Anni Townend: Hello and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me, Anni Townend, the podcast that helps you to grow confidence, care and courage in your leadership. I created this series of candid conversations for leaders to share their personal stories with you to encourage and inspire you on your own unique leadership journey.
Today, I'm delighted to be in conversation with Carolyn Youdell, Group Marketing Director at Specsavers. The title of our conversation, Becoming Compelling Skilled Sailors, is one of the themes that we explore in our conversation, becoming compelling. The second theme that we explore is that of embracing challenge.
And finally, the third one is driving simplicity.
Welcome Carolyn.
Carolyn Youdell: Thanks, Anni. I'm very excited to be here. I've been really looking forward to talking to you. One of my favorite people.
Anni Townend: Thank you very much. And I know that you are a regular podcast listener, not only to my podcast, but also to other people's podcasts.
So it's really brilliant to have you as a guest on Leaders in Conversation. And I would love to start with your first theme, which is that of becoming compelling and to ask you, who are the people, places, and experiences that have made you the compelling leader that you are, Carolyn. And it's one of the reasons we invite you back to the Marketing Leaders Program to speak about your leadership and your passion for marketing leadership.
So how did you become a compelling leader or a compelling skilled sailor? And who are the people, places, and experiences that shaped you?
Carolyn Youdell: Firstly again, thank you so much for inviting me. And as a listener to your podcast, I have sat in my car for, I have these huge epic drives in my job that I do now.
And I've often semi answered those questions in my head to myself. So when you actually invited me on, it was a real thrill to be able to Have a really good think about it myself a proper think of what I would say and imagine somebody else might be listening to it.
So in terms of the people and places, people for me is family. We didn't know it at the time did we, but what I now know is actually I probably had quite an extraordinary childhood because I had a really ordinary childhood. My mum was the teacher, my dad worked for a big engineering company, had a sister, had this huge family of cousins and aunts and uncles and all of us in my family had our birthdays in June. So I just remember this like endless stream of aunts and presents and cakes and strawberries. And that's how I think about my childhood thinking I was having a very ordinary time, but looking back now, actually quite an extraordinary life as a kid, but one of the most important bits I think there was all the women, all the aunts were working.
My Nana's worked. And so as a girl growing up without brothers. We're eight girls in the cousins, it was just girls and we were just this sort of band of rowdy girls who have all gone on to Do all all manner of incredible jobs all over the world so you don't really think about these things, but when you start thinking about them, you're like, actually that's the setup, lots of teachers, the mums were all teachers, the aunts were teachers, so my love of words definitely came from my mum, who's an English teacher I'm collecting words now and always have really, and then when I think about my dad as well, he was this very, hugely aesthetically pleasing, tall, always beautifully dressed.
And I think about my career in marketing and think, the kind of marrying of these things have definitely shaped me and really honestly, until I started listening to the podcast and preparing and thinking about coming on, I hadn't really put that connection together.
Places I grew up in Nottingham's spectacularly unpretentious and I love it for that. And having lived all over the UK, not really branching out too far, but I've lived all over the UK. I've come back to Nottingham and my kids were raised in Nottingham.
And then experiences I put. Two things really. I worked, I had a working life, I graduated, went to work, and then I had my kids and I had six years off with my children. I was a stay at home mum they were twins. I couldn't imagine just leaving them to somebody else.
It just felt like too big an ask. So I just stayed at home with them and went back to work. And then I was nearly 40 when I went back to work, had six years out and I was really lucky I went to work at Boots and I got put on very relatively quickly on a leadership training program and that was when I started on this self awareness journey with a Matt Radley Associates coaching program, which was just eye opening. And then within a couple of years, I'd moved and gone to Shell. And then I was put on the program that you led the Marketing Leaders Program. So in a very short space of time, I had this real double dosing of leadership.
You've got to become a leader and be more purposeful about that. And I think really thinking about that is really important. And then I would also say back to the children.
Being a working mom with kids with teenagers in particular, they keep you on your toes. You might think yourself aware and you might think that you're doing this amazing job with your colleagues and your career, but you come home and you have to be an entirely different authentic version of yourself, but you're a mum and figuring out who that is.
Two kids going through a life that we didn't go through with social media and pressures and some neurodiversity with one of my children And she has made me really incredibly capable as a leader now around neurodiversity and leaning into how incredibly special and important the way all of these different brains work. So I feel like leadership for me, it's absolutely been a journey.
And one of my mantras is around every day is a school day, which is probably hammered in to be by my mum. I'm in my fifties. every day, every time I'm leading new teams, you're learning all the time. And that for me is just massively important. I think that's how I got to where I got to.
And when I look at my core values of bravery, all the women in my family working, optimism, I've always ended up being an optimistic person surrounded by this huge cacophony of people generosity. I do feel lucky that I've landed into companies and they've just seen something in me and they've put me into these positions and then sent me on courses and programs that have just endlessly developed me.
So it feels to me like my core values that I, up until literally when I started thinking about this for your podcast, they were mine and I'd somehow cultivated them. By myself, actually, what I now feel is that I trace every single one of them back to, the people, places and experiences. And yeah, that's been a really exciting journey for me the last few weeks thinking about it.
Anni Townend: I love that the podcast gave you an opportunity to think differently about your values and indeed your purpose, which we’ll come to, and one of the questions I can remember being challenged by years ago is when I went to shadow a leader and their team over in Amsterdam, and I was having a relationship building conversation with the person and asked them.
Why this organization? What are your values and beliefs? And, as part of getting to know them. And they said, no, very very forthrightly. And what it transpired was they wanted me, given that I was shadowing them for the day, they wanted me to tell them at the end of the day, as part of the feedback to them, what I thought - through how they had behaved during the day - their values and beliefs were, what they stood for, which was such a fantastic question and challenge to me, one that stayed with me, one that I think about.
So let me ask you, Carolyn, in your role now at Specsavers, if you were to ask people what they see reflected through your behavior, would they be able to say?
Carolyn Youdell: I genuinely believe they would. And in fact, I know they would because I am about to move roles and I've had a couple of people spontaneously just write a note to me about, the impact I've had on them in the last couple of years that I've been at Specsavers. And. what was gratifying is that what they've reflected back to me is what I have written down on my piece of paper of the things that are important to me.
In order to become compelling, I think you have to be really, truly self aware, like the internal self awareness is one thing, which is the work that you can do for yourself.
What are those things that I feel are most important to me that I couldn't really compromise on, but it's the external piece that we often miss. And again, that was what's brilliant about going on a more structured program is that you do these huge 360s and you find out from your colleagues and friends and peers and boss and various people exactly what they think of you.
And I think that for me was the important part to understanding what made me compelling. And I use compelling rather than superpower because I think it's much more magnetic.
So that magnetism of being compelling is the thing that you need to work on. Understanding for yourself, what is that, what is it that makes me compelling and what I boil it down to, and I had to do a lot of work on this, you have to do a lot of spade work, you have to talk to people, you have to be very vulnerable and ask them to be really open and honest with you and where I've boiled it down to is around trust, is around the way I show up, I'm credible in the fact that I do know what I'm doing now.
I've been working in marketing since I graduated. In fact, the year before I graduated, I did, a year of marketing. So I've been doing marketing for a while now. So my credibility in marketing is relatively taken for granted, but the next stage of that around. Your intimacy and the relationships that you build and how self oriented you are and how reliable you are.
And the self orientation piece for me is where I think people who work in my team and who are led by me.And I've had this evidence back to me recently that I am there for them. I try and make their life at work better. I try and get under the skin of problems for them. I try and I can't do it for everybody because these programs are, they cost a lot of money and they do tend to be for the privileged few.
But I take all the learnings from those programs and we push it down into the team so that they understand the rudimental self awareness pieces around Transactional Analysis and locus of control and dynamics of team and all the kind of accountability pieces that people need to get to understand.
And it's easy to do with teams. And when I first talked about my purpose when I was on MLP I would quite confidently say I use the platform I have to improve the capacity, the capability and confidence of other people. I was very pleased with myself when I came up with my purpose and felt very comfortable wearing it and saying it out loud, as I have for many times on MLP since.
But where I've gone to with that now is I understood that to be people's confidence in their job as marketeers. And now what I do is I go into this space of helping people to understand what's making them tick or not, what their triggers are, all the stuff we've done before on, impact felt, impact intended, impact sent, all this stuff that we've done.
It's actually quite straightforward to do with people. And it's hugely rewarding to see whenever I do transactional analysis with the team, see them sitting there with their big eyes open going. Oh, I think I'm an adaptive child all the time, they can see it for themselves, but they've never been shown it.
What I now do is I worry less about the kind of functional skills of the people I'm leading and spend a lot more time on them. I'm bringing them out. And I think that's why people are very happy to be in my team and be led by me. And I think that's one of the things that makes me compelling is that I'm easy to trust and people know that I'm working on their behalf.
Anni Townend: You really are. And in fact, one of the reasons I remember inviting you back to speak on the MLP, the marketing leaders program was because I'd heard about a session that you had led on being your confident best versus just surviving taken from future engage deliver in particular and how amazed people were by the session and thrilled and delighted by what you'd shared with them.
And I remember saying to my colleague, we must invite Carolyn back to speak on the program because that's exactly what we want. We want people to share what they learn - every day is a school day - back in their work environment. And you were doing that at Shell at the time. And It was just lovely to have you back and to hear your experience of putting the program into practice and helping people to be their confident best, to be more aware of who they are when they're at the best and how they can live their leadership through being in touch with their values and beliefs and their purpose.
You've embraced challenges and it would be great to hear how you've gone about that, and you're thinking as a leader about embracing challenge.
Carolyn Youdell: I will pay respect to the great Franklin D Roosevelt for the actual quote which is a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor and that, for me, literally transformed my thinking around how difficult sometimes work is, how challenging sometimes people can be experiences, meetings and if you sit in that meeting feeling like, it's it's something to cope with, something that you've got to try and get through, it is very different to, in my head, my little mantra about smooth seas is wow, this is great.
What am I going to learn now? I'm going to try and navigate this. How am I going to do that? What do I know about myself that's going to enable me to navigate this? And, even this morning, I've had a conversation with one of my team about her having a very radical candor kind of conversation with someone who's working in her team and she's reluctant, because we're all reluctant to do that.
It's difficult. And I just say to her, look, come on, this is you becoming a skilled sailor. You don't have to. If you really don't want to, then just go back into ruinous empathy and we'll just leave them in the dark. But, this is an opportunity. Don't see it as a difficult thing. See it as an opportunity for you to just experience a different kind of conversation that will go anywhere and you just don't know where it's going to go and you're just going to be navigating it as if you were, to stretch the analogy, just doing anything for the first time in real life, and you were just coping with it.
I was on MLP and I remember Syl Saller who was such an icon. I've worked in advertising for years, such an icon coming in. And once I'd stopped being dazzled, one of the things she said was, if you want to be a leader, you've got to love problems. Because it's all you deal with and the more senior you get, the bigger the problems are because by the time they've got to you, 25 people have already tried to solve them.
And I remember thinking, Oh my God, that's what it's going to be like if I'm a leader. But in fact, what I enjoy now are these opportunities for me to just keep learning, keep being challenged and having these little mantras, like I said, a little picking up these words from being a wordsmith like my mum is, they help you just calm down and be present and be in the moment in the meeting thinking about how to navigate rather than being scared baffled, cross that you're being put under the pressure, whatever.
And it's a very positive way of navigating things I think.
Anni Townend: I think it's a great analogy that navigating things because sometimes I think we may have used this on the marketing leaders program, the paying attention to the context and used the analogy of the sea of being on the waves as a way of helping people to talk about what it's like currently in their leadership and to think about whether they're on board a ship with other people, are they swimming in the water? Are they the captain of the ship? Are there other ships at sea? Who is in those ships?
What's their perspective of their boat, their team? I think having metaphors and having analogies can be hugely helpful. And a book I have just read. recently is Wavewalker by Suzanne Hayward, in which she describes her extraordinary childhood the only one she knew of going to sea with her family age seven and of being at sea for 10 years and how her passion for learning and education and her determination to, to learn and to grow through education and how she managed this.
I encourage the book to all listeners, but also a book, Radical Candor by Kim Scott, which is such an amazing book. Also a podcast encouraging us all to care personally and to be challenged directly. And one of my mantras is be kind, be direct and be yourself, which encompasses her radical candor.
Navigating and choosing to care personally and challenge directly and to navigate the unknown through that perspective is massively helpful. What else has helped you to embrace challenge?
Carolyn Youdell: I think linked to that, and I touched on it before. In leadership and in management, there are all these buzzwords, and resilience has been the buzzword of the last five or six years. And then of course, massively important and hugely discussed over COVID and lockdown but it's actually a term that I've just begun to loathe because I feel that it gives an impression that you've got to just hold on, like resilience is like just keep going, just keep going on your boat.
Don't let go. Don't let them grind you down. It's that kind of thing. And I prefer the term bounce back, which is around, for me, it pays respect to what happens to you when you do actually hit a setback, not just a bad meeting, we're all in bad meetings, but a genuine setback that you bounce back.
That you do go down and you allow yourself to say that's okay, feeling a bit bad about that, that didn't go very well, rather than this kind of, just don't worry about it, just keep going, be resilient, just keep rolling. And so I always use the term bounce back with my team and when I'm talking about things because we do go down.
And if you role model that as a leader, you role model it as a parent. I'm very honest about how I'm feeling. I have a wonderful boss, who's the CMO is ex IKEA. So he starts every meeting with thinking and feeling, which I can tell you when we all first started working for him was a bit of a stretch target, particularly for some of the longest term select service people, but, you can be very honest and I think it's good to be very honest about that bouncing back. And then the corollary to that really, is around just you being the change maker. So being less buffeted by the waves. And there's an Abe Lincoln quote about, create the future that you want, don't just wait around for the future to come to you.
You have to create the future you want, and then that does help you to rely a little bit less on your bounce back ability because you're creating the future. And what I've noticed about the very successful people I've worked with is they are change makers. And in marketing today, people do have an opportunity, I think, to stretch their legs into, another MLP phrase into new areas.
Take AI for instance, at the moment, you could quite legitimately go stretching your legs into that because nobody really knows what that means for businesses. Very few businesses have really figured it out. So assuming the permission to just go forward.
I have noticed in my career that the successful people are the people who do that. They just see something and they just go for it.
They don't ask permission. They don't wait. I think that's something for me in my career now, being a little bit braver about being a change maker is something that I have set myself an objective to be.
Anni Townend: That's great to hear and lovely to have your thoughts on resilience and on bounce back because I've also given these things a lot of thought and very much combine confidence with resilience and also when bouncing back that we are changed by our experience
We will go down and we will come up and we will have been changed by the experience and to then combine that with being a change maker and learning about ourselves through the experience of the setback.
Your third theme, Carolyn, is driving simplicity, which I think is so important in leadership, and it would be great to hear you talk more about that.
Carolyn Youdell: This has always been a strength of mine. So maybe it's unsurprising that I would choose it as a topic for leadership because I'm good at that one.
So that would be a good one for me. But it's rooted in something a little bit more serious than that. Humans. We're just beset, aren't we, at the moment by the number of messages. And, we're guilty of this running marketing departments that are sending out millions of messages, millions and millions of messages.
And people I think are just utterly overwhelmed and there are statistics to show almost three quarters of the population are on a monthly basis feeling overwhelmed. And if you catch people at the wrong moment, with some very complicated explanation or a very complex presentation or a very, impenetrable pre read or whatever, so for me, there's a real empathy around simplicity, which is keeping things very simple, instead of putting the effort and energy into making things complicated and thinking of another 25 things to stick onto your document or into your message to your customer or onto your offer or into your pricing. Just paring everything back and making it really simple is a real act of generosity.
I try really hard with my team and with the documents that I produce, with the datasets we produce and provide for things to be easy to understand, don't make it difficult for people to understand it. And it is that sort of empathetic. It is driven from empathy for the people who are receiving it, but I think it's something that our agency partners and our consultancy partners thrive now on, impenetrable decks and complexity and this is the next big thing and this is the next big trend.
I think it's a very important muscle for marketing leaders to try and constantly cut through what is it. And again, my boss, CMO at Specsavers is constantly talking about the ultimate outcome. What is it that we're wanting the customer to do? Think, feel, do, but what is it that, and that's the job, not the 50 million other things that you think might be exciting.
It's just that. And again, on the marketing leaders program, it sounds like I haven't really learned much since then, doesn't it? But Keith Weed again, rockstar came in to talk to us. That was a career high, actually, sitting in a room of what there would have been 20 of us and Keith Weed coming in to talk to us and him defining marketing as our role is to create consumer demand led growth for the business.
And that's it. Consumer demand led growth. And when you pare everything back to that as a marketeer and go today, what have I done? To create consumer demand led growth. What have I actually done? What have my team done? And we've produced lots of reports and we've done some amazing insights workshop and we've written incredible decks and vision statements, but did that actually create consumer demand led growth for our business today?
And I think for me, as a marketing leader, that's your job every day all day, and it helps and enables you to just disregard so much stuff that gets thrown at you. I really advocate for that putting the effort in to make things simple and, just keeping things simple for your team because they're almost likely to be incredibly overwhelmed as are lots of people at some point during that month or year or whenever.
Anni Townend: That's such a great theme for listeners to explore is where could they drive more simplicity and get really clear on what it is that they're driving whatever the business organization that they're in.
As we come to the close of our conversation Carolyn, what are your three encouragements to leaders who want to become compelling skilled sailors, whatever their area of work, leadership and or in life.
Carolyn Youdell: There's not gonna be any surprises here. So being compelling, Jeff Bezos famously says that your brand is what people say about you when no one's listening. I think the way I got to understand about what makes me compelling is by talking to other people, not listening to myself.
So if you are listening and thinking, you don't know. What would make you magnetic? What would make you compelling? Then talk to other people about that and find out for yourself. That will be your USP. So it's worth understanding it, cultivating it.
Secondly is around simplification. Just simplify. everything around you for your team. Focus on the outcome, the ultimate outcome for your organization. And I think that's just worth so much of your time doing that.
And then the final thing is, changing your mindset around what is challenge. And is it, this dreadful thing that's happening, or is it an opportunity for you to learn, an opportunity for you to become a more skilled sailor?
And those are my three encouragements.
Anni Townend: They’re brilliant encouragements. Thank you, Carolyn.
How best for people to contact you? If they would like to find out more about you, follow you?
Carolyn Youdell: With my very peculiar surname, Youdell, I'm the only Carolyn Youdell on LinkedIn, pretty much. If you put in Carolyn Youdell as Specsavers on LinkedIn. You'll find me.
Anni Townend: That's brilliant. That's Carolyn, spelt with a Y, Carolyn, and Youdell spelled like how it sounds,Youdell.
To you, the listener, please do connect with Carolyn on LinkedIn.
Please connect with me on LinkedIn, Anni Townend. That's Anni without an E and Townend without an S. If you would like to listen to more Leaders in Conversation please do go to my website, Leaders in Conversation with Anni Townend.
Please do share, review, and listen to other episodes. Thank you for listening.
A huge thank you to my marketing team, the Conscious Marketing Group, and to Coco O'Brien for the production of the podcast. And finally, Carolyn a huge thank you to you for our conversation today. And I'm thrilled to have had you as a guest on the podcast
Carolyn Youdell: Thank you, Anni. My pleasure.
