Curiosity, Resilience and Fun – a conversation with Meg Farren, General Manager, Chief Customer Officer and Chief Marketing Officer

Hello, welcome and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me, Anni Townend. 

Today’s guest is Meg Farren, General Manager, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and much more! 

I had the joy of meeting Meg for the first time on the Marketing Leaders Programme, in early 2024. Meg opened the programme for us, and did a wonderful job of sharing her story and setting the context and the ambition of the programme.

Together Meg and I delve into the people, places and experiences that have made Meg the person and leader she is today. 

Meg’s Three Key Encouragements to Leaders 

1. Be Curious in Everything, make your first response a curious one, about yourself and about others - ask Why all the time
2. Lean into your Fear, build resilience through daring to ask - don’t hold yourself back
3. Have Fun, find and do what you love and gives you Joy

To connect, follow and find out more about Meg:

LinkedIn: Meghan Farren

To listen to other Leaders in Conversation with me Anni Townend go to my website, www.annitownend.com

Leaders in Conversation is the podcast in which I talk with leaders about their own life and leadership stories, to encourage you to reflect on your values, beliefs, passion and purpose, and inspire you to be even more confident and courageous in your leadership. 

A big thank you to Coco O’Brien for the wonderful intro and outro music, for the lovely design, and for the excellent editing and sound production and promotion of the podcast.

To contact me Anni Townend do email me on anni@annitownend.com visit my website www.annitownend.com, subscribe to my newsletter and follow me on LinkedIn.  I look forward to connecting with you, thank you for listening.

Transcript

Anni Townend: Hello, welcome and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me, Anni Townend. Today's guest is Meg Farren, General Manager, Chief Customer Officer and much, much more. The title of our conversation is Curiosity, Resilience and Fun. 

Leaders in Conversation is the podcast in which I talk with leaders about their own life and leadership stories to encourage you to reflect on your values, beliefs, passion and purpose, and inspire you to be even more confident and courageous in your leadership.

If you're not already, please do subscribe to the podcast, review and share it. Thank you. I had the joy of meeting Meg for the first time on the marketing leaders program in early 2024. Meg opened the program and did a wonderful job of inspiring through sharing her story and setting the context and ambition of the program.

Meg, welcome. 

Meghan Farren: Thank you, Anni. Thank you for having me. And it's so nice to see you again. 

Anni Townend: It's lovely to see you. And I'm really excited for our conversation. As I mentioned, you inspired through sharing your story on the Marketing Leaders Program. And immediately I remember thinking how lovely it would be to have you as a guest on the podcast so that more people could hear your story and learn from you, and in particular, dial up curiosity, resilience and fun, which I know you're going to be talking about.

I'd like to start by asking about the people, places, and experiences that have made you, and in particular, those people, experiences, and places that have informed your values, your beliefs, your passion and purpose, and made you the leader you are today. 

Meghan Farren: You know, when I was just reflecting before this morning on that question of who am I, tell me a bit about yourself. It seems such an easy question to answer. And yet I always find the simplest questions. So difficult because I think I'm so many things, and at the minute, I'm the CEO of KFC in the UK and Ireland, but I am a wife to an entrepreneur.

I'm a mom, I'm a daughter, a sister. I'm a volunteer football manager. Who I am depends on who I'm with in any given moment in my life. And what's, quite interesting, is that actually it's all about people when I talk about who I am, it's always in relation to others.

I don't know if it's like that for everyone when they talk about themselves. But definitely for me the people in my life, even my teammates that's almost how I define myself in some ways. I am one of three daughters. I was the oldest and I meet every stereotype of being the oldest that you can find and I think my childhood, has definitely shaped.

So much of my inner values and the things I'm good at. And also some of the things that trigger me or that create weaknesses. My dad was a big CEO of a company. My mom was a nurse. And she grew up in those days where she probably would have been a doctor, but didn't because, you know, it just wasn't what was done. She became a nurse instead and an amazing nurse. And I think from both of my parents, I grew up with this sense of You can do anything and be anything you want but make sure that it's something you really want to do.

My dad always said to me, and I think I said this to the marketing leaders when we first met, just follow the things that you love to do and everything else will fall in place. That has certainly been true in my life. 

Anni Townend: It's such a good mantra, isn't it?

To find what you love to do and then to follow it and encourage others to find what they love to do and follow it. And I know for myself, Meg, I love walking and I've always loved walking. I love being outside. And for many years I thought I had an inside job because of working with people, with senior leaders and their teams, often inside.

And what I've done over the past 10 years or more is incorporate being outside as part of the experience of building the team and similarly in working one to one and so for me the mantra of your dad and that you apply to your life and leadership to others is very much one that I discovered through thinking how can I incorporate my love of walking into the work that I do. And it's a question that I often ask people and recently asked somebody. And they said, I absolutely love cooking. And so I'm thinking about how can I support them in creating opportunities where cooking becomes part of something that they offer.

Meghan Farren: Yeah, on the walking outside piece, people are much more comfortable to open up, and they feel much less vulnerable sharing about themselves, and being in a deep, intimate, personal discussion with others, when they are, walking side by side versus being sat across from each other.

So there may be something that's intricately linked in what you do and that thought as well. 

Anni Townend: Absolutely. I think so. And even virtually, Meg, some of my work with senior executives, one to one work they're on their phone. I'm on my phone and we're both walking where we are based or where we happen to be in the world and in that work, even more perhaps when I'm not physically walking side by side with someone, then I draw on nature on the place that they're in and the time in and what we're noticing, what catches our eye and the changing season and sometimes the changing weather, even whilst we're in conversation. So it's a lovely mantra from your dad, I think, and it sounds like one that's guided you.

Meghan Farren: Completely. I am so lucky to be in a job that I just absolutely love. I literally have fun every day. And that sounds like an over statement or an exaggeration or hyperbole, but it's absolutely not. I laugh a lot, even when things are really tough and it's pressurized things go wrong all the time.

But even then we still laugh and I love to laugh it's definitely super important and I have been in my career in places or roles where it definitely wasn't fun and I definitely wasn't at my best either. And I think as you become older, a bit more, experienced, you start to have the confidence to make choices that say, actually, no I'm not going to spend 50, 60 hours a week doing something that makes me miserable, especially now as a mom, when you're in your job, you're away from your family.

It needs to be worth it. You need to be doing something that you care about. That you feel you can have an impact in and that you enjoy because I come back as such a better mom because I'm enjoying my life at work. I bring that energy back home and I think I'm much better at being a mother because I'm fulfilled in that sense.

Anni Townend: I love that. Absolutely. It makes sense, Meg, because I think self awareness and self reflection and being curious, which is something you have in the title of our conversation, being curious about ourselves and the environment which we thrive in.

And for you is one in which you have fun, that you enjoy. And I'm confident and know this about you from having met you on the marketing leaders program that you're fun to be around. And that doesn't mean to say that you're not being serious about what you do. So I noticed that what you bring is the both, and you're serious about what you do and you're having fun and importantly, you've discovered through self curiosity, the kind of environment that you flourish in and that you're your best in. 

Coming back to your childhood and the people in particular, because you said it's people who've really shaped you. You've spoken about your dad and his mantra and your mom, that she is and was a brilliant nurse, albeit would have liked to have been a doctor and that you're the eldest of three.

What else from your childhood has shaped your values and your beliefs and your passion and purpose? 

Meghan Farren: We were a very tight family unit, and we moved when I was young. It must have been about 10-11. I moved to Australia from the U.S. And it was one of the hardest things we ever did.

Australia is an amazing place. It's beautiful. But as a preteen, I went from being in a state and public school in the U. S. to a very elite, posh private school in Australia. Full uniform. I'd never worn a uniform in my life with a real strong American accent.

And I think that experience built a lot of resilience. Because you were on the outside and it was constantly just carrying on. Growing up, I played soccer

That was my sport. And I'm pretty athletic and sports have always been really important in my family. And then when I moved to Australia, girls didn't play football at that time. When I was a kid, they didn't play soccer there. And my dad didn't want me to give up soccer so he pushed me to try out for the boys team and I was 11, and boys at that age and girls at that age. I think it was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. I can still remember it, the image clear in my head. And I made the team, and one of those boys friends, didn't make the team because I made it and I was the only girl.

I wouldn't go so far as to say bullying, but the teasing and the things like I couldn't change, they would all change on the pitch. Obviously I couldn't change on the pitch. And it was hard being on the outside. And I think that builds a little bit of courage and resilience because every time you think.

There's all sorts of experiences in that move, everything from being told once in an English class, I raised my hand to participate in class and to read out and the teacher said, no, I can't handle an American accent today.

And again, I'm the only one in the class. They're all Australian and it's those things that after a while, you, build self resilience and that teacher, I look back and I think, goodness, she could really scar people.

I moved to France when I was in university and studied there for a year. And again, an American in France. 

I was learning the language and I did a degree in French, I didn't have the quote unquote background that everyone else in whatever room I was in had, and I think that made it hard.

As I look back, it built confidence in me and I do have personal confidence, not in an arrogant way. I think confidence and humility can exist together. But I definitely do feel a confidence in myself. And I think that really helps me today. Actually, be humble in some ways. And I think it helps me help others and I think it helps me in making big decisions.

Anni Townend: The experience of being an outsider at such a, relatively tender age of 10 years old and moving countries, moving from one kind of school into a very different kind of school, and by the sound of it, a much more formal school, a very different culture, one where girls at that time didn't play football, didn't play soccer.

You had the encouragement of your family, you described yourself as coming from a very tight family. So you had that support and that love to just do it and get on with it. And that sort of grit and determination comes through, but also a sensitivity. Certainly from my own experience, I also changed schools, not countries and went from one school to a very different school when I was 10 years old and it had a lasting impact on me of being the outsider. I come from a very Northern Yorkshire family. 

Meghan Farren: Oh, really? I wouldn't have known that. 

Anni Townend: You wouldn't have known that. And one of the reasons you wouldn't have known that is one of the first things I realized in order to fit in that I had to do was to change the way I spoke. So I listened very carefully to how the other students spoke, and I changed the nature of my accent in order to fit in, and I can't remember who asked the question, what's the opposite of fitting in? I think it might be Brenne Brown. The answer to the question, what's the opposite of fitting in is belonging.

And it's such a good answer because I think that experience of not fitting in and of trying to fit in through losing my accent, albeit when I go to Yorkshire or I meet a Yorkshire person, I am hale and hearty. So there's a real kind of sense of belonging to where I was brought up. And at the same time, a recognition of something that I very consciously chose to do to fit in. But what I didn't do then was feel confident in who I was.

Confidence and resilience. And I think the two do go together. You've put resilience and humility together. I think the experience for me of feeling very much the outsider brought with it a sensitivity and a passion for inclusivity and diversity, which has been with me all my life and is a core driver for me and my leadership.

Meghan Farren: I think there's something while you were talking about your experience and in that changing schools, it connected and made us thought of when you are, or you feel like you are on the outside or you're different or you're new and everyone else isn't new this idea of the, all of your senses are on hyper alert and you're noticing and observing and really listening, with all of your senses.

I wonder if that experience helps, really build that listening muscle and help build empathy skills and awareness skills in yourself and others that maybe you just wouldn't notice as much if you hadn't been through that. That's a curious thought I might reflect on.

Anni Townend: Yeah. Take the thought and reflect on it for sure. I think my experience is that real listening is so important and it's important for us as leaders. The more we listen and notice, the better the questions that we can ask to help people grow and develop and encourage them in their confidence and courage and resilience.

So I think listening, and I remember reading some time ago, an article in the Harvard Business Review where a leader was asked, what do you wish you had learned years ago? And their response was, I always thought as a senior leader, I was there to listen, to give an opinion. And what I learned was I needed to listen, to listen to understand. 

Meghan Farren: Oh, I love that. 

Anni Townend: Isn't that great? And that stayed with me that listening to understand combined with curiosity stops us from being judgmental, opinionated. I know that when I'm more curious and I'm really listening, then I learn and understand so much more.

Meghan Farren: I had a great mentor many years ago now, I think I was a marketing director and it was the CMO at the time. And he said to me once, your job is not to know the answers. It really stuck with me and I use it all the time with people moving into more and more senior leadership roles.

This idea of changing your mindset of what success is and what your role is and it's liberating the idea that you don't have to have all the answers and that it's not your job to have the answers. It's your job to help the teams and the people around you get to the very best answer.

And when you release the anxiety and the pressure of having to know everything you release that pressure valve and it enables you to ask the next best question, which will enable a better answer to come because you're actually listening rather than listening to respond.

You're listening to really learn and with curiosity. And so I think there's something in that thought as well, which is changing your mindset around what great looks like, and what success looks like in your role. When I first moved into this general manager role, it was my first GM. Position and I've had a very varied background.

I started in finance, but I didn't spend much time there and I was in consulting. And then I spent most of my career in marketing and various parts of the function. And when I became a general manager, I had this real kind of sense that I needed to go back and get a finance degree. I needed to do a week studying this and a week studying supply chain.

And my boss, who is one of the world's most amazing coaches he's the CEO of KFC globally. He said to me that is just not your role. If you want to be a CFO, okay, you can go do an advanced finance course, but your job is to bring the team together and to set the direction. And to be the conductor of an orchestra and to allow their amazing talents to shine and to all play together in harmony.

And it's so liberating because it releases a fear and anxiety and the worry that you're not doing a good enough job. And the positive side of that is it also empowers your team and it gives them accountability and allows them to shine.

I think that is probably one of the biggest lessons I've learned in my career, in a new role or under pressure or stress, I have to self coach myself on that one. Then once I do, I'm like, okay, fine, that's good because I have the best CFO and the best CMO. And so I don't have to worry that I don't know the answer because they will come up with the answer. And maybe that's partly why I have so much fun at work because I'm not doing anything. My team does everything.

Anni Townend: You're creating the environment in which they can do their best work. And learn and grow and develop, but also something which I think it sounds as if you do is you create an environment in which they can do their best thinking together. And I think this is something that we, as leaders, my experience of working with senior leaders is not making enough time for people to do their best thinking together. I find myself encouraging thinking time, not just on your own reflective time, but also together thinking time so that together we can do our best thinking. And the third thing that I'd love to hone in on is that you are comfortable with not knowing.

Which I often say, leadership is about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. And what's lovely about what you've just shared, Meg, is that you're actually comfortable with not knowing. And I think that's so important, and it's such an important lesson for us all. I went on improvisation workshop, invited by a couple of colleagues to participate.

And one, it was lovely being a participant. We had a lot of fun playing with making mistakes of not quite knowing what was going to happen next. And importantly, the notion that most things that we do, we are improvising. A little bit like our conversation, neither of us exactly knew what either of us were going to say, so we're already improvising, and on the strength of that. I invited Steve Chapman to be one of my guests over a year ago now on the podcast to talk about being playful with not knowing, which you clearly bring and have a lot of fun with.

Meghan Farren: I think it does help create a space that feels more safe for people to do their thinking or to think live and to share their real opinions. And what you said. That part about creating time for thinking in a room together and thinking as a team. That's something my team has been working on, actually.

And it requires a level of trust amongst the people in the room, but also a willingness to come in with an open mind and to not know the answer, and it's much easier to come in with an open mind if you don't have the answer, but if you think, the answer, then your reaction is to poke holes in what the other people are saying or to convince them that your answer is the right one.

So we've been doing a lot of work on tools for how to run a debate or discussion to ensure that people listen fully to someone's perspective and to reflect on that, and then to respond to that and to build on it, rather than entering the conversation with a formed view. 

And then you're judging everyone else's perspective against the thought you have in your head. And that's just natural human behavior. So we had to work quite hard at, don't think about other things. You don't want to come in with a formed perspective, in many cases, sometimes maybe, but not in every case and to build the muscle of actually being open minded, I think takes work for a lot of people and it is uncomfortable. My job is not to know the answer.

Anni Townend: Especially as you highlight, when we have a point of view that is aligned with our values and beliefs that we're very attached to it can be really difficult to detach in order to be able to really listen. And it's lovely to hear that you with your team now are working on some tools and leadership muscles to help listening and thinking with an open mind rather than coming in with an already formed mind.

And it does take work, Meg. Without a doubt. 

Meghan Farren: And I think, you wouldn't want a group of people or leaders that didn't care. But when you care, you attach some worth, something of yourself to what's being done or said or achieved.

Anni Townend: One of the ways in which I encourage people to listen and also to give an opinion is also to own that it is an opinion and to speak from the ‘I’, I think this, I feel, I'm wondering, I'm asking myself the same question, so it makes it easier for other people to listen.

I'm not telling them that this is what people think, this is fact - I'm saying, This is what I think. This is what I imagine. Tell me what you think. How do you feel about that? This is how I feel. So that kind of I, you, we, and then together we have a kind of collective response. And to be able to do that, you mentioned a really important part of leadership is creating that safe environment in which trust is built.

And it's something which I've done a lot of thinking around together with my colleague, Lucy Kidd. And we've created our Collaboration Equation, which starts with psychological safety, creating a safe environment in which people can enjoy Inclusive Dialogue that leads to Diversity of thought and feeling, and then people get to their Collaborative Edge, which is an exciting place to be where people are doing their best thinking together.

They're listening. They trust. They're excited by each other. So I'm really happy that you mentioned the importance of feeling safe to being able to trust each other. 

Meghan Farren: I think that it's hard and it takes time as well. It's not an overnight thing. 

Anni Townend: Meg, as we come towards the end of our conversation, having covered a lot of ground, what are your three encouragements to leaders that you would like to share with listeners?

Meghan Farren: The first one is about being curious. In everything, I think if you can start to build the muscle that a first response is a curious response to ask for a point of view to ask why again which is essentially maybe another way of saying, to learn. It's a muscle to help you learn and not just learn, school books or facts or, techniques, but to help you learn about others and their points of view.

I think being curious about others and about yourself can be a game changer and can create safety for your team and allow others to thrive and it can help you get the best out of others. 

The second one, I don't want to say, don't be afraid of failing because I think that's really hard advice to give people, especially ambitious people who want to do great things like no one sets out to fail. I think that's hard advice. Like, how do you tell someone - fail? What I do think is lean into the fear or when it feels scary to do things you haven't done before. You don't know if it will be successful and it might be really hard, but those experiences build resilience and make you better the next time. 

One of the things I've really been working on in our organization is dropping the fear of asking. Sometimes we even find people don't want to ask for what they need, just because they're worried someone might say no.

And it's that fear of rejection that stops people from asking huge things. And so I would just say there's no harm in that and rejection. All of us have been through it. That's one for a whole other podcast. I've been through rejection and it just makes you stronger for the next time.

And nothing will fall over. Everything will be fine. So I would say do the things that feel scary or uncomfortable because it will build resilience. 

And then the last one is just to have fun. There's too much going on in my life. So many other places I could be spending my time if I wasn't absolutely loving the people I work with and the job I do every day.

And for me, that's about people. But for other people, it will be about other things. Find joy in what you get up to do every day and it will be okay. 

Anni Townend: Wonderful, Meg. They are three amazing encouragements, which you absolutely live and embody in your leadership. Thank you for sharing them. And I have one final question for you, which is as a result of our conversation today, this conversation, what's the conversation that you're going to have and with whom?

Meghan Farren: I think that I'm going to go back to the very beginning when we were talking about this noticing and observing and when you're not the same as everyone else in the room, and I'm going to talk to my eight year old about that feeling, because she's been having some difficulties in school. She's at that age where girls can be tricky.

And I think there's something in helping her put words on the feeling she's having and then also show her that it will help her build a superpower she does have, I can see already. She's building this deep empathy from feeling these things herself. And so I really want to find the right way to talk about it with her.

Anni Townend: Wonderful. She's very fortunate. Both of your children are very fortunate to have you as their mom. 

Meghan Farren: Oh, Anni, thank you. I love my kids. 

Anni Townend: And how wonderful that they have you to have that conversation with and to have fun with. Thank you. I have had fun today. 

And for listeners, how best to follow you, contact you, learn more about you, Meg. What's the best way? 

Meghan Farren: To be honest, I'm not really big on social media but I'm on LinkedIn, so you can connect with me on there, and I do try to respond.

Anni Townend: And that's Meg Farren. 

Meghan Farren: It is, it's Meg, it might be Megan Farran on LinkedIn, 

Anni Townend: Excellent. If you'd like to listen to other leaders in conversation with me, Anni Townend, do go to my website annitownend.com.

A huge thank you to you, Meg, a big thank you to Coco O'Brien for the wonderful intro and outro music, for the lovely design and the excellent editing, sound production, and promotion of the podcast. 

To contact me, Anni Townend, do email me on anni@annitownend.com. Follow me on LinkedIn. Go to my website. I look forward to connecting with you. Thank you for listening and a huge, big, warm thank you, Meg. 

Meghan Farren: Thank you so much, Anni, for having me. It's been a wonderful conversation. 

Anni Townend: It really has. Thank you.