66: Sarah Waddington CBE, MD, Astute:Work : The Changemaker: Driving change through action in the PR Industry

Shownotes: CBE, Founder of Socially Mobile, Future Proof and several other initiatives to build a better industry. Sarah Waddington, CBE had the foresight to launch her purpose driven management consultancy a decade before others started talking about Purpose. In this episode I spoke to her about journey 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾👉🏾 The importance of shared values for great results and purpose being a commercial imperative in today’s world👉🏾 What PR practitioners can do to remaining relevant as advisers to the C-suite in a world of flux👉🏾 #FutureProof and the three things we need to plan for to FutureProof the industry👉🏾 What good leadership looks like, how women lead👉🏾 Addressing the the gender/ethnicity gap in leadership in the industry👉🏾 The vision behind ‘Socially Mobile’ and her aspiration for itAnd last but not the least what the Elephant in the Room is for her“From a leadership perspective the elephant in the room is when people won't recognise or acknowledge their own weaknesses. I'm a flawed leader, I think we all are, there's very few people that I would look at and go they're the full 360 thing. But I know I've made mistakes and I'm human, my intention, I like to think is always right. I always want to learn and I think that's the other elephant in the room, just sometimes knowing you don't know the full picture and back to what you said earlier, when we need to listen better, all of us need to listen better.”What is the Elephant in the Room for you? Listen more here….Memorable Passages from the podcast:👉🏾 Thank you so much for inviting me, I'm so delighted to be speaking to you today. 👉🏾 Thank you for the lovely congratulations. I actually have my investiture in July, so I've got something very exciting to look forward to. And, you say since that news and being able to use that to launch Socially Mobile been quite a special time for me so I'm very grateful for all of that that's been happening. Where to start in terms of starting my own consultancy, well I did a French and media degree, loved it. And in my final year, I was lucky to do an internship and I went to a PR company and the rest is history shall we say. Came back to the Northeast, went into PR agency, then wanted to widen my expertise and went to PR marketing agency, developed my marketing knowledge through an MA and kept my CPD up. And ultimately I got to a stage in my career where I was running three offices for a group up in the north.👉🏾 And the recession hits, this was about 13 years ago, and I suddenly sensed an opportunity, I was doing less of the day-to-day stuff and I was missing it. And then I had clients who wanted to work with me and weren't getting me but also didn't want or couldn't afford anymore to have agencies with big operational costs, they wanted the consultancy direct. So that's when I actually set up my own company and didn't really look back. And I was really fortunate that back at that time, I did something which was quite innovative in terms of business model, I actually set ourselves up as a remote working agency. And that seems very commonplace now because of the pandemic. But pretty much the first of my kind and I could only do that really because a lot of the private sector and blue-chip companies that I'd worked with, were doing the same and it just became much more acceptable. 👉🏾 So I started there and then as we...