it so they effectively had a strawberry field for pick your own and they had a caravan in the field um and myself and my sister used to rotate sort of slots to go and effectively man the strawberry fields quite anything could have happened to us I mean literally in that caravan don't even go there um but when I split up my boyfriend one weekend and so I was in tears oh I can't go to work my mum said you have got to go you have committed to her that you are going to do that pull your socks up and go to that strawberry field so i was given no choice but i learned so much from that i will i will always go back to that strawberry field if i'm thinking about can i do it can do it no you've got to you have given a commitment someone trusts you to be there you cannot not be there and that's really ingrained in me.

10:26So what was your what was your career trajectory once you studied your business degree and gone out into the world of work? Tell us a bit more about your reaching to leadership roles and what your first concrete leadership role was. Yeah so it was actually very quick I think one of the other very quick stories I would say is when I was at Fison's which I don't think actually exists anymore I worked for Fison's in Ipswich of all places as a temporary secretary for the graduate office the graduate recruitment officer and i can remember then experiencing being in an environment where he was creating the space for me to do more than i was there to do as my job and not only did i love the fact that the boundaries were taken off because i could see so many things that could be done and changed and i was given the space to do it but i could also see how he really appreciated that yeah and so the two things gave me a real like actually this this is the way to do things a real taste for it so when i um left you know left polly i basically still didn't know what i wanted to do it was before the days of career offices being online and all the rest of it so i went to the library where they had the sort of stuff about graduate Do you remember those?

11:41But I was inherently lazy. OK, so I basically went along the aisle from A and I didn't want to apply to the AA because that looked dreadfully dull. So I got to B and I applied for British Airways and BP. And I got both. And BP was in Aberdeen and British Airways was down at Heathrow with staff travel. I mean, it was not much of a contest. So I went to BA. And I also, I did a business studies degree where I loved the marketing stuff, but I worked out that none of the marketing people could do finance, but I could do finance, which is ironic going back to the mental arithmetics that I fundamentally failed at at primary school.

12:27and I thought actually I will major in finance because I can always go back to marketing yeah that's easy but none of the marketing people can do finance if I want to run a business I need to do both um so I went to the finance scheme at VA not because I wanted to be an accountant because it was a means to an end yes and what was great about the finance graduate scheme at VA at the time and I'm not sure if I'm graduate schemes actually are good enough at this these days and again it created loads of opportunity for me to fill spaces and if you give me spaces I will fill them um and I guess my first big leadership role at BA um within two within well the big big let's say big leadership role um was in 2000 was in so I joined BA in 1990 by 1995 1995 I was the financial 1994 so four years in I was the financial controller for worldwide catering wow and that only happened because someone took a punt okay so tell me more about the someone um it was it was a lady called Jenny Sharp she was the general manager for catering and they'd done all these interviews with people that wanted the job but they just didn't have the spark that I had and I think she could see my spark um and it went on and on because the finance people in the kind of hierarchy were saying oh she's not ready and Jenny was like no she's ready she can do it she can do it um and she said she took a punt and I went to the first meeting because I was then part of the catering leadership team.

14:14And I was like, what was I, 27, right? I had a company car that was so cool. All the important things. Beyond cool, all the important things. And I sat in the first leadership meeting and I'm like, you know, sitting on the edge of my seat because I think I need to be, like, I'm a grown-up now, right? I need to be, I'm here. And she pulled me to one side after the meeting. She said two things. one is the greatest skill for a leader is humility so you don't need to prove yourself you've proved yourself by being here and she said the other thing is you don't need to fill the spaces if no one's talking you don't need to fill the space yeah you don't need to prove yourself by having something to say and i'll let again i will never forget that it's very powerful i think it can be quite hard to do particularly as a younger woman in an environment where you're an outlier yeah um but when you can do it and you can do it with quite authority it can be amazingly effective yeah it is very interesting so so you were a high flyer literally at a at a young age working at the va um what what happened next in terms of your career progression talk us through that and and and the moments that were impactful and the people that were impactful on the way Yeah, yeah.

15:32So I'd say the biggest pivot point in my career, probably before actually then forward winding 25 years, was when I was the financial controller for marketing at BA. And we had been trying to put what we call the interactive video at the time, which is basically seat back video onto the back of the headrests on the aircraft. We're talking 1996, 97. It's hard to imagine it now without that. I know, exactly. And BA was way behind because they'd been trying to do it for four years and they'd spent millions and they'd not got there, whereas Virgin were already there. So Virgin started as a sort of a bit of a vanity project with marketing saying, well, we want to have these things on the screens and we want people to be able to do gambling and buy things and blah, blah, blah, way before their time.

16:26Meanwhile, Virgin just put these things on the backs of headsets and started playing videos right it was really simple and what happened as a result was they were stealing market share from VA transatlantic yeah so suddenly it went from a vanity project to I don't care what's on it you just need it um and it was it was a broken project across engineering procurement and marketing so marketing wanted something that was whizzy yeah engineering and wanted something that would just work because they knew that they would have to fix it down route when it breaks. And commercial, actually a guy called Charles Grasser, who a number of listeners might know, brilliant, brilliant guy, now does a portfolio career, was the commercial director saying, for God's sake, I don't care, just put something on the bloody aircraft.

17:19And it needed somebody to come in and run it. And again, there was a consultant called Simon Dannett, a consultancy that is, I don't think, I don't think it exists anymore, KAU Consulting, but he'd been advising BA on this issue. And again, he spotted me and he said, she can do it. What do you think was in you that these people were spotting? I'm so fascinated by the fact you've had a series of people who sort of pulled you out of the crowd. I know. What do you think it was that they were sort of resonating within you? I think they were actually mad and I think they were totally blind and didn't see the truth.

17:56I don't think the evidence speaks of that actually. I think probably three things. Right. I think absolutely, and I don't know why or how, but the ability to be able to look across things rather than just at one thing. Right. So I'm a systems thinker. I'm a systems thinker. Yeah. Yeah. I think the second thing is, and it's something I talk a lot about to leaders and teams, is curiosity. Yeah. And if we ever lose curiosity in any context that we're operating in from a leadership point of view, then as far as I'm concerned, it's game over. Yeah. And the final thing is...

18:45that fighting spirit which I suspect comes from my childhood both in terms of being number three or four but also losing my dad and having to just frankly put on my big girl pants and grow up at the age of 14. Yeah and I think a combination of those two things probably creates that sort of so finish telling me about um this story uh that i interrupted you on around this uh getting the the screens on the back of aircraft yes and i want to also move on to your other life yes they're both very important yeah i'm gonna give them time yeah yeah um so very quickly actually because i think it was genius personally and it wasn't my genius which is why i say it um they decided that the only way to fix this and get something on the aircraft within six months was to create a job called Project God.

19:35Because what you had was you had senior executives at board level basically fighting about what was needed. So you had, again, the marketing director, Martin George. You had the services director. I can't remember all these names. Mike Streets. You had the technical people. They were all at sort of board level basically fighting about what good looks like. Yeah. Right. And so they decided they needed this role. and rather than calling it a project manager right which basically means project managers get told what to do right project god meant that i was going to decide what to do and they just need to fall in i would consult with them but they weren't going to make the decisions i was you know what i think that should be a job title i think we should put that on linkedin profiles project god literally there's definitely a picture in that brilliant it drove a behavior set right which was just superb absolutely fascinating um and yeah so so basically i did project god um i had a one other learning from a leadership point of view actually in picking up project god because i worked actually from a functional point of view for a wonderful lady who since sadly died at a very young age called eda rossi who was in ba at the time and she was my line manager but I was project god and so the first sort of couple of months we sort of rubbed we kind of bashed our heads against each other because she was trying to line manage me yes and I was trying to be project god yes and we bashed and bashed but we worked it through and we worked through what the relationship needed to be and how how she could support me and help me to be successful which would be successful for her and we both learned a lot from that experience and again And it taught me about sort of effectively serving leadership, that leadership does not have to be about control.

21:27In fact, the best leadership isn't about control. That's absolutely brilliant. And I think a great example also of how sometimes when you have a challenging relationship that you put the energy and effort into resolving and improving, it ends up being the strongest partnership that you can ever have. Right, we've got a press pause on that. I need to know more about how you um have ended up having such a huge focus in your life on domestic abuse so if you're happy to share that story I think it'd be of real interest to our listeners yeah sure um so in in the sort of where are we um in the early 2000s I met because my daughter was at nursery with a little girl called Katie I met my great friend Joe uh Joe Simpson and we were literally best buddies and actually the context here is I've never really had a girlfriend because you know my father died I then focused on just looking forward I wasn't a yeah I wasn't I just didn't have lots of girlfriends yeah um and then I met my husband when I was 17 so I was then focused on him so she was my true fast proper girlfriend we used to go on holidays together so we were really really super super close and obviously we had young children together she was in a very toxic relationship with her husband who was a BA pilot and long story very short they separated in 2007 after he threatened her with a knife and told her he was going to kill her.

23:03And then between 2007 and 2010, they went to a very acrimonious divorce. But through all of that time, he was heavily coercive, heavily controlling, and increasingly so stalking her while she was after they separated. And then a week before their final high court hearing, I was talking to her actually, and we were talking about the fact that it was her divorce hearing in a week's time and that it was all be over you know I'm sure there are many listeners who have supported friends through divorces and you literally live in their you live in their shoes don't you and emotionally as well as as well as sort of everything else and so I was just willing her to get to that final high court hearing um but he had other ideas so he dropped the children off after half term they were nine and ten he had a hammer in his child's homework bad and um literally within the hour of me talking to her he dropped the children off he bludgeoned her to death um within the earshot of the children which is devastating he then put her in the boot to the car he put the children in the back of the car he drove the children to his girlfriend's house dropped them off and then he went off into the night and buried her not in a shallow grave that hastily prepared but in a deep um in a deep grave that had been meticulously dug over months with a garden box that had been adapted to be a coffin um disposing her body um and kind of the rest i guess is history um he ended up being arrested the bottom line is he was not prepared to lose he wanted he was going to win at all costs even if it meant him doing what he did um and he was then convicted of manslaughter due to diminished responsibility um which is just devastating on every level I guess from my own personal point of view

25:12number one I ended up very very quickly in very very deep trauma not just because of what happened to Jo and hearing that it wasn't she wasn't I thought she'd just been pushed over and hit her head on the fireplace and it'd been just a terrible accident but hearing the lengths that he went to takes you to a level of see that robin again hello this robin has been following me around and look who's here now while i'm talking about joe this is crazy this is just crazy oh my god um in a moment are you right it's a robin set you off i mean i i have whilst you take a moment just to say crazy i really appreciate you sharing what is clearly still a deeply traumatic experience to talk about um but it is something that's important because unfortunately it's still a story that people will be living with and will have to live with in the future yeah and i think what's what what's really important is hearing how you harness that absolutely most horrific of tragedies to create something that is contributing towards that not being the case in the future so when you're ready the robin's the robin's gone so maybe it's time to speak again thank you um so yeah thank you i appreciate that um the times were very hard at the beginning for obvious reasons um as i said not not just because of what happened to joe but because remember i said my father died when i was 14 and i never dealt with that trauma so what i actually had deep inside me was very unresolved trauma and actually if I look back now and I look at my career and my life from when my dad died all the way through to when Jay was killed I was very very driven but people would often say to me you've got like a veil in front of you we don't feel like we're getting to know the real you yeah and I used to say I don't want to live near work because i don't want to meet people from work in the supermarket i was fiercely holding on to compartmentalization separately yeah um so yeah so i went into deep trauma but that was a gift actually because i then went through very very hard and tough trauma therapy for years um which i've now come out the other end of which has been again i say you need to learn and understand yourself yeah if you feel it isn't right and that you're not in the right place I would always encourage people to go into therapy get the right therapy because it can actually be it can change your life yeah not just for you but it can change the life of others around you yeah because you start really engaging with the world in the way in which if you're traumatized if you're struggling the upshot of that is you are not engaging yeah and your point around And understanding yourself being a precondition of being your best self as a leader is something that I think is, it takes us different times and trajectories to process and to take on board.

28:21But most leaders get there at some point. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's, I mean, you know, it is a gift that comes with age, let's face it. It's absolutely a gift that comes with age. And I think one of my missions is how can we tell stories like this? Yes. That gives younger people, younger leaders in the workplace, the permission to be authentic from the get go. Yeah. The permission to say, I don't expect you to be this polished article. Yes. Not have to go the long way around like some of us do. Exactly. Exactly. So I'm really interested in how do you take something that is, you know, at the very kind of core of your being, traumatic, triggering, however you want to describe it.

28:58and use that as a positive driver for change how do you go from processing that personal trauma to using it as one of your drivers for leadership um i would say that there are probably two parts of that answer the first is when you go through something like that and you are literally it feels like you are physically being ripped in half okay and and actually as part of that journey I was also diagnosed with breast cancer um in 2018 and so I went through a year with breast cancer and I lost my hair and the combination of being ripped apart so that There's no hiding place when you're feeling like that.

29:56People just have to take you as you are because you don't have the strength to be something different. And then when I had the cancer and I was still very much in survival mode, I was just clinging on at that point. But I was back at work. But I was clinging on. And I had cancer. and I actually thought when I was diagnosed with cancer that I thought a this is game over this is like kind of finally this is game over okay lord take me I'm yours and the second thing I thought was thank goodness now people are going to know that I'm not well interesting because I've been fighting and surviving but no one knew how hard it was to just get up every morning and be present so I was actually relieved that finally people were saying oh she's not well yes permission to officially not to be okay correct and then i shaved my head before i lost my hair and it was the most liberating thing that's ever happened to me um because again i'd always hidden behind my hair my hair was always my kind of trademark almost and then suddenly i didn't have that it was like here i am well and all of those things piled on top of each other to effectively i came out the other end of all of that just like i can't be anything other than who i am and what i am it's a total reset totally rebuilt totally rebuilt exactly brick literally brick by brick chemo helped i mean i wouldn't recommend it no no this is this is not necessarily something that anybody should want to have to replicate that's what obviously wouldn't but it reset my brain because it fried my brain and therefore it stopped the habit of feeling so what did you do with this sort of this this new almost you know reincarnated hetty what did you do with that then in terms of creating that positive response to the most awful provocation?

31:47So I'd already started the fight. So the fighting, Hetty, had already started. When you're faced with a jury saying not guilty to murder, when someone has quite clearly gone to extreme lengths to kill somebody in a brutal way, that's so wrong. It's galvanising. Yes, it's absolutely galvanising. And a great friend of mine now is a lady called Emma Webber, actually, who's the mother of barnaby webber one of the students in the nottingham yes um attack and she's the same right she is absolutely she's brilliant she's an absolutely brilliant lady and actually you should think about bringing her on the podcast at some point but it's the same thing it's so wrong that it galvanizes you to do something you cannot set back and just not do anything so that was already there even when i was feeling ill and crap that little pilot light never went out and then as I got stronger I started realizing that my work in the corporate sector was over I needed to do things that were purposeful because if I wasn't doing something purposeful I would be doing distracting stuff in my out in the outside world um and also this is important and a message I think for everybody is always make sure that you're doing something you believe in you really really believe in in your heart yeah if i had been doing something when joe was killed that was if i've been doing what i'm doing now when joe was killed i don't think i would have fallen as far and as hard because i wasn't doing something that that's swinging to my heart yes it's energy generating isn't it exactly it's a generative type of busyness when you really really love the purpose behind what you're doing every day and the reality is you You know, yes, what we went through was extreme, but we all go, we all have our crosses to bear.

33:38We all go through things. And I would never compare one thing to another. Therefore, set yourself up in life and in a career that you believe in, and then you'll be much more resilient. So you set up the Joanna Simpson Foundation and you became a strong advocate for a better societal level response to the hidden scourge, often of domestic abuse domestic violence yeah but you also changed your professional direction in terms of your chief executive role yeah so tell us about why plowshare and um what what that means to you to be working in in a role well you explain it i was going to paraphrase but it's better that you explain why it's important and why it speaks to your purpose um so i had i came back after cancer and number one i just didn't feel like i was treated with empathy and with the kind of values I believe in when I had cancer by the company that I was working for which distressed me and I you know said I've kind of come out of the surviving mode my brain was starting to work again and I was starting to realize it's not good enough it's not okay the way we treat our people in organizations and I've got a lot more to give and so I said that I need to leave so I decided to leave the corporate world but at the same time thank goodness because otherwise I'd be broke um along came Plowshare it was again I did I didn't go looking for I didn't even know the world existed of what we do at Plowshare but I got a phone call and I immediately said well I don't think that's me and I kind of thought about it as we can thought which that could be me that sounds really fun um and so I called them back and it wasn't paying a massive amount of money but I just felt like that could that could resonate so I just went for it um and why did I think it could resonate because it brought together many of the aspects of what I've been doing in my career but in a really fun way right so number one it was CEO of a business yes a small business but a great opportunity frankly for me to put my money where my mouth is it's one thing to sit in a big company and say they're all crap and they treat their people really badly and we'll put your money where your mouth is and run a business and see what happens right so great opportunity um the second is you know i've been doing transformation for years at this point yeah and what i'd realized was transformation is innovation it's just got a different word yeah um it's about that curiosity it's about that creativity and here's a job where you're spending every single day doing creativity and curiosity what's not to love about that um and then i guess finally it was um yeah i think those were probably the oh no the final one is in order to be successful plowshare needed to work in much wider ecosystems yeah and also engage very effectively with the ministry of defense which is by the way a large organization with big silos that need you to look across so actually i realized that i actually quite had quite a lot of skills to make it happen i see there's such a good lesson there which is it's somewhat quite hard to imagine what your right next step could be when all you know is i'm done with this chapter yes um and sometimes you have to create it but sometimes it's actually just about learning how to abstract the stuff that you're good at and then think about other places where that could be useful yeah but the world of um technology and defense and security has changed so much even in the time you've been at plowse here so uh i mean it used to be that it was a sort of quite specialist thing to be interested in and now i think nobody would argue the idea that technology is probably the key determinant of your security and sovereignty as a nation or as a company.

37:34How has that changed your world?

37:39It has definitely changed the world in as much as when I joined six years ago. It was, as you say, quite niche and people weren't really interested. And everything was a battle. Now I go back to, by this time, I know how to affect change. I've got big ideas. I'm curious. I want to make change. And me battling against the MOD, you can imagine that wasn't necessarily a kind of a match made in heaven, shall we say. And there were times when I just thought this is just not worth it, but it was all about delivering impact. And so I could see, you know, I wanted to make a difference to the world. I could see that I could make a difference to the world.

38:18I'd already seen that I was making a difference to the world. So why can I not do it in my professional career? So I went about changing Ploughshare radically from a diversity and inclusion point of view from a purpose point of view from a size point of view you know we are not the organization we were when i joined six years ago um which is another story we haven't got time for but um but i think the important thing to your point is it's all changed now and suddenly i am being given the space to fill remember i said way back space to fill i'm really good at filling spaces if you give me to them yeah give them to me and so now you know i'm super proud that last year we launched at dsci which is the big defense um fair um the technology and growth alliance which is saying actually instead of plowshare looking at spinning out innovation just from IP that's owned by the Ministry of Defence, we should be looking right across the defence enterprise.

39:25Billions of pounds every year is spent in defence research, not just in government, but in the primes, in industry, small and big, and in academia. And we have a duty as a country to make sure that that technology is being adopted as widely as possible to deliver against the greater gender and to help society and the environment and so we created the alliance so we're now going big um and i love it it's very exciting to talk about that and of course one of the challenges the uk has is that you know we are universally agreeing to be brilliant at breakthrough technology being there at the birthplace of technologies that go on to prove to be you know disruptive at the societal levels but we're not always the best at capturing the value from that so what can we learn from your journey at plowshare that would help us in the uk to be economic beneficiaries social beneficiaries of insights and progress in research and innovation that that happens here well that's a good question um so i think we have the opportunity and i think now is the opportunity to look again a whole system approach at how we take research into impact in this country there's a lot of conversation going on you know there's people looking at what do we need by way of investment and for sure we need access to more private capital we absolutely need access to pension you know three trillion three trillion pounds sitting in pension funds in the uk that are grossly underutilized in terms of facilitating and enabling that growth but i do think that we have a suboptimal system yeah of taking research from academia from research places including academia to impact yeah you know every university has got its own tech transfer office no tech transfer office can be an expert in everything why on earth aren't we saying right we're going to have five tech transfer offices across the uk that each specializes in a particular thing and that way if there's brilliant innovation and research in universities around I don't know biotech yeah there's one place they go you create a massive community that goes from transfer to seed to scale and everything you need in terms of talent capital everything all in one place in one ecosystem surely that would be more efficient and effective so I think we've got the opportunity to take some much bigger boulder steps if we choose do you have a favorite example of where we've we've done that successfully i'd be okay how about this do you have a favorite commercialization journey that you've been on at plowshare is a particular technology that you are um proud that you helped get out into the world for civil applications um that i have personally been involved in plowshare yeah yeah for plowshare so so actually the one i would use is quite a defense one but i am actually super proud of it which is a company called sentinel photonics they do laser detection and protection so effectively in the battlefield if a tank is going to be blown up yeah it will be the um the enemy will use a laser to point at the tank and then they will use laser laser they will use the laser to effectively channel the um bomb or whatever yeah to blow up the tank yeah okay so if you know that a laser's been pointed at you you know to run yeah if you don't know laser's been pointed at you you're basically dead yeah okay and that's true whether you're an individual soldier or whether it's a tank or whatever and so um but that's also a problem for air ambulances that often have to abort flights because idiots are pointing lasers at them and they don't know if it's a threat that they need to worry about or not it's also happening for civilian airlines it also happens in football nets yeah right where lasers get pointed at goalies and that affects whether they can so it's an issue and we basically took two guys from the labs in court and down who'd worked out how to provide a capability to identify whether you've got a laser pointing at you with cam with normal camera technology normal phone camera technology so it took the ability to do it from great big units that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to a little thing that you can attach here it's a game changer we literally we did two we did a number of things but we did it fast yeah okay we empowered them to leave dstl and start up this company we gave them 80 equity in the business so we didn't hold on to lots of equity because i needed them to have skin in the game i needed them to take risks for god's sake they were leaving the civil service yeah so they needed to have skin in the game so they had loads of equity in the business we wrapped support capabilities around them.

44:36In fact, going back to your old job, one of the conversations I'm having with them at the moment is to get them onto one of the Royal Academy of Engineering programmes, which are brilliant. And they have gone from strength to strength to strength to strength. And I'm super proud both of what we were able to do for them, but also how they really embraced it. So very, very good illustration, actually, of also the fact that this is not about high technology necessarily but about making smart technology affordable yeah and easy to implement yeah so uh i'm going to just quickly throw in a few more questions before we move to our closing quick fire rounds i'm very interested in the fact that you seem to be quite unusual in having a very visible two-stranded career if i can put it that way so um when i look at your biography on your corporate website at plowshare you're very open about being the chair of refuge alongside the ceo plow share is that a personal choice have people encourage you to do this and do you find that it has any downsides a good question so um it has been a personal choice um but a personal choice driven by i'm just me i am literally just me we're all just humans kind of navigating our way through life we start out the same we certainly end up the same right and i'm just little old me trying to do my best right so and i'm tired it's exhausting keeping your different parts of your life segmented it's just impossible yeah so so that's really why i do it i've been advised on countless occasions not to do it yeah so i have been advised often from a career point of view don't post on linkedin or any other social media for that matter about the work that you do refuge or about the campaigning that you do which we haven't really talked about but you know i change laws i've stopped my friend's killer from coming out of prison through relentless campaigning um and and i kind of hear that and i try it it's not me no so i stopped it yeah and i now post about what the hell i'm going on but i try to make it relevant like i mean i'm not the kind of person who's going to post on LinkedIn that I've been you know on holiday to the beach you know I'm not but as far as I'm concerned my work in my campaigning my work in refuge is as important work as my plowshare work and actually the two worlds are ironically starting to collide a lot and what I would also say is that I learn more I probably have learned more as a leader from everything I've had to navigate as chair of refuge yeah as I have in my corporate career can you give us a little bit more color as to what that means so um firstly I became CEO of Plowshare I always get the names wrong I became CEO of Plowshare and chair of refuge almost at the same time um and there is a funny story there because the team at refuge didn't want me so they lobbied to get effectively an article put in the Saturday Telegraph that said arms dealing anti-feminist takes over at refuge which was the first my first foray with the press actually and I had a great person on the on the on the board of refuge who said just don't react don't say anything don't do anything it will become fodder you don't need to worry about it now i laugh about it right but it was just a really just example so um so let me give you an example so so through all of that i've had to be very resilient because i had a lot of challenges about not doing the job at all but there are certain decisions that we've had to make at cloud share which have see i'm doing it again there are certain decisions as a board we've had to make at refuge then have been very difficult and it's particularly difficult in the charity sector because you're dealing with values you're dealing with really deeply grained values of what people think and believe but I have to manage all of that both in terms of members of the board and in terms of the executive and make sure ultimately we're making the right decision for refuge and there was a particularly difficult decision that we had to make around gender actually and gender inclusivity and it was very difficult because I had the executive in one position and then I had half of the board in another position and the other half in another position but all of their positions were entirely valid for them yes but I needed to navigate all of that to get the right decision made for refuge and that required me to learn a lot about the issue it required me to speak to individuals it required me to show that i was listening and listening authentically and that i cared but i also need to show that give everybody the confidence that how i was going to make the decision and and and how they would be involved as a result of that i lost i lost three trustees overnight right but it and actually was the right decision for them personally yeah but it was the right decision for refuge I had to dig so deep to do that but I learned so much about how you make decisions how you take people with you and how you deal with all of those and actually I learned a lot about the whole issue around gender yes which I wouldn't have lent into had I not had to do that no and I think boards can be a fantastic training ground for leading through influence in a way that is a wonderful part of your talk as an exec as well yeah um right i have to close off soon so i'm going to do um two quick last questions before we go into the quick fire round one is um you've talked about the amount of resilience that you have had to develop and sustain in your career what have you found at a personal level beyond the sort of the very deep therapy that you've been through um a good way to sustain that on an ongoing basis how do you take care of yourself so that you can continue to give your all to these different very important causes yeah um i would probably start off by saying i'm probably not the best role model on that issue um but because actually i get energy from many of the things that i do yeah um you know i can't tell you how many hours i do on plowshare how many hours i do on refuge and other stuff and i'm training for the london marathon at the moment which was just another bonkers idea that i had and doing it for refuge um but all of it gives me energy yeah so what i have to watch out for from a personal point of view is i know the signs if my ptsd which is largely gone but never properly goes away i know the signs that it's becoming too much and I have to really watch out for that and if that happens I have to just make a very conscious not very easy decision just to step back and it that's when your ego actually has to just take a for god's sake right the like the world can live without you yeah right you don't have to be in every meeting yes you don't have one I went on I was lucky enough to go on a cruise just before christmas yeah um which i won with the pride of written award which is great yes congratulations on that which you won for your campaigning work on domestic abuse yes um and and it was a really defining moment because i had got to burnout and the big thing i got to on burnout was that i had started particularly for my campaigning work watching people on social media and having massive fomo right i needed why wasn't i in that room and why wasn't i in that room and i needed to be in that conversation i needed to be in that conversation and i just realized when i was on the cliff you don't just get over yourself right you do enough and actually everybody else has got a story and everybody else has got change that they can happen and actually everybody else is bloody brilliance at it so get over yourself get your nose out of social media and just live your life well those are great life lessons to all of us so i think i'm going to park my other question because I think that's a perfect note to end on.

53:10I'm going to do some quickfire questions. So I'm looking for a word, a sentence, maximum two, and I'm going to be tough on this. So what do you like to do to decompress after a tough day at the office? I go for dog walk. Dog walk. Can you share any embarrassing moments you've had as a leader? Oh, God, there's so many. I don't know. Can I come back to that? Yes, you can. Is there a favourite quote or phrase that you find yourself using a lot or liking to share with other people? Yes. If it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't. And don't wait around for someone else to do something about it. Just do something about it.

53:50Love it. What's been a good sort of learning in your life about leadership that might not be obvious and sort of not being taught in a course or something? um i would say it is twofold one is that one that jenny sharp said right in the early days is humility is the biggest skill you can have as a leader beautiful what do you hope people say about your leadership when you're not in the room uh i hope that they say that she cares and yeah that she that she cares on every level that she cares do you have a go-to piece of advice that you offer to aspiring leaders just for you is there a book that you would recommend to people who want to um think more deeply about leadership uh no because i'm actually not a big reader i think i may be slightly something rather on the spectrum but i i'm not a big reader so no is the answer listen to podcasts listen to listen to this podcast that's the answer even better who needs but what was your most embarrassing moment as a leader?

55:02My most embarrassing moment as a leader, I have had many, is probably the one where the article ended up in the Saturday Telegraph saying that I was an anti-feminist and a warmonger, which resulted in me actually having to have a meeting with all of our celebrity ambassadors at Refuge and basically explain myself, which I won't quote people, I won't name people, but it was probably the most cringeworthy moment of my career. I think Project God and War Munger are quite interesting job titles between them. Last question. So this podcast is called What We Don't Know. So what do you know now that you wish you'd learnt earlier as a leader?

55:53um actually the biggest thing i've learned now is that when you go into a room you think people are worrying about what you look like but actually they're worrying about what they look like it's such a such a strong note to end on and um so many of us could do with just that just being on repeat in our heads uh forever probably hetty you've been amazing you've shared so openly and generously. We really appreciate that and thank you for all you continue to do on these really important issues. It's been a joy to get to know you. No, likewise. Thank you so much. And finally, we get to talk properly.

56:27Next time I'll wear my leather jackets. Wow, that was a really intense conversation, but very uplifting one, actually. So Hetty's an unusual leader in that she's sustained this dual career across a kind of more traditional professional domain in the context of having lived corporate life and then now running Plowshare, which commercializes innovations produced in Ministry of Defence and other public sector organizations. But she has done that alongside very visibly also being a champion, a campaigner, a leader in the response to domestic abuse. And I found it so interesting the way she was able to hold those two spaces in her world, in her professional domain, simultaneously.

57:18Lots of us, I think, find that intimidating or feel that maybe it's not considered the dumb thing to be so forward about what motivates us personally outside the professional domain when we're in a workplace context. She had some really, really great insights to share. I mean, I thought that the story she told us about her early career, where she was repeatedly spotted by more senior leaders as having a spark. People who could see that spark, so many of us who managed to make it into leadership roles will be able to tell you a corollary of that. The people who do the spark spotting are the ones who often are enablers of talent reaching the top table.

58:02I loved her emphasis on systems thinking and filling spaces. That thing of when you get an opportunity, use it to the full. Don't stay in the lines all the time. Go over the lines, colour in all the spaces that you think you should be filling and occupying. I thought that was really compelling. I also really like to emphasis on humility and leadership. And actually, I think sometimes as a woman in the leadership context, there's a sort of double-edged sword to how you deploy humility. If you literally go around saying, oh no, I didn't do anything, it can be quite career limiting in some context.

58:43But the way Hattie talked about it was very relatable in the sense that don't overcompensate, don't try too hard. Recognize that other people have skills and that by doing your job, you will demonstrate to them what you bring to the table. So I find it a very moving conversation it was emotional you could see that the work that Heshi does really really speaks to her at a deep personal level and that's true for her plowshare role as well as for her work in refuge and beyond and her point that when you really believe in what you do it energizes you is spot on. So you always need to take care that you are looking for the signs that maybe you need to refuel the tank.

59:34But actually, when you do a day job that you really love, it gives you energy. It gives you momentum. And that's a privilege. Thanks so much for joining. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. There's going to be loads more interesting guests coming up. Some also going to be recorded here in the Rainforest Dome in the Eden Project. and then we'll have some others back in the studio very soon. So please do follow us along on all our social channels. Please make sure that you tell us what you want to know more about, which guests you'd love to see, what questions you'd like us to be exploring with them.