Amelia Boothman.
Director of Brand Innovation Strategy, 1HQ Brand Agency
What do you do now?
I am the Director of Brand and Innovation Strategy at a Brand Agency called 1HQ in Windsor. This means I help brands diagnose how to improve their performance, if they are losing market share or want to gain new customers. I do this by analysing and interpreting insight from trends, semiotics and primary customer research. I have a small team and over my career have managed between 2-7 people.
Where did your career start?
After graduating in Experimental Psychology at Sussex I didn’t know what to do and fell into qualitative and quantitative customer research project management. This was interesting at first but became boring and repetitive when we won big ongoing customer satisfaction tracking surveys. This was where I first managed people. I ended up being the oldest of a team of graduates and was promoted to Research Manager very quickly. This baptism of fire proved a steep learning curve, managing the expectations of graduates just out of university who seemed to want the world in a basket and my small agency didn’t even have any baskets to offer. We ended up creating a whole training programme from scratch.
Has there been a stage in your life where you first appreciated what great leadership looked like?
Yes, I had an amazing manager at Hauck Research; Katy Mousinho and now my MD and line manager Rachael Slaney at 1HQ. Both of them have a high degree of empathy, emotional and social intelligence and take the time to understand what motivates you in order to get the best results from you. This makes perfect sense as it’s a win-win for you and the company you work for. With their support, I have grown as a person and a manager. It's amazing how much a good or bad manager affects your whole life and personality, poor management can make your whole life miserable.
Do you have any examples of what you have done to develop yourself as a leader?
Being a leader is possibly the hardest part of all the roles I have taken on, it's a constant journey that is never finished and just when you think you’ve got it sorted, a curve-ball comes along and shows you otherwise. I have been on at least 4 management training courses, each with different companies. Some are useful and some less so.
What has stuck in my mind, is that you must take the time to understand your team's needs and motivations, to best understand their motivations. This is very different to becoming their 'mate' or friend, which can lead to awkward relationships when the business must make difficult decisions and overly chummy friendships can prevent you from making the right difficult conversations that must eventually take place. This leads me to my biggest learning which is noticing and dealing with issues as soon as possible. Never leave an issue unresolved, hoping it will go away, most of the time it won't and it will probably get worse.
It is also very important to show yourself as fallible and human. Remember its OK to say you don’t know the answer. Its very easy to believe you must pretend to be superhuman and all knowing. This is of course unsustainable and piles huge pressure on yourself. It is also important to remember that not all problems are your fault and a problem shared is a problem halved.
For a long time, I used to think that anything that went wrong was my fault and tried to deal with problems on my own. I now will often consult my MD or HR manager if I can't resolve the problem or want a second opinion. I am still surprised when they are keen and able to help and not once have they made me feel like I have failed in some way for seeking their advice. In fact in most cases, they have often said I should have asked for help sooner.
How do you think Leadership has benefitted you?
It makes you more empathetic, robust and helps you have more humility. It's not for the feint hearted. I remember when I was junior thinking wouldn’t it be great to be a director, but its full of twists and turns. Just when you think you've got everything running smoothly, something else happens and throws a spanner in the works. I have kept some really special relationships over the years. Both managers and team members, who inspired me and helped me grow or seemed to thrive under my leadership. What I have learnt is that sometimes you are a perfect match, and then management is easy, but when you see the world very differently it’s a much tougher role.