Leadership in Colour from Shez Iqbal, Powered by Media For All [MEFA]
Leadership in Colour showcases outstanding leaders of colour sharing their personal journeys, offering valuable insights and advice, and highlights their current projects. Join us to hear from these inspiring leaders and expand your perspective on leadership.
Leadership in Colour from Shez Iqbal, Powered by Media For All [MEFA]
Episode 14 - Reflect on your experiences with Jacob Knox-Hooke
Have you ever wondered about the untold stories behind influential leaders? On this episode of Leadership in Colour, we sit down with Jacob Knox-Hooke, Operations Director and Co-Leader of DE&I at PHD Global, to uncover the rich tapestry of his life and career.
We trace the unique history of Jacob's name back to Sierra Leone, exploring how his heritage has shaped his professional journey. From his beginnings in digital planning and buying to spearheading diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, Jacob reveals the strategic importance of dedicated roles in fostering genuine change within organizations.
Our conversation evolves into a deeply personal exploration of our respective paths into the marketing and advertising industry, highlighting serendipitous moments and the powerful influence of family heritage. Jacob opens up about the challenges of growing up in an environment where academic achievement was paramount but emotional expression was limited. He shares his transformative journey from unhealthy coping mechanisms following significant personal losses to discovering the importance of emotional literacy and resilience.
The episode wraps up by focusing on the necessity of empowering teams through diversity and inclusion, and the integration of mental health first aid training into management practices. Jacob and I discuss practical strategies for supporting team members through emotional intelligence and coaching techniques. We reflect on the importance of honest introspection and openness in personal and professional growth, providing valuable insights for leaders aiming to inspire and nurture their teams.
Join us for an episode filled with heartfelt stories and actionable advice that will resonate with leaders at all levels.
Your feedback is always welcome, as we strive to enhance the content's value for you. Enjoy Leadership in Colour - Voices you may not have heard from before.
I started these conversations to discuss leadership, mentorship, growth and so much more from voices you may not have heard from before. I hope the conversations inspire you, motivate you and give you something to think about. This Leadership in Colour, with myself, shezik Bhan, is supported and powered by MIFA. Hello and welcome to Leadership in Colour. My name is Shezik Bal and I'm really pleased to say I've been joined by Jacob Knox-Hook, who's the Operations Director and Co-Leader of DE&I at PhD Global. Jacob, I'm not that good at doing introductions, so maybe you can introduce yourself a little bit better than what I just did and also give us a bit of background on your name.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you and great to be here and thanks for having me. Yeah, so, jacob Knox-Hook, it's a. It's a funny name actually, it's a very unique. I've known for certainty my whole life that everyone I've met with my name is related to me. So that's um, yeah, something not everyone can say. Um. Actually, I've spent a lot of time trying to trace the history of the name and I haven't got to a concrete answer yet. But it's from my dad, who's from Sierra Leone, and he got it from I don't know who. Yeah, so presumably because it's a kind of agnosticized name, it's a slave name, or maybe a name that came from a benefactor or a pastor or priest, and those are kind of the common ways that an African person would get a British name.
Speaker 1:It's quite cool. I've never been in a situation where I meet another Iqbal and I know that we're automatically related. Has that happened to you?
Speaker 2:have you met a stranger or you know someone out and about their Knox hook and then you've automatically realized, oh, you're related, it's happened slightly differently, where I mentioned my name in this kind of workshop, consultation type thing that was happening and, um, it was around sierra leonean people and celebrating their contribution to london or to society in in the uk. And you know, I mentioned my name earlier on in the kind of thing in relation to my dad. And then in the break I got chatting to someone who essentially said hey, we're related, I've never met you before, he's not an ox hook, but he's, he's a cousin of an ox hook. And so he immediately knew and said oh, do you know? Blah, blah, and it struck up the conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's uh, it's quite noticeable with the double barrel it's a great way to have met someone new and talk to us a little bit about your role. Then what do you do at PhD Global?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I work a split role. I've been operations director for a few years now, which came about because I come from a digital planning and buying background. So I started out buying essentially kind of paid search and paid social so google, facebook ads and things like that many, many years ago and moved then into also buying kind of digital display and video like programmatic advertising, and then leading a team and phd global around 2016. 2017 got to a place where a kind of victim of our own success we were winning some bigger clients and the digital planning and buying team was growing that much that there was an opportunity that we needed to have a bit more process and structure in place to be able to operate effectively, and so it was around 2019 that that was kind of coming to fruition. The hires were being made and we were. We were really expanding and we'd gone from being about just just under 20 people in 2017 to nearly 80 or 90 in 2019.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, moving to this operations director role, which is all around processes and tools and how we work together and trying to make that as streamlined as possible and as effective as possible, and then in 2021, I pitched to the leadership team to that I wanted to lead DE&I for the agency. I felt that there was an opportunity for someone to kind of step into that role. Up until that point we'd had for many years a voluntary DE&I committee, but I felt that it was. It would be a symbolic move to have someone as the figurehead, but also to have someone with a bit of their time on paper right, so essentially being paid to do that work rather than just being off the back of voluntary team.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we've certainly seen the difference at Critio in having people in paid roles taking on the on a day-to-day basis as opposed to handling that in parallel to their current roles. Have you noticed a big difference within the organization since you took it on?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think that I can't take full credit for the leaps and bounds that we've made, but I definitely have had a bit more of a mandate and a bit more scope to be that kind of needling person who's kind of prodding and prodding and say, hey, what about that thing that we, we spoke about, is it happening?
Speaker 2:Kind of leaning on people in that regards, like pushing upwards a bit but also having a bit more headspace to try and really empower that voluntary team, because we are still largely a volunteering team who do bits and pieces here. My other co-lead is our head of learning and development, so she sits on the board and together we have a good relationship with the CEO. So I'd say that we've definitely seen some positive change on some things that I would say are less sexy but really important. So, things like policy change and we've got some brilliant policies around, for example, things like not just maternity but paternity and trying to make sure that there's parental leave for all different types of situations, so not just typical families, but also things like policies around baby loss, policies around gender transition, all sorts of different things to make sure that you know, in terms of the fabric of structure and not quite law but policy. That is there.
Speaker 1:We've got a good foundation yeah, to be fair, I mean, you say it's not not particularly sexy, but it is extremely important for an organization to have those policies in place. So we caught up last week I think it was last week and we were having a little bit of a chat about your life before phd or before advertising. Do you mind walking us through a bit of that? And I think, if I, if I recall correctly, you studied advertising or you studied media. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yes, I studied advertising and marketing at De Montfort University in Leicester, yeah, so used to be kind of a polytechnic, had a great business school and I decided, you know, in my A-levels I didn't feel I really knew what I wanted to do, if I'm honest, but I felt that studying business was broad enough that it can be applied to lots of different things.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I think, if I rewind a little bit, I only mentioned your studies, by the way, because I also studied marketing and I think that our industry is I think we're a rarity. I don't think there were that many people who chose to study marketing or advertising and then wanted to work in the industry and made it their ambition to work in the industry. Most people that I speak to say they've fallen into the industry, so I think we're a little bit of a rarity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are a rarity and, I totally agree, definitely in a minority in terms of my company. Looking at the people that have degrees, very few of them studied advertising or marketing. But it's funny that you say that, though, because I also, even though I studied advertising and marketing, I feel that I kind of fell into it myself because, yeah, when I graduated from uni I really wanted to. I had a strong feeling that once I started, you know, I think we all probably expect this so once you start your career, you're going to be working until you retire, and that feels such a long way away when you're in your 20s that, um, I wanted to put off the start of that journey for as long as I reasonably could. So I managed to apply. I managed to save up in my sandwich year.
Speaker 2:So I did a sandwich degree where I did two years studying, one year working and then went back to do my final year and in that year working it really I had an office job.
Speaker 2:I was working as a research assistant for, basically, the local government association and, yeah, it dawned on me that this office job life was probably gonna in some way make up what I was going to be doing afterwards. So I thought to myself I definitely need to try and find something to do in between. I didn't have a gap year before uni, so I thought after I'm going to try and at least take a few months off. And I was fortunate enough, yeah, to be able to save some money and go to uh to pay for a trip to go to South Africa for three months coaching football with townships. So, um, yeah, that was a fantastic experience and it gave me an opportunity to see a bit of the world. Like I was enticed by the idea of backpacking, but I didn't really trust myself with money, uh, in the sense that I really like, enjoyed partying and I'd probably not last that long if I didn't have that much structure around me, just going out and having a few too many drinks.
Speaker 1:Before we carry on, as you coach football, I'm assuming you're still into football. Who's your team?
Speaker 2:I am an Arsenal fan. Yeah, I'm a proud gooner, it's. It's an interesting point of contention because actually my dad he came here from Sierra Leone in. Actually, my dad, he came here from Sierra Leone in 1957 and you know he picked his local team, so he picked Tottenham and was a Spurs fan and then, yeah, he had my brothers in fact. Yeah, he didn't. He was we'll get on to this but he was very much a disciplinarian, very strict, and enforced a lot of rules, but he didn't actually enforce the teams that we supported.
Speaker 2:So I'm from his second family. He was married, uh, in sierra leone when he came over and he ended up um having like five boys from that first marriage. Then he divorced his first wife and met my mum. They married and then I'm the third out of four that he had with my mum, but his first son, who's older from the first family, he supports man U. My dad supported Tottenham. My older twin brothers above me they supported Arsenal. So, actually, and we used to live, kevin Campbell actually lived near us, we used to see him around and Ian Wright was my idol when I was a kid. So I definitely kind of went with the adoration of Ian Wright and Kevin Campbell, red being my favorite color, following my brothers rather than my dad, so in a sense it was a bit of uh yeah, I guess disobedience in a way that was you sort of going against your dad by supporting their, their main rivals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm quite pleased with that. I much prefer arsenal. I'm an arsenal fan, so also in my local team is palace, so I okay both. Um, not a fan of spurs, to be fair, but there's a rivalry for a reason, but um yeah, I, I think kind of you know you're asking about the job, how I got there.
Speaker 2:So if I rewind to yeah much earlier, I think my dad was very much a disciplinarian. I touched on that. He kind of really instilled like as an immigrant he came over to try and build a better life for his family and I think that better life was success against the expectations of society, right. So, getting as much education as you can, going into a professional career. My dad actually studied librarianship when he came over. So he came over to a place to study librarianship at Loughborough and then made his way down to London, started a library, was part of the team that started a library in Southgate in North London, kind of near where I live. But then he studied law in night school and by this time he had five kids. So he really had that drive and work ethic to be working full study pretty much full time in the evenings and, yeah, he qualified as a barrister and then from that and his appearances in court he met my mum. So my parents actually met in court on the right side of the you know the stand, I guess you could say, because yeah, my mum was studying as well, I would say, with my dad. He definitely came from a working class background in Seolia and his parents were did like kind of manual roles and so for him, education and becoming a librarian assistant in Fora Bay College, the university in freetown, was his step up to try and, you know, elevate himself and he passed that on to us and we were very much expected. I think it was just not even questioned that we would probably go into law to follow him and yeah, there are a few other really strong tenets that he kind of drilled into us from childhood. But yeah, sadly I kind of went off the rails a little bit Like he was. He was quite a bit older than there was quite a big age gap between him and my mum and he sadly passed away in 1997. Unexpectedly he was a little bit overweight, he had diabetes and kind of high blood pressure. But just this was just before my 12th birthday.
Speaker 2:I had no real idea or expectation that he was in a bad way and he, he literally had a kind of heart attack at our house and I remember hearing the kind of kerfuffle downstairs in the front room and I kind of ran down there to see what was going on and I was, I wasn't letting the room. They were like no, no, go back, go back. But I was asking you know what's going on? What's going on? And they said, uh, eventually told me that he'd collapsed. Yeah, I remember seeing the ambulance come and my reference point was this tv show called casualty, where, you know, the paramedics would kind of fly in. They'd put someone on the stretcher and then put them straight in the back of the ambulance and shoot off to the hospital with the blue lights flashing. So they actually were in our front room, for it felt like forever. I was sitting upstairs just kind of looking at the ambulance out of the window, just listening to see what was going on. But, um, yeah, they were in there for ages and then went to hospital. My mum went in the back of the ambulance and I just naively expected that, you know, he'd had some kind of um, I don't know, uh, something had happened, but that he just the two of them would just come, come back a few hours later. So I was kind of waiting nervously by the front door and then, when I saw my mum coming back alone, I then even then thought, oh, you know, he's probably just keeping him in for observation. But then when she opened the door, yeah, she gathered us all together and explained that he's passed away. So that was really quite a shock.
Speaker 2:But I went off the rails a bit after that and so I started acting a lot at school and that started to impact my you know, my academic route. That I was on, I'd say, but yeah, definitely took me a while and actually I was kind of ticking all the cliche boxes, you know. I went off the rails a little bit, I was misbehaving, I was getting into fights, I was being kind of late on purpose, being disruptive in classes, and I was really fortunate that my my head of year, mrs Brown, who is also my English teacher, she really stepped in and kind of uh, you know, metaphorically put an arm around me and gave me a bit of space and like, looked after me a bit so that I didn't. She kept me in the school. Basically, you know, in another, in another life, I could have been thrown out of school and gone down a completely different path. So I was really fortunate to have that.
Speaker 2:But having fallen in with the wrong group of friends, I was in a kind of bad place for a little while, and then it took me until probably like year nine to kind of snap myself out of that and get back on the get back on the right track, by which time, yeah, I'd had a bit of um so math. For example, I'd gone that I was in the top set previously and then I'd gone down to like the intermediate set where the highest GCSE grade I could get was a B. So that was for me a bit being limited and told, oh, you can't achieve the best possible was a real wake-up call for me. Actually to say, um, I need to do everything I can in the other subjects to try and lift myself up and do as well as I can must have been quite a changing dynamic in the house you mentioned.
Speaker 2:You got older twin brothers yeah, yeah, and one little brother. Yeah, so they were um four and a half years older, and then my little brother was seven years younger.
Speaker 1:Okay, so quite a spread in ages what was the dynamic like in the house?
Speaker 2:yeah, it was. It was really weird, to be honest. I mean we had, I'd say that I grew up around a really strong work ethic right and literacy in the truest sense of the word was so valued. You know, education, learning and exceeding in the school environment was was massively important, but unfortunately that was a bit the sacrifice of emotional literacy. So it wasn't really normalized to talk about any feelings. I'd say anger was probably the only thing that we could get away with showing, but anything else was not normalized to talk about.
Speaker 2:Feelings were almost treated as a a kind of annoying, an annoyance. Yeah, oh, just be quiet. Just, you know, just swallow it and you've got something else that you need to do. So being upset distracts you from that. So just get rid of it and crack on and um and so, yeah, when he died it was, yeah, it was such a shock.
Speaker 2:I think we all handled it differently. Uh, I just tried to carry on as normal, I think. Um, we didn't. It's really odd that we didn't really talk about it. We didn't really other than my mom gathering us together and saying, giving us the news officially. I don't have any strong recollections of us sitting down and talking about it and, uh, we didn't have any kind of grief counselingselling or bereavement counselling or anything like that. So we just I think the the kind of message of the day was this is sad, we're all going to grieve in our own ways, but life has to go on, so let's just keep looking to the next thing and kind of cracking on. So yeah, I wouldn't say I'd say not the healthiest way of dealing with it it's funny, right.
Speaker 1:I can't reflect on that from any other position other than the perspective of a person of color, but I feel like not all people of color, but most people of color have had similar experiences where, from an emotional intelligence perspective, the conversations are usually exactly as you said, usually about, you know, displays of anger, or discussions around the displays of anger, or maybe huge fits of laughter and uh, yeah and you kind of sort of these are the two that you, you're allowed to display or offer up but, anything in between is dismissed yeah can you relate to that?
Speaker 2:absolutely yeah, and that was.
Speaker 2:You know, that was so. That became internalized for me, because it was so habitual that if I were upset about something and maybe crying or in pain or you know whatever that emotional or physical pain, I was just shushed, shushed you, just, you'll be okay, distracted, or whatever it might be. So that then became my self-soothing mechanism to just ignore it and crack on. Yeah, for me that's unhealthy because it's still there, just unresolved, kind of simmering underneath the surface and, yeah, it's much more likely to come out then as an outburst or to come out sideways, as I like to think of it, which which did happen a lot in the house, especially with the twins that who were, yeah, around 15, kind of 16 time when, when he passed on, where they struggled in different ways, I think. But yeah, what happened from there then really was I was going off the rails, I was in with the wrong group, I had this reckoning of you know. I can kind of see what's going to happen if I stay on this path and managed to, with the help of, you know, some not subtle nudges from home and again unsubtle nudges from some of my teachers, I just, literally from one day to the next stopped hanging around with that group, started sitting at the front of the class and started hanging out around with a different group of friends and kind of started to get myself back on, uh, to my kind of natural place. So, rather than being disruptive and naughty, I was just like getting on with it, you know, keeping my head down, getting my work done. And then, yeah, kind of kept with that through A-levels, went to uni to to study marketing, uh, advertising and marketing in Leicester, and then, yeah, I had that placement year, did my final year, and then, as I was coming to the end, I was thinking to myself, you know, I was looking forward to the time in South Africa and, almost in denial about what was coming afterwards, I was just thinking I'm not going to do anything at all to prepare for it, I'm literally just gonna leave it. I was living at home, I had home to come back to, so I was fortunate in that regard.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, came back in probably September, I think September or October, and started hunting for jobs. Then, yeah, and I was just kind of, I started with my friends actually asking you know, have you got anything going at your place? And one of my closest friends had a job, actually got me in front of his company owner, got me in front of his company owner and he was working as a an architectural like model maker and basically managed to get me this job where I got my foot in the door. It kind of sounds odd but I was basically driving a van for this company delivering their architectural models, picking up their supplies, their wood and what have you and. But the owner of the company liked my cv because of the marketing experience and he wanted me to work on some trying to bring the company into the kind of 20th century and, you know, get some marketing practices in place, working some like new business for them and stuff like that. So that was actually quite an interesting initial career experience where I started off doing 95% of my role was driving. By the end of that first year I was probably spending more like 50 to 60% of my time driving position where I was doing the marketing for them and looking for new business opportunities and drumming up some some great new business, getting our director out to the middle east actually to go to like property conferences and drum up some new kind of streams of income. So that was really.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, it was really interesting, um, for a few reasons. Firstly, because I didn't just actually go straight down the media agency route, like I had a few applications I sent. Firstly because I didn't just actually go straight down the media agency route, like I had a few applications I sent in that just didn't get me anywhere. But also then because I took something that felt quite kind of left field but I just thought, you know, it's something, it's best to start with something, then hold out for what you think is your ideal role when you don't know how long you're going to be waiting. Right, I thought experience was would be a better teacher than just sitting around so how long did you do that?
Speaker 1:for how long did you do the dual driving and marketing role?
Speaker 2:yeah, so I did it for about 14 or 15 months, something like that. This was around the time of the uh, the economic crash, right, so I'd actually gone away over new years and I remember I came back at the start of the year, I think in 2009, and, yeah, I was kind of came into the office and was called into my uh, you know, the company owner's office and he basically sadly, gave me my, my notice I was being made redundant. He was really really clear to point out that it wasn't anything to do with my ability. It was purely a case of kind of last in, first out. They had to to protect their own survival. They had to. They were changing the forms of contracts and putting more people on as contractors rather than full-time staff. I was the kind of second driver. They had a driver that they had for a long time, so they just moved me on basically.
Speaker 2:But actually that triggered for me a personal crisis because, even though he was at pains to point out it wasn't performance related or anything about me, I did take it personally. It was. It was quite immature really. I didn't have good, healthy mechanisms for coping with that type of news, and so I felt, yeah, I felt kind of betrayed and let down and that I'd done something wrong, even though I hadn't. And then, yeah, a few things happened in quick succession. Then my um, you know, we've always had dogs as a family, like my my mum's dog died, so that was like really upsetting.
Speaker 2:And then my motorbike. So I'd I'd always dreamt of getting a motorbike and that first year of working I'd got my license, I'd fallen for this offer where you can get in a fully comprehensive years insurance for 100 quid if you buy a new bike. Right when I started my license I'd said to myself I'm gonna wait until probably like three, five, maybe even seven years after I get my license, until I've got a place where I've got a garage, can lock the bike up out of sight or, you know, behind a fence or something. But when I saw this offer, I just you know, I went with it. I thought, do you know what I can afford? Monthly payments to get a bike and the insurance is pretty much nothing if it's a one off payment of 100 quid. So I I did that. But then, after the redundancy and my dog dying, my motorbike got stolen in that february and that was really like it felt like in a self-centered way. Obviously, it felt like everything was going wrong for me how old were you?
Speaker 2:at this time. Yeah, I was probably uh 24 or 20. Yeah, about 23 or 24, something like that, but you're 24.
Speaker 1:Your transportation's a big deal to you, right, especially?
Speaker 1:if it's something that you've saved up or you've thought about for quite a while. I can, I can understand how that being stolen, and this is your prized possession being stolen, can you know, especially after you've lost your, your job, the dogs passed away that must have felt, as you say, like, maybe like it, like all the dominoes were were falling one after the other yeah, it felt huge and I realized on reflection that owning a motorbike was something that I dreamt of from when I was a kid.
Speaker 2:I used to buy motorbike magazines every now and then and just look at them and like, imagine what one I'd like to have. But then, buying it and riding, I've made some friends that were bikers as well, so our link was just biking and it was part of my daily routine. I'd drive to and from work. It had really formed a big part of my identity. So, yeah, it wasn't just a bike that was stolen, it was. It felt like a part of me being kind of ripped out and I was obviously in a bit more of a vulnerable state with the being jobless as well. So that was, yeah, that was tough and uh, I kind of, yes, a few other things started to uh hit the kind of go wrong then actually. So, yeah, I ended up basically having to leave my house, so I almost kind of go wrong then actually. So, yeah, I ended up basically having to leave my house, so I almost kind of temporarily became homeless.
Speaker 2:Uh, it was relation in relation to my um, to football. Funnily enough, that spawned it, like there was a. There was a football game I was watching with some friends and, uh, I got a bit, um, I had a few like cans of beer too many and then we lost the game. And I got a bit, I had a few like cans of beer too many and then we lost the game. And I went home angry and I remember like I kicked a fence panel outside the front and and kicked a like broke some other. Basically I caused a bit of damage like on my on the property, on our property, you know. So I wasn't like smashing up public um things.
Speaker 2:But then I went in and went to sleep and in the morning I had this big to-do with my mum's um second husband basically, and he basically was going to call the police and have me arrested for criminal damage. You know I was. I went down pleading I'm really sorry, you know I was, um, I had a bit too much to drink last night, I'm really sorry, I'm going to replace the thing. They're broken, like. I went in apologetic but his kind of response was like really angry, and how dare you do this? And like, yeah, so it escalated and I just I just had to get out of there. So I basically left home, I grabbed my guitar, uh, a few bits, and just left home and just felt, uh, kind of, yeah, really, my, that was my lowest point, without a doubt, and I felt lost and like I didn't have a home to go to.
Speaker 2:Unfortunately, at that point, um, you know, I spent a bit of time wandering and thinking and then, um, just found myself, my feet just took me to to my oldest friend's place they lived a few miles away and then they kind of took me and let me sleep on the on the sofa for for a little while and get myself back on my feet, started to do odd jobs here and there, ended up driving, um, yeah, delivering pizzas for pizza hut, which was, you know, not great, but they'd give me a free pizza every shift that I worked. So it was food that I didn't have to pay for and I was earning, you know, getting a little bit here and there and tips. Nothing really remarkable, but it did actually help me kind of steady myself. Having some structure again in my life Gave me some time to focus on my music outside of the shifts that I was working.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, and then I hit my kind of jackpot. In a sense, it was actually the same friend. I was at his birthday, got chatting to one of his good friends from uni and she was working for Mediacom at that point and you know, I mentioned what I'd studied and what I was. I was actually I was a bit ashamed of working at pizza hut, but I mentioned it to her and just said you know, yeah, I'm like eager to get out and, you know, use my brain a bit more as soon as possible. So she offered to pass on my cv, which she did, and then I got an interview and ended up getting a job. Uh, working in search, yeah, a company called MEC Interaction or MEC Global, which has now turned into Wavemaker. That was my first agency job in 2010,. I think I started doing that.
Speaker 1:Talk me through that feeling, because you've had a lot happen, right. If you talk about from, you know your father passing away. You're losing your father passing away. You're losing pushing your dog passing away. You're losing your bike.
Speaker 1:You've you've had way too many drinks and you've gone home and then you've left home and you've got this job at pizza hut and you're sleeping at your your on your mate's sofa yeah and then, by chance, you just happen to bump into this girl at a party, pass on your cv and you've landed yourself a job in the industry that you're after, where you wanted to work. How did that feel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it felt incredible, but I also didn't feel worthy of it. It was a really odd mixture of things. I knew I'd studied it, it I had confidence in my ability to uh, to learn, primarily, and, to, you know, take feedback on so that I can know exactly where I need to be focusing my efforts to get better at something and uh, and also, to you know, just build relationships with people and work as a team, like. I've always been big into sport and team sports were some of my favorite experiences playing football, basketball, what have you. So, on the one hand, I knew that I could do it and I had almost unerring confidence, but then, on the other hand, I had this I was. I was almost still that broken person, I hadn't really processed it and I was still in this mode of feeling like I'd delivered pizzas for so long that I that kind of felt like who I was, it become who I was, and so it felt odd that this, uh, you know these people would give me this job, but obviously they were seeing my potential and how I kind of presented.
Speaker 2:Um, and then, yeah, in those early days actually, I realized that I had panic attacks, kind of dealing with that clash of just almost the two ends of the spectrum in me, knowing I can do it but not believing myself, at the same time having the belief of my uh the manager that hired me and the director of the team, but also really not wanting to let them down, really wanting them to, to really wanting to show them that their investment and belief in me, to give me the job, was a good decision, yeah so.
Speaker 2:So that was tough and I actually only realized years and years later. I did mental health first aid training in 2018, I think, and we were talking through it was a really heavy training course, really worthwhile, but they were talking through the symptoms of panic attacks and it just hit me in that moment, eight years later, that that's exactly what I'd had. I was sitting, I remember, sitting at the desk and I had this simple task to do on excel and I had it open. I was looking at and I was just like getting heart palpitations and I was like I can't do it. I can't do it and I'd just go and sit in the toilet for like 10 minutes and then come back to my desk and be too scared to ask someone for help and go back to the toilet and go to the kitchen, do whatever I could to waste time, and it was. Yeah, it was really odd not having that outlet or feeling safe to talk about how I was feeling.
Speaker 1:So how does that feel now when you reflect on that?
Speaker 2:It feels normal, in a sense, from where I came from in terms of the lack of emotional literacy and emotional intelligence. It feels normal that I would be in a situation where I have some difficult thoughts but I don't have a healthy coping mechanism to externalize them or or deal with them. Instead, my help, my coping mechanism sorry, it was an unhealthy one. It was drinking, so I'd go to the pub after work and just have too many drinks and then wake up hungover the next day and come into work and kind of it would just stack on top of each other. But what I've learned is the importance of self-reflection and really understanding that we have coping mechanisms and that they are either healthy, healthy or unhealthy, and that we have power to decide which ones we want, which route we want to go down. So I'm much more aware now and, yeah, much more, I'd say, cognizant and purposeful in the decisions that I make and where I spend my time and what I do, what I do.
Speaker 1:Has this impacted the way that you're leading people as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it has.
Speaker 2:I think I touched on the mental health first aid training One of the key things in summary, for if people are not aware of that training, it's around.
Speaker 2:It's fulfilling the role of someone who can signpost people to resources that they need, role of someone who can signpost people to resources that they need, and the role of being an observer and spotting if somebody's behavior changes or if there are signs that you think might be something, and then equipping you with the tools to try and have a confidential conversation with someone where you just ask them how they are or maybe might point something out.
Speaker 2:I noticed that you've you know, you've stopped sharing your screen at meetings. I just wanted to see is everything how, how are you, how are things or you know, just trying to equip us and give us a confidence to look around, be observant and then support people and and so that's fed into my management style in that I'm very much. I think the bigger picture for me is I'm a manager of someone in a work context. We're there to do a job, so that is really what we need to get done, but we spend so much time together compared to how much time we get to spend with our family and friends that it's important that we're human about things and that we try and temper the expectations and the things that are asked of us that are sometimes unrealistic with what we can actually achieve.
Speaker 1:And then I definitely work with people to try and draw that line between what we can control and what we can't, so that if we're going to be worried about stuff, it's at least stuff on the right side of the line, so that we can actually have an impact rather than, yeah, falling onto that path, a slippery slope, really yeah, I can, I can totally relate and I also did the mental health first aid first aid, of course, and, um, and, like you, I also, um, studied coaching, uh, which we haven't mentioned, but just to let everyone know, um, that's, that's another thing that jacob does, uh, and, and I think that it does help because, exactly as you say, we don't have the emotional intelligence piece ingrained in us early on.
Speaker 1:Some of us, um, and things like investing in coaching or the mental health first aid course or other you know courses that are similar out there, helps us better understand exactly how to discuss emotions and also, maybe some of those probing questions to get to support our teams right, and it could be to support our teams, it could just be to support anyone around us yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I think, having done my coaching training, I've had to really and I think actually when, when we spoke, you uh mentioned you know you've got to be careful not to coach everyone because it's it's a certain type of, there's a certain type of expectation to a coaching relationship that's different to a normal relationship, right where. But I think some of the skills that are useful in any situation are listening, like really listening, rather than listening to try and find an opening where you can come in and make your point or whatever it might be. It's really listening to understand.
Speaker 1:That is super important and uh and useful yeah, you never want to try and coach your wife is the best. I remember when I first started the coaching training I wanted to coach everyone. Started having conversation, my wife, my wife said are you? She says you coaching me, and then I caught myself and yeah that that that conversation went sour pretty quickly. So, yeah, you don't want to try and coach your wife, at least not without checking in. Um, so talk to me a little bit about what you're working on at the moment. What's keeping jacob up at night?
Speaker 2:yeah, so I'm working on some really exciting things on both sides of my split. So on the operations side, we're really working on becoming a more mature organization with how we uh kind of document our processes and the interplay between different teams. Okay, because I found that, you know, I've seen it a number of times in my career where there's a really often an enigmatic leader, not necessarily of the organization but of a team, and they have a really strong plan and they sell it in and everybody's, you know, drumming to the same beat, but then that person leaves and actually that kind of impetus and real drive and understanding of it just doesn't live on beyond them. So that's on a kind of higher sense. But, yeah, really working on processes and tools and how we can more consistently work together so that our output is. So there are certain things that are consistent, but it also leaves room for the creativity that really brings our work to life.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, on the DE&I side, we've really really trying to evolve the way that we work and make sure that we're as representative and open to different points of view as possible. So I mentioned that we've we've done some great work in the last few years on um policy change and getting new policies written and and kind of up in the system so that everybody has access to them if they, if they need them. But we yeah, we're really looking at how we can try and drive some strong change around um, like gender pay gap, ethnicity pay gap, and have put some practices in place that are at the kind of level of behaviors but also at the level of, like, our ambitions as an organization for how we can be more inclusive and really try and drive and be at the forefront of of those changes amazing and what sort of challenges are you facing there?
Speaker 1:because that sounds like a really nice sort of directive and mission statement but quite difficult to deliver on yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So I think we're always trying to tread the balance between something that's really inspiring as a North Star with, when you come a few levels down, ok, what's the day to day or month to month reality of stepping towards that, and also what's a good rate of pace to be moving forward at.
Speaker 2:So that's that's really the challenge that we're working on, be moving forward at.
Speaker 2:So that's that's really the challenge that we're working on and that's, I guess, yeah, what's keeping me up at night is trying to trying to find ways to keep the people delivering the work empowered, and in some cases that is small steps, but then making sure, making sure that that north star is clear enough and that people understand it and can recall it.
Speaker 2:You know if you're, if you're asking them, you know what, what's our vision as an organization? Because then I find that, in the same way as an individual might have big goals, but then you've got day-to-day decisions, um, if those goals are clear, then the decisions that we're making can either be towards or away from that goal, whereas if we're not too sure about the goal or we're making can either be towards or away from that goal. Whereas if we're not too sure about the goal or we're like flipping and flapping a bit. Then you don't have that strong direction to either face towards or away from. So yeah, it's really making it tangible and making those tangible things ladder up. Those are the challenges that we're trying to overcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's a good shout actually, because quite often it feels like organizations are investing in dei or de and I from a uh, a tick boxing exercise perspective, so they literally just want to say that they've done something, as opposed to working towards a particular goal of elevating a workforce or supporting a workforce or whatever it might be. So working towards particular policies or working towards a particular goal or a particular milestone allows you to appreciate right, okay, well, we're going to invest this money in X and this is the reason why. And if it's not going to help you get to that goal or milestone, then you can ignore it. It may be a very nice idea, but it's not falling in line with what it is that you're trying to achieve yeah, absolutely, and I think I like this idea.
Speaker 2:I heard, um of a shelf where you can metaphorically put those ideas that don't quite work right now or fit in but there's some value to them. Put them on the shelf and you can come back to them, um, another time down the line. But, yeah, we're definitely. You know, it's a challenging economic environment for individuals, but also for our clients, right? So we're trying to make sure that we, I think, like future proof ourselves, in the sense like I don't love that word or that phrase, but I think that the way society is evolving, you know, in all sorts of ways, demographically, in terms of our perceptions and like our expectations of work it's really important that our workplaces evolving, evolve to keep up with that.
Speaker 2:And I heard, um, yeah, another industry leader, uh, zav, um, zavio reese, the other day talking about how, uh, it's a competitive advantage to have, like, an equal maternity paternity policy. Um, but really it shouldn't be an advantage. It should. There are certain things that should be standard for all of our companies, um, but there's a there's a time frame to that being a reality, right? So there we're at the stage in some areas where it's a competitive advantage to have the policies that I kind of mentioned earlier, and, um, yeah, that's what we want to be doing trying to push those boundaries as much as possible absolutely, jake.
Speaker 1:It's been a real pleasure to speak with you. I usually invite my guests to help me wrap up the conversation to see what the main themes are. I think you covered off quite a bit there, um, in regards to sort of emotional intelligence piece. Uh, in regards to leadership, I think we spoke quite a bit about your, your grit as well, sort of getting through not just the adolescence but also the working life as well. What would you like the takeaway to be for the audience?
Speaker 2:I think the key takeaway for me is being open to experiences and reflecting on them is one of the most important things that we can harness, one of the most important skills we can harness, because if you're open to experiences, trying things and then reflecting on what you got from them, that allows us to take things, even from negative experiences that can help us as we grow into our futures and our potential.
Speaker 1:And what do you reflect on this experience?
Speaker 2:Of the podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's been really great to have space to talk honestly and openly about things that I wouldn't necessarily talk about every day at work. It's just things that are part of me and who I am and how I present to the world now, that I don't always necessarily share. So for me, reflecting on this experience, it's been a great opportunity to explore that in a safe space. And actually, going back to my last point, it actually has helped me to reflect on some things and what my leadership style is jacob, I've really enjoyed the conversation today.
Speaker 1:Thanks again. I agree with you. That's a fantastic uh takeaway, so be open and reflect on your experiences. Thanks again for coming on the show well, thanks so much for having me.