You Don’t Need to Be a Boss to Be a Leader – a conversation with Andrew Edwards, Event host, Trainer, Teacher, Broadcaster & Mentor

Today’s guest is Andrew Edwards, former BBC broadcaster, and now an Event Host, Trainer, Teacher and Mentor. The title of our conversation is ‘You Don’t Need to Be a Boss to Be a Leader’.

Leaders in Conversation is the podcast in which leaders share their life and leadership stories; the people, places and experiences that have shaped their values, beliefs, passion and purpose to encourage and inspire you to be even more confident and courageous in your own leadership.

If you are not already please do subscribe to the podcast, review and share it. Thank you!

ABOUT THIS EPISODE 

I had the joy of being introduced to Andrew through his brother John Edwards. If you haven’t already listened to John and I in conversation, it is a great episode on Understanding Ourselves, and Understanding Others. 

John suggested that Andrew would make an excellent guest, and that he had produced, whilst at the BBC a podcast about their late Mum’s experience of living - and dying - with dementia, ‘Mum and Me: The Dementia Diary’ 

Andrew offers valuable insights into: 

• Leading by example through your leadership behaviour in an ‘on and off air’ frontline role.
• Looking down, up and out - remembering to consult your team, using the expertise around you, and never losing track of your real bosses - your audience, customers and the public.
• Swimming against the tide of expectation - your own and others’ expectations while looking after your own mental health.
• Differentiating the personal from the private, and the power of opening up in the right way to others and getting the balance right. 

Andrew's Three Key Encouragements to Leaders 

1. Be true to yourself and your values 
2. Listen more than you talk
3. Inspire others through your leadership behaviours 

Connect, follow and find out more about Andrew:

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/thebeardedbroadcaster

Andrew's website: www.theandrewedwards.com

X / Twitter: @RadioAndrewE

Instagram: @andrewedwardsleeds 

Email: beardedbroadcaster@icloud.com

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

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. 

About  Andrew Edwards

Andrew is a broadcaster, teacher, trainer and event host. He began broadcasting on hospital radio in his hometown, Hull, making his professional debut as a sports reporter on Viking Radio. He started his career in journalism at the Hull Daily Mail newspaper, before joining the BBC as a trainee in 1989. Andrew moved to BBC Radio Leeds in 1993 where he stayed, very happily, for the next thirty years. 

For many years he combined his on-air career with teaching radio journalism and spent seven years at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and Leeds Trinity University. He still mentors students and radio colleagues and is now doing freelance work at the University of Leeds.

Until 2022 he spent part of each week looking after his Mum, who died from dementia. He gives talks about, and hosts events linked to, dementia and hopes to write a book about his mother. He recorded a weekly audio diary called ‘Mum and Me: The Dementia Diary’, for which he was named a Dementia Hero at the Alzheimer’s Society’s awards 2021.

Transcript

Anni Townend: Hello, welcome and welcome back to Leaders in Conversation with me Anni Townend. Today's guest is Andrew Edwards, former BBC broadcaster and now an event host, trainer, teacher and mentor. The title of our conversation is: You don't need to be a boss to be a leader. 

Leaders in Conversation is the podcast in which leaders share their life and leadership stories, the people, places and experiences that have shaped their values, beliefs, passion and purpose to encourage and inspire you to be even more confident and courageous in your own leadership. If you're not already, please do subscribe to the podcast, review and share it. Thank you. 

I had the joy of being introduced to Andrew through his brother, John Edwards. If you haven't already listened to John and I in conversation, it is a great episode on Understanding Ourselves and Understanding Others.

John suggested that Andrew would make an excellent guest and that he had produced whilst at the BBC a podcast about their late mum's experience of living and dying with dementia: Mum and Me, The Dementia Diary. 

In our conversation, Andrew offers valuable insights from his leadership roles, both at the BBC and since into 

• leading by example through your leadership behaviour, 
• looking down, up and out, 
• swimming against the tide of expectation, your own and others, and differentiating the personal from the private, which, Andrew, I think is something that we're going to be doing now.

Welcome. 

Andrew Edwards: Thank you so much, Anni, it's lovely to be with you, and slightly odd as well, because I have to tell you that in 30 plus years at the BBC, it's the first time I've ever been interviewed, I've interviewed countless people, but to be the subject rather than the person asking the questions is, interesting to say the least.

Anni Townend: It's very exciting for me and a great privilege, and of course, has me feel more nervous that I'm speaking with a former BBC producer, a podcast host of their own, and to have you here as my guest on Leaders in Conversation is a real joy, especially as I have had your brother, John, as a guest and knowing you through him and your experience in particular of your mum's living and dying with dementia.

I'd like to start by asking you, who are the people, the places and the experiences that have shaped you, your values and beliefs, your passion and purpose and made you the person, the leader you are today 

Andrew Edwards: When people talk about individuals who've made a real difference and often, you go back to that one teacher who made a difference at school. That's a question I think quite a lot of us are asked. And there is a teacher who I'll come on to in a moment. But there's two people who right from the start I think had an influence that I didn't perhaps think about at the time, which was my Grandpa, who was born in 1902 and left school at the age of 12.  After the death of my parents, I was going through paperwork and I found the letter from the education authority, releasing him from education at the age of 12 because he had a job to go to, and he stayed essentially with that same company until he was 65.

And there was our dad who left school at 15 without really any qualifications, but then became somebody who had a BA and an MPhil to his name and studied philosophy just as a bit of light relief after he retired from work. And I think to have two people who were of different ages. My dad was born in 1928, grandpa in 1902. People who'd had to rely on themselves and educate themselves.

And I think that sense of taking control of your life and working hard and when appropriate sacrificing, not just in monetary terms, but in terms of perhaps what you might believe in. I think those two people in their different ways were hugely important. And when I say sacrifice, our grandpa, who was a very big person in my life. We grew up, my brother and I were just one grandparent, because something else that wasn't talked about in the family, and I only found out this from going through papers. My dad's mother died the day before I was born, and I never knew that, it was never mentioned. But he'd kept the cutting from the newspaper, from the death announcement. So he had to cope with the death of his mother and then the arrival of his first child within literally a day of each other. And my grandpa was the only grandparent around, dad's father had died in 1936, after the effects of mustard gas poisoning from the First World War, and had been a, an ill man coughing upstairs.

His mother, as I've just mentioned, died the day before I was born. And my grandma, this is my mum's mum, had died the year I was born. So she did see me, and there are pictures of her holding me, but, as I understand it, she didn't really want her illness, which was leukemia, to interfere with the joy and the loveliness of the arrival of a first grandchild.

She was gone by the December of the year I was born in the January, which meant that word sacrifice has always been in my mind there. It meant that grandpa, having just retired, the year I was born, because he was 65, the month I was born, took me on as a bit of a project. I was treated like a grown up.

He always used to call me ‘old chap’. He would sit me up on a stool in the Cardoma coffee house and I'd have a frothy milk and he was a very big figure in my life. Bigger, I think, in retrospect than I realized even at the time. And I knew he was important then, but he'd ring up 10 30, every single morning.

And I can remember this even before school. And one of the things he liked, he went to work as education association classes to educate himself. He liked poetry. He would teach me a line of poetry every morning, tiger, tiger burning bright in the forest of the night. And he was hugely important and dad was as well in lots of ways. But I think one of the things that really strikes me, my parents were not well off. Dad had not experienced a lot of education other than his own education, which he motivated himself. He was somebody who in terms of his politics, was quite far to the left, but he and my mum decided to send my brother and I to a independent school in Hull at a time when the local schools were struggling.

And I realized actually the sacrifice of his own political principles for what I think was a bigger principle for him, which was the value of education and the hope that his children might have life and opportunity that he didn't because he was a kid literally wandering the streets of Hull where we grew up and where he grew up during the war with a mom who was baking bread and selling it from the doorstep to try and keep the family alive.

Grandpa, I think, gave quite a lot to my parents when things were tough and to my uncle to keep his business going when times were tough for him as well. 

Anni Townend: Can I ask you about a couple of things there, Andrew, one of which is the self-reliance that both your grandfather and your father experienced and how they embodied that in how they were, but also the sacrifice part. Is that something that you yourself have gone on to have to make choices and sacrifice something in pursuit of something else?

Andrew Edwards: In truth, no, because I think that what dad and grandpa wanted for us has probably materialized that we went to the school they wanted, despite dad losing his job in 1980 and things being extremely squeaky. We kept at the school, and we went to university.

We've had successful careers. I've made choices. I've not made sacrifices. And I think that's the difference. I, for example, have made a decision, to stay as somebody who has been frontline in a job rather than going into management, which is something I had the opportunity to do.They were the ones who made the sacrifice. 

I think that if there's a problem, you've got to sort it out yourself. And I think that came really home to roost for me with Mum, that you end up doing loads of things looking after a parent that aren't really on your life's tick list, clearing up after an accident when you're at home with your mom, those sorts of things.

You look around, who's going to do this? It's me who's going to do it. And I think that’s self reliance, I'm sorry to even bring that up, but it's one of those things people don't talk about. A wonderful occupational therapist who worked with Mum gave me a vast amount of support and came to mum's funeral said, Andrew, you've got to get over yourself.

And getting over yourself, I think is actually linked to what you've just said, which is it's not sacrifice. It's just making a choice and realizing the only person who can do this is you. So you better get on with it and do it as well as you can.

Anni Townend: Getting over yourself and getting on with it. Something I do speak about with leaders is about getting out of your own way. So it's a similar spirit of noticing what's going on around you and then getting on with it, getting out of your own way, and certainly for me with my parents, when they relocated to live close to me.  I became involved in their lives and in caring for them, loving them in a different way to how I had known them previously.

Andrew Edwards: That's an interesting comment you make, and it made me think of something that I hadn't really thought of before, which was a choice I made, which was to spend a day a week looking after a dad, and then very soon after he died, mum, began to show the first signs of dementia.

So I made a choice to focus on their care. That's not a sacrifice, that's a choice to devote that time, which I could have done other things with, but for me, it didn't actually feel like a choice. One of the things that grandpa taught me was that there aren't choices often, he left a little bit of money at the end and he said, one of the last conversations we had, make sure your mum's okay, because she'd looked after all her life and the price she paid perhaps was probably being treated always as the little girl rather than the grown up woman as it were, but he treated me as the man who was going to look after mum in her old age.

And I've never forgotten that. 

Anni Townend: And you certainly did that and shared the experience through the podcast, ‘Me and Mum: the dementia diary’.

Andrew Edwards: I'd spent my career as one of those presenters who always saw myself as the conduit for others stories.

I wasn't of the more modern generation where you talk about yourself all the time on the air. And I don't mean that in any way as a criticism. Because it's this thing that you touched on earlier about the difference between the personal and the private is stuff really that you and I might, if we were having a conversation on the phone and we'd known each other for years we'd talk about.  But the personal is something that you and I can talk about, say here, knowing that other people are listening and it's relevant, but it doesn't make you go, Oh, goodness me, why are they talking about that?

And I needed to be persuaded that talking about mum and the experiences that we were going through with her and things like, coping with the role reversal with parents, with incontinence, with memory loss, with mum cooking endless meals for people who'd been dead 20 or 30 years, because in her mind they were still very much alive.

I thought actually, I do need to do this and it was a colleague who I'd never met. I was at one of those work events, it was a day I had been off looking after mum and I must have talked a little about it that evening. And this woman next to me said, you should talk about that on the radio. And I did reflect on that. And in the end, I did record the first of the diaries, literally a couple of weeks after that.

And it was a diary, not talking as a radio presenter, but talking as a son coping with what so many children or spouses or siblings go through looking after a loved one with dementia. And I think that speaking about the personal and really helping others. And I did help others in a way that I think in 30 plus years on the air, nothing else had ever done and ever touched people.

It's because you were talking truths about the dilemmas. There's no perfect care. I remember again and again, people would send a well meaning message on social media while I wasn't there. I do hope your mum gets better. One of the things I tackled was sadly not going to happen.

And I think being honest and open and taking the private for a broader public good can make a real difference. And I think that's what I realized in the end, you end up talking about the very personal and some might say it becomes too private, but I knew if I'd started this story, I had to end it.

So I talked about my grief at her bed after her death. And that's really tricky and you're pushing yourself really into difficult territory. I think there's a lesson there about not dodging the big stuff about the things we've talked about already. And recording the last two editions of the diary I didn't know the penultimate one would be that, which was going to fetch end of life medicines. Which ironically are not medicines at all. You go to collect the water, which is needed for some of the end of life medicines. The medicines are the straightforward bit, the water you go and collect from the pharmacy and it's there in the cupboard in case it's needed.

And a week later it wasn't because mum slipped away, but talking about that and that degree of the personal, but in a public way and I hope an appropriate way and talk about grief and talking about relief. The fact I was relieved when mum had died because it had been seven very difficult years.

It's so fascinating. And I think when you are a public figure and leaders are public figures, And when you're on air, you're a public figure and you're exposed in a similar way in many cases. The choices you make, what you do and don't do and what you say and what you don't say are very important.

Anni Townend: And that leads into one of your other insights around leading by example and leaning into talking about things which aren't often spoken about, even in private, let alone in public, but speaking about loss, about grief and about dementia. I can remember the language of dementia being something which I gave thought to, and that I spoke about my dad living with dementia rather than suffering from it.

And I got that from one of the many books that I read to help me to be able to be with him. In his living with dementia, and I think what I hadn't appreciated was the impact of dementia on the physical body and, nor had my dad. What happened for him was that when he stopped being able to walk, which was something he loved doing, something I love doing, and have got from him for sure, from both of my parents, that something went out of him.

He could still get outside, but that independent man, one of the hardest things for him to stop doing was driving. Because again, he was in control. He was in the driving seat behind the wheel and it was hard for him to let go of that, to stop doing that. It was even harder for him when he was no longer able to walk, and The impact of dementia on the physical body.

I obviously knew that it impacts on the mind, but I learned a lot about what happens when somebody is living with dementia and being with somebody who has it. 

Andrew Edwards: And I'm so glad to hear you use that expression living with and I do talk about mum living with and dying from because that is what she died from as well as what she lived with.

Did you learn things about yourself that you didn't know? Because I have to say, I've learnt more about myself looking after mum than the whole of life before that, I think it was almost as if it was leading up to that in a perverse sort of way. 

Anni Townend: I did Andrew, I learnt about a different kind of love, really, and The power of touch of stroking my father's hand of when he was in bed, which he was quite a lot of the time towards the end of his life of lying next to him and not speaking, but speaking without words, just lying on the bed, me fully clad, him in the bed, and how comforted I know he felt, but also how comforted I felt.

And so there was an ease between us, which when I was growing up, we didn't have. So it was a discovery of something new and different in the relationship, which was one of ease and comfort and a peace that we shared towards the end of his life. 

Andrew Edwards: That's lovely to hear. And I think for me, there's a real lesson about communication.

And this translates to communication more generally. I started recording this audio diary, the dementia diary in 2019 she'd been formally diagnosed in the beginning of 2018 and had shown the first signs in 2017.

So there'd been a couple of years before I started the diary when we knew mum was on, as it's often described, her dementia journey. My boss said, it'd be really nice to hear your mum's voice. We haven't heard her. And I thought, Oh I'll record her voice. And of course, every time I tried to, there was very little to record and what I'd realized without realizing it was that mum wasn't speaking any longer.

She could say yes or no. She could say yes, she fancied a trip out. She could choose between tomato soup and mushroom soup or whatever, but she wasn't speaking yet she was communicating at a very high level. And I think that idea that so much of what we do, how much of our communication is physical.

It's about the what we give off. It's almost like the aura we have. And this is where I think it's so fascinating about leadership. It's the tone, I think is so important. If you spent your life working on the radio, the tone of voice, how you come over is really important. And people say that it's far easier to fake sincerity on the television than it is on the radio. You're just listening to the voice and what is being said. And I've over the years had a lot of listeners who are blind and partially sighted, get in touch and say, you didn't quite seem yourself at the weekend.

And I thought I've really put a good show on, but someone's seen this because they've heard you over the years and I think the way that you can communicate. And the way I learned that mum was communicating and that she was no longer speaking.

There was one episode where she did speak. I was cooking her tea in the kitchen. I don't know if you can see on this podcast, soft creature on a chair over my left shoulder, Anni, which is my mom's donkey. And that donkey is called Ripple. And that's because she loved animals and birds all her life. And she supported the donkey sanctuary and she sponsored a donkey. And towards the end of her life, when it becomes very difficult to buy a present, I wanted to find something that was appropriate. And that soft toy that you can see there was a kid's toy in the Christmas catalog of the Donkey Sanctuary.

So I bought Ripple and gave Ripple to Mum, and she used to look after him, talk to him, stroke him, cuddle him. And Ripple was with her when she died. And if I now go and give a talk to a group about dementia or host an event, Ripple comes along. And I think just thinking about that diary, I read mum the newsletter from Ripple. So he'd send her a birthday card and a Christmas card and a Valentine's greeting. And Ripple had something called equine asthma. So he used to have to wear a little nose mask to help with his breathing.

And I'd read that to mum. And she'd taken it in and I thought that was fine. I said, you stay there, mum. I'll go and cook the tea. I've got some fish cooking. And then I heard her voice from the room next door, where she was sitting at the table, reading this newsletter from Ripple the donkey.

And it had probably been 18 months, two years since I'd heard her voice and somehow the wires had reconnected in the brain and there she was mum again. I grabbed my phone as quickly as I could put it on the record mode. That was the last time I heard her speak, but I think that power of connection and it was that donkey there, the real one rather than the soft toy that made the connection really made me think. And it can move me to tears listening to mum's voice again. And it was, it's a bit like her phone voice, a sort of posh Yorkshire voice that she put on it.

And I think, thank goodness I managed to record that. 

Anni Townend: So important that you did. I recently got rid of the landline in my house and office, and on the machine there is the recorded voice of my mum and probably of my dad. I haven't listened to them yet, but I knew I must keep the base with the answer phone in order to be able to hear their voices as and when.

Andrew, during this time and what you've learned, but in particular learning about looking after yourself when you're looking after somebody else, your mental health. And you describe it as swimming against the tide of expectation and other expectations and the importance of looking after your own well being.

How have you done that and who and what helped you to take care of your own mental health and emotional well being? 

Andrew Edwards: I think this is really important. And I think that. I often look at Venn diagrams. I wasn't great at maths at school, but my brother, John, who you spoke to, he's brilliant at maths.

I remember a particularly powerful student teacher who we nicknamed Rupert. So I mentioned earlier, the power of teachers. The one I was going to mention was Mr. King, my English teacher, who I did a little drama with and public speaking with and he gave me, I think, a confidence to believe that a lad from Hull with no connection to the media might be able to get onto the radio.

But this chap, he wasn't called Rupert clearly, but he wore check trousers. He taught us about Venn diagrams. I think in life too much is made of the importance of knowing this is right, and this is wrong, and this is what we should do, and this is what we shouldn't do.

But for me, life is rarely black and white. It is often quite gray and that doesn't mean it's dull. It just means it's a bit more complicated than people would like.

And I'm often quite wary of people who are, this is the only way to do it. This is what we should do. And I've met some leaders who are like that. And of course a leader in the end needs to make a choice. But I think that idea that you perhaps would benefit from listening to what others have got to say before charging on with that choice and look at some of the implications.

I know that sounds a very obvious point to make, but I have so often seen people go in a direction because it seemed right without considering the wider implications. And I think the reason I mention that is that in relation to my own mental health and the way I was looking at my life and my career, there are several things that come together.

There's ambition, there's expectation, which I think is your own expectation, but the expectation of others, which I think actually is often bigger. There's confidence, whether you have that or not, and then there is your mental health and to an extent as we age, physical health I'm juggling at the moment, a couple of medical conditions, neither of them serious, but both of which are making me really think about my physical health and giving the time to my physical health so that I can make sure that I've got more time, frankly, to be around. 

Because if I don't devote myself to the physical health, I may not be here in the future to enjoy that. So it really gives you a sense of priority. But mental health, I've struggled with I suppose anxiety, it would be described as now a lack of confidence a lot in my life.

How I present myself and back to wonderful Mr. King for helping me get up there and do the school play. And I was head boy at school, reading things out loud. People get an expectation of you as a result of that.

And the reason I joined the BBC was my lovely auntie Sylvia, who was my mom's brother's wife. And she and my uncle ran a shop together. And he, when there wasn't a customer in, would have, if there were cricket was on, the BBC Radio 4 Longwave Cricket on, she would have BBC Radio Nottingham and BBC Radio Lincolnshire on in the afternoon and she'd always talk about Dennis.

And I thought Dennis was a friend, he just wasn't a friend who she used to have tea with, because Dennis was a friend on the radio and there was a lesson there. And one evening she rang up and she said, I've just heard this brilliant advert and it was the training scheme I ended up doing.

She wrote the details down. She said, look, I think this would be really good for you. It's for people without any formal training in radio who love to talk. I applied for the course and the 11 other people I trained with, one of whom's my other half, Cathy, are hugely significant people in my life.

So all of them, leaders without I think with any exception being bosses and they have been very important, but Sylvia then almost was delighted. I got in the BBC. But then why aren't you being the boss? You know what? Why aren't you director general of the BBC now, Andrew? So she was a woman who left school early without qualifications, worked in retail all her life.

She was always the person I imagined on the other side of the microphone at six in the morning. Sylvia always used to say, a customer doesn't come into the shop to see you start grumbling and scowling at people. So I'd always think of her, but every time I spoke to her she would say what, what next, what's happening there.

And that was really interesting because of course, you're part of your own expectation gets dragged along behind other people's expectations of you. So I think there's expectation there. There's ambition, yes, because back to dad and grandpa, partly I wanted to do what would make them happy. Not that either of them actually ever said anything about it.

My dad wasn't a man who would have expressed, really. I'm sure he was delighted I got into the BBC, but I don't remember him rushing over and giving me a big hug to say, well done for getting in. He'd been proud and he'd been pleased, but it wasn't exactly effusive how he'd have dealt with that.

Grandpa, I spoke to regularly, But I don't remember him ever really pushing me to do certain things, but at work, people have expectations. Why did he do this? Why didn't you apply for that? Why don't you? So I think there's that and against all of that, you need the confidence to do it. And I think particularly in somewhere like broadcasting, where there's an awful lot of people with ambition, your Venn diagram needs to include quite a lot of drive to just keep on going.

And sometimes at the cost of other things, personal, colleagues, whatever it may be to push yourself forward. And I think I realized as time went on that I didn't have the driving ambition. I had, I think some of the ability to carry on and go further as it were. I made the decision instead to focus on what I knew I was decent at.

To stay in the area I was in for my other half and I to both balance a career, which is quite hard. Often you see in couples, one goes one way and one goes the other and perhaps supports the other. We've both had equal careers and a child who's emerged through the middle of it.

And I decided to start teaching as well. So I taught at university And I think balancing all of that came after I sought help, I went to counseling for a good few years and it's no coincidence that after the counseling, we decided to start a family and I applied to work at the university.

I've made a series of life choices that my career, my future could be, it's really what this is about. It was leadership in a different way. It was a different set of choices, inspiring people in broadcasting, by teaching, by spreading the word in other ways.

And I think understanding my own mental health and realizing how important it was to have that health, which has been a bit rocky at times. I've needed help along the way as well. And also, I think as I get older, realizing that physical and mental health are so much bound together and you need to give yourself time and space.

We're really bad at pointing out that people who are addicted to work and overwork, we almost celebrate that. The work we somehow applaud. And I think that often still goes against the flow, actually saying you need to give yourself the headspace, the time, you need to know yourself and you need to be honest.

Anni Townend: And in doing that, creating time to remember why we're here and who we're serving, which is something else that I know is important too, is remembering who the real boss is. And in your role at the BBC or as a mentor and teacher, it's the people who you are leading, who you are in relationship with, that are the real bosses, as you call them. 

Andrew Edwards: I think it's an interesting word, boss, isn't it? It's probably a bit of a journalistic cliche to use it. But I do think it actually sums up quite a lot because we use the word in a broader context, don't we? Bossing people around.

Leadership is a different thing and I think too often being a leader is confused with you must be the person who's in charge of an organization or a section of an organization to be a leader. And I think what I do feel really strongly is some of the most powerful leaders are those who are leading by example, who are on the ground.

I think certainly some of the areas I've worked in broadcasting. It's true in school teaching. It's certainly true in universities. It's true in the medical profession. If somebody is good at their job, they're often pushed up into running it, some of them are brilliant at it, and some of them train for it.

But organizations, in my experience, don't necessarily equip people or train them as well as they might. So what you end up with is somebody who is no longer doing what was that driving force, the teacher who wants to teach, or the nurse who wants to nurse, or the university lecturer who wants to inspire.

They end up running things and actually it doesn't quite work. And I think that's that, that for me is a really important thought because I think if you lead by example, whether that is I now realize when. people getting in touch. There's nothing like leaving an organization after a long time to bring out nice comments from people, but a student from 20 odd years ago, getting in touch and say, you really showed me how to do it, Andrew.

This is a student news day, but we're going to treat it as if it's a BBC news day and we're going to turn up on time and we're going to look as though we mean business. 

I think that's how I think of leadership in that way. You’re showing people by your everyday actions. A few days ago, in terms of when we're having this conversation and a friend who I'd worked with very closely at the crack of dawn for many years, producing my breakfast show, he left on the same day and he posted on LinkedIn a lovely message talking about me and I just put a few words on there in reply to that.

There were nice comments, but what it made me realize is the other people who'd noticed that, that support, that listening that advice, that mentoring doesn't need to be formal mentoring but that's what you're doing, whether it's students, whether it's the former students who are now running charities that I'm helping with doing media training, whether it's those people I met 20, 30 years ago, whether it's the person from hospital radio, wonderful young woman called Malika, I'm involved a bit with hospital radio where I started my broadcasting.

She came to see me a couple of weeks ago. I just gave her a few thoughts about what she might do. You are leading in all of those cases, whether or not you think it's leading. 

Anni Townend: I absolutely think our leadership shows up through our leadership behavior, whether we have that in our title, whether we have leadership by way of leading a team.

Leadership is how you show up in your everyday behaviors, leading by example. 

What are your three key encouragements to listeners and leaders, as we draw our conversation to a close? 

Andrew Edwards: One of them is about listening. One of the most inspiring people, for me was a boss called Phil Roberts, who hadn't had a vast amount of formal education. And he, I remember introducing himself, he said, I'm not high on the IQ.  I'm quite high on the EQ. And he'd done a lot of work on how our brains work and motivating people. He did daily feedback with us, which when you're a radio presenter, listening to what you do, what you could do better, what you might do less of all of that was really interesting. 

It made us listen to what we were doing. It made us not listen to Phil saying, this is how you do it. And this is not how you do it. You actually come to those decisions yourself in the same way as you do when you go for counseling. So it's a bit like back to the mental health where you listen to yourself and look at yourself.

So I think listening more than you talk so that you start the ball rolling, but then you hear what other people have to say. And yes, as a leader, you have to make choices and you have to lead. But I do think looking at who is around you and too often in my experience, people are leading with the eye on who's above them, or if they're at the top, they're trying to create a certain impression, actually, who are you leading?

And if you listen more than you talk, in my experience, you learn a great deal more. So that's one. 

Being true to yourself and your values. I think we've talked about that and I hadn't realized how much I was going to talk about my dad and my grandpa at the start and their values. I think actually sticking to what you believe, which doesn't mean you're inflexible. It doesn't mean you don't ever switch because I'm not the same person I was when I was 13 as I am now in my late 50s.

But if you have values. Sticking to them. So if something is wrong, calling it out, if something doesn't feel comfortable, even if it's uncomfortable for you to point that out, actually doing it. And I think in organizations, sometimes it's actually harder to do that the higher you get, because you see yourself as it.

Part of that orthodoxy. We can't challenge the orthodoxy about why something should or shouldn't be done. So I think I look at my dad that he had those values. He believed in education. He had his political views, but actually he saw, I think, for his sons, a bigger interest and value, which was that of education and the power of education for transformation.

So there was flexibility there, but it didn't mean he was going to compromise on his values and he had a funeral with a humanist celebrant. My mom had a Christian funeral. That's because dad didn't have anything to do with the faith side of it. Mom, I realized was very different.

So I hope I was true to them at the end, just as they were true to themselves. So be true to yourself and your values. 

And I think the final one. Is what we've really spent the whole of this conversation talking about, which is leadership. That's back to you're the teacher or you're the radio presenter or you're the nurse and then you get a management role. So you learn how to be a manager and of course there are certain techniques and skills and all the rest of it, but actually who you are, what you do, how you behave is actually what leadership is.

And I was quite moved listening to my brother John talking about his leadership and he made a reference to who you are as a teacher in the corridor is every bit as important as who you are as a teacher in the classroom or then in all the leadership roles he's gone on to have in education. And I realized that who you are on the radio at 10 past six in the morning, speaking to the bus drivers starting their shift or the farmers out milking, or the people coming back from a night shift in a care home. I never thought of that as leadership.

But I think I realized that I actually had a duty. I do feel it. I've spent my life in public service broadcasting. I work now with public sector organizations and charities and doing things that I feel are right that don't conflict with my values back to that other point I made.

I think that idea is that you are all the time a leader, a modeler, whether it was teaching the students that I've done for many years, whether it's mentoring formally or informally, And I think it's to get over that idea that there are fences around everything. If you're on a formal mentoring session, great, that is mentoring, but actually just meeting somebody, giving a bit of feedback, encouraging somebody to think that in 20, 30 years time, they may have us back.

Promising and lovely a career as I've ended up through whatever mysteries managing to have giving them that confidence to think that, yeah, in this case, I'm a young man from Sheffield with no connections to the media whose family don't know what my ambitions are, but I feel this quite deeply inside me.

If I can have a short conversation with somebody. And that leads them on to have the joy and the satisfaction from a career that I've had and I'm having. That will make me very happy. So don't ever forget that you're leading all the time. 

Anni Townend: Wonderful. Thank you, Andrew. And as a result of our conversation today, who will you go on to have a conversation with? 

Andrew Edwards: That's a very good question, because you don't always know who the conversation is going to be with, or what it's going to be. I tell you what I repeatedly return to, that I love speaking to others, but the person I need to be most honest with and have the sternest conversations with, that person is myself.

And when I go out running, as I will this afternoon, it's a bit like a sieve for me running. Imagine you're in the garden and you're trying to get a finer soil and you've got a load of stones in your sieve and you sieve that out and you're left with the big stones, a lot of the stuff just falls away.

You don't need to worry about that. You may think it's important. It isn't what you're left with is the big stones. And sometimes I need to have a word with myself, because it's too easy to take the cautious route. I can talk about mental health and all the rest of it, but I don't want to hide behind that.

And I want to keep pushing myself to do things and to take on opportunities and to have difficult conversations. Until I find out who the next person is I'm going to speak to and about what, I'll have a conversation with myself this afternoon about what I've learned. about myself from you and from me having this conversation today, and I've really enjoyed it, but it's about having the courage to be true to those values, but to keep pushing forward.

And often that's pushing forward into slightly uncomfortable territory. 

Anni Townend: And I describe that as keeping up with myself. So it sounds as if this afternoon, you'll be running and keeping up with yourself, having that conversation about what really matters to you. and reflecting on our conversation today.

Thank you so much, Andrew. For people who would like to connect with you, contact you, find out more about what you do, who might like to seek you out for mentoring, for some teaching how best for people to get in touch with you, to follow you? 

Andrew Edwards: I have a website, theandrewedwards.com. So on there LinkedIn, I'm the beardedbroadcaster. And I also do a lot of photography and my photography, it's just a picture a day, generally speaking, but you can find me on Instagram @AndrewEdwardsLeads.

Anni Townend: Thank you, Andrew. I'm going to follow you then on Instagram because I also love taking photographs, creating images.

Thank you to you, the listener, for listening. 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 Coco O'Brien for the wonderful intro and outro music for the podcast for the lovely design, excellent editing, sound production and marketing of the podcast.

If you'd like to contact me, do so on anni@annitownend.com and follow me on LinkedIn. I look forward to hearing from you and to connecting with you. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Andrew. 

Andrew Edwards: Thank you so much, Anni. I really enjoyed it. 

Anni Townend: Likewise. Thank you.