How Diverse Boards Sustain Organizational Success, with Laura Sanderson

Jackie - 00:00:10:

You're listening to the Diversity Beyond the Checkbox podcast. I'm your host, Jackie Ferguson, certified Diversity Executive, writer, human rights advocate, and Co-Founder of the Diversity Movement. On this podcast, I'm talking to trailblazers, game changers and glass ceiling breakers who share their inspiring stories, lessons learned, and insights on business inclusion and personal development. Thanks for tuning in to the Diversity Beyond the Checkbox podcast. My guest for this episode is Laura Sanderson. Laura advises companies on key appointments to shape their future. She has now been responsible for more than 300 appointments to the boards of FTSE 100, FTSE 250 private, mutual and familyowned firms based in London. Laura leads Russell Reynolds Associates operations in the UK and oversees the firm's board and CEO advisory partners team throughout Europe. She has more than 20 years of experience identifying and recruiting leading executives to serve on boards. Laura, thank you so much for spending some time with me today.

Laura- 00:01:22:

It's a great pleasure to be with you, Jackie. Thank you for having me.

Jackie - 00:01:26:

Of course. I'm so looking forward to this conversation. Laura, I always like to start by asking our guests to tell us a little about yourself, your background, your family, your identity, whatever you'd like to share.

Laura - 00:01:38:

Sure. Well, perhaps because I'm talking to you, Jackie, what I feel most moved to share is a funny story about discovering more about my identity. My father is British since sort of 1066 or thereabouts. My mother, it's much more interesting. And I knew that she was her parents were basically Norwegian Scandinavian heritage. My brother and I always joke about the fact that my mother is one of those very nurturing, very kind of caregiving, kind of quite like the Jewish mother stereotypes, if I could put it that way.

Jackie - 00:02:24:

Okay.

Laura - 00:02:25:

A little while ago, my husband got very irritated by we've got a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment going on in the UK at the moment. And my husband got so annoyed about this, he said, we're going to take DNA tests because we're all immigrants. Go back far enough, we're all immigrants. So I took a DNA test and it revealed that my great grandmother was a Russian Jewish emigrate. So she was driven out of Russia in one of the pogroms one of the early persecutions of the Jews in Russia. So I called up my brother and I said, you know, we always said we had a Jewish mother. It turns out we do.

Jackie - 00:03:07:

Wow.

Laura - 00:03:08:

So that's my mix of heritage, I guess, Norwegian, Russian, Jewish, English, and a few other bits and pieces besides.

Jackie - 00:03:18:

Awesome. Thank you for sharing that, Laura. That's awesome. Tell me a little about yourself now. What kinds of things do you enjoy when you're not working?

Laura - 00:03:27:

Okay, well, I really enjoy spending time with my three gorgeous teenage daughters. I enjoy going for runs in the countryside with my extremely badly behaved dogs. I enjoy listening to podcasts. Jackie, that's the other thing I really enjoy so, yeah, sometimes while running as well, those would be the main things.

Jackie - 00:03:51:

That’s Awesome. Yeah, I love that. Thank you for sharing that, Laura. Laura, what you're doing now is really amazing, and we're going to jump into that. But what did you think you'd be doing in your career and how did you get started in this field?

Laura- 00:04:07:

I had it all mapped out when I was six. I knew exactly what I was going to be doing. I was going to be a ballet dancer and a PE teacher in my spare time. Turns out I have absolutely no aptitude for either of those things. But something else I was doing when I was maybe 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, was playing with my friends near our house and we used to play cops and robbers, and I was in charge of running the police station. And I had these very detailed files on all of the criminals, which I kept with personal characteristics, likes, dislikes, photographs, a little short biographical history. It occurred to me a few years ago that the things I was writing back then, when I was eight or nine or ten for my police station, very similar to the candidate profiles I write today, very similar. And I've always been interested in so I didn't know then that I was going to do what I've ended up doing now. But I have always been interested in understanding people. What makes them tick, what's their story and organizations? What do they need and how do you match the two together and how do you pick the right person for the right context, the right organization, where both are going to thrive together and fit the individual story into the organization's story? So that's what I love, people and stories.

Jackie - 00:05:40:

That's fantastic. I love that connection between what you enjoyed as a child and what you're doing now. That's awesome. Laura, let's talk about your role at Russell Reynolds and tell me how you go through the process of what you do, and then why is there such a push to add diversity to boards from your perspective?

Laura - 00:06:01:

Great question. So I think one thing that's important to understand about the process of what we do is that Russell Reynolds, as an executive search firm, we're always client led, so it always starts actually with the client and what the client is asking for. Clients will come to us and they will have a very particular need, or they think they will have a very particular need. That the first step of what we do, is push back a little on that to make sure that what they need really is what they need. We'll ask a lot of questions to check how carefully they've thought that through, to see what they're missing. Because we should be able to provide some different perspective to make sure that they've really thought accurately about what they need and also to help them anticipate they might know what they need today. But do they know what they will need in three or four years time? So how do we make sure that they're actually recruiting for tomorrow as well as today? So we'll take the brief, we'll do quite a lot of due diligence so that we understand exactly what kind of situation we might be putting someone into. And then having taken the brief, we go away and we do a really thorough search. And the search is always looking for both some hard skills in terms of experience, but also for the culture fit and the right soft skills to succeed with this group of people in this role. And actually, I should say the values fit more than the cultural fit. That's actually the cultural fit, in a way is misleading. It's the values fit that is really important. So we do a really thorough search, we talk to lots of people, we interview lots of people. And then, in a way, we act a little bit like the sort of agent for those wonderful candidates that we found, describing them to best advantage to the client, and then trying to help both sides make smart choices. And understand one another well enough to know whether this is going to be a marriage made in heaven or just a first and last date. We usually once the client has chosen their person, we let them walk off into the sunset together. But we may support the success of that person in the role by helping them with some transition coaching or some development coaching. The fun part about building a board is that you are putting together a team of people over quite a long period, so you're constantly adding to the mix and each new element changes the mix. But Jackie, you had a really interesting question about why is there such pressure need to increase the diversity. Diversity, yeah, exactly. So I'm quite excited to give you the answer, really, which is that I think that for a whole variety of different reasons, people have woken up to the fact that it is undeniable that diverse teams that are inclusively led, they've got to be inclusively led. Just having a diverse team isn't enough. It's got to be inclusively led. But diverse teams that are inclusively led will consistently outperform homogeneous teams. Whatever the task is, diverse teams that are inclusively led will outperform homogeneous teams. And that right there is the answer to why it's so important that we have diverse boards. Because they will be better as long as they're inclusively led.

Jackie - 00:09:38:

Absolutely. Laura, tell us, what does it mean to be inclusively led?

Laura - 00:09:44:

So I think the leader of the board is the chair of the board. But it goes for any team leader, doesn't it? I think you need to put effort into understanding at a deep level who each of your team members, your board members are, their identity, their values, how they tick, as well as their experience. Because it's only when you understand who they are that you will really be able to anticipate what they bring. And then you will know when to turn to them for their opinion and when to look to them for their particular contribution. There are some basic practical things about inclusively leading, particularly a board. Some bad examples from the bad old days. I evaluated a board once where there was a view that the women on the board weren't adding a lot of value. And when we watched a board meeting, it became very clear that what was going on was that every time there was a topic under discussion, the chair and he was the chairman, this one would ask all of the men on the board their view first. And only after all of the men had spoken would he come to the women. And funnily enough, there wasn't always all that much left to say at that point. So there are a few kind of inclusive Leadership 101 about make sure that you don't just listen to loudest voices in the room. You do get people to talk in turn, you do draw people's voices in. You ask for a perspective even when it's not being volunteered. But I think a good chair or a good team leader does that because they really know who they've got and they value who they've got absolutely. And then they lead them inclusively.

Jackie - 00:11:43:

I love that. That's such good advice for all of us who lead teams, right? Are we leading our meetings, are we leading our events inclusively, and are we mindful of who we have in the room and pulling those voices through? So that's such good advice. Thank you for that. Russell Reynolds Associates had conducted some studies looking at board culture in the UK as well as global leadership. Can you share, Laura, some of the overarching findings of those studies and maybe share some of the unexpected realizations or connections there?

Laura - 00:12:19:

So we do some regular studies. There's one which we do, which is a major study where we survey hundreds of board members across the globe. And what we're primarily asking about in the course of that study is what behaviors lead to the best individual director performance and collective board performance. And that's a very, very useful study. So we can tell you in some detail what kind of behaviors it takes to be a really effective non executive director. But we also do studies effectively asking more about people's experience of being in the boardroom and at their level of confidence in leaders and in leadership teams. And some surprising studies that have come up from one of our very recent some surprising results that have come up from one of our very recent studies on that, which is interesting. One is that a gap is opening up how much confidence executives in an organization have in their CEO and executive leadership team. The confidence is declining, but the board still have more confidence in the CEO and the executive leadership team, which is really interesting. We think that what's going on here is this is a post pandemic thing, that there was a moment during COVID when actually CEOs and executive committees were feeling quite confident in their abilities because they were achieving amazing things in impossible circumstances and getting stuff done and keeping the show on the road. But actually now we've settled into, well, I think we call it poly crisis. What we're living through at the moment, the confidence of CEOs and their executive committees to deal with that, that they can deal with that has dipped, but board's confidence that they can deal with, that remains quite high, which is an interesting gap. So that would be one fun and interesting finding. I mean, another one would be one which surprised me, actually, was a survey that we did a little bit longer ago, but it surprised me because it showed that female board members in the UK, because we often look by geography, were still reporting higher levels of sort of experiencing some sexism in the boardroom. And that surprised me. I was probably naive, but I thought we were a little bit past all of that. And actually there was a good reminder that we're not past all of that. A very public reminder of that. Recently, one of our largest company CEOs, one of our most prominent female CEOs, Amanda Blanc, who is CEO of Aviva, faced the annual shareholder meeting and was on the receiving end of some unbelievably sort of horrible sexist questions about whether she was man enough to be doing the job that she was doing. And it was questioning her record. And the thing that was absolutely fascinating was her chair had chairman stepped in to defend her and said that that was an inappropriate line of questioning. But hearing Amanda speaking about it afterwards, it was quite interesting. She reflected on the fact that it had been sort of water off a duck's back to her at that time, in that moment, because she hadn't met with an attitude like that for a while. But it wasn't that unusual. She just sort of took it in her stride and it almost took her chair's reaction and other people calling it out to notice how wrong it was. I think all of that is quite thought provoking we are now. We had a huge milestone in the UK where we've got to the place we were hoping to get to in terms of gender parity on footsie 350 boards. We got there three years early. It's absolutely wonderful. So we do have more gender balance boards now than ever before. We thought it back in 2011, we thought it was going to take 70 years to get to this point. We've actually got there in a little bit over a decade. It's a huge moment, but even in spite of that, I just need to remember that there may be still some sexism lurking below the surface.

Jackie - 00:16:42:

Absolutely. There's always more work to do, but we are making those steps forward. So that's amazing. Thank you for sharing that. There are, as we talked about Laura, a myriad of advantages to increasing diversity on boards. What are organizations missing that are promoting their friends and colleagues to their board? Right. We always go into our circles first. Right. And what are they missing about understanding what they really need to be covering through their board appointments?

Laura - 00:17:18:

I think it prompts a few thoughts. The first thing is that all of us have a natural inclination left or in devices, we will appoint people like us. So if they go down that route, then the first answer is they may just be missing diversity in the first place, particularly because some people have a very diverse network and a broad social circle, but many don't. So actually, just reaching to our existing network is a fast way to get a board of people that is more homogeneous. What do we miss if we end up in that situation? We miss the diversity of perspective that you need in order to be able to see round corners, boards that are homogeneous. They're a little bit myopic. They can't see things from every angle, and that means they can't see risk in the same way. They can't anticipate what may come in the future in the same way. They can't horizon scan in the same way in a concrete way as well. It's fascinating. We have shown through our own research at Russell Reynolds that there is a correlation between diverse teams, which are inclusively, led as well as outperforming. They have higher levels of innovation. They're much more innovative. The ability to think innovatively is not something that any board can afford to lose out on. If we're just staying in our networks, staying in our lane, if you like, reaching out to our friends and family, then what we're missing is all of those different lived experiences and all of those different perspectives that can then come together to be much more creative.

Jackie - 00:19:07:

Absolutely. Laura, thank you for that. It's so true. And you see that with teams at any level, the more diverse they are, the more perspectives, the more opportunities to solve problems differently, to think of new ideas, to be innovative. I totally agree with that. Laura, let's talk a little about women in leadership. And I've had this conversation with multiple people, and when we talk about women in leadership or diversity in leadership, often what people are thinking of are white women. How are you committed to prioritizing intersectionality in women? So black women on boards, women who are part of the LGBTQ plus community, women with disabilities as you consider your board appointments. And how are we missing the mark? By not understanding intersectionality among women.

Laura - 00:20:00:

The way I think about it, Jackie, is we need to work hard at understanding intersectionality amongst individual board members, men and women. Because you're absolutely right. The lived experience of a white gay woman is going to be very different from the lived experience of an older Afro Caribbean straight woman is going to be very different again, from the lived experience of a man who's come from a tough background and maybe doesn't have the same educational attainment level, et cetera. The way I like to think about this is that people are a collection of well, identities are so complex, aren't they? And people are a collection of extraordinary pieces of lived experience and you want as much richness in the mix as you can possibly get. But I want to sort of advise my clients not to think about people as collections of categories, if you like, because I think there's a danger. So I'm proud to say that in the UK we have had as much of a push about increasing the ethnic diversity of our boards as we have had. We had a big push on increasing the gender diversity, but now we're focusing a lot on increasing the ethnic diversity. The danger that comes with that is if you're not careful, that then clients can look for all their intersectionality in one person. And actually that's a problem partly because by the time we've looked for all our intersectionality in one person and also looked for the experience we need, we have very few candidates. But the bigger reason it's a problem is that if we've got a board which is otherwise quite homogeneous, but one person who's a fabulous mix of intersectionality, then that person is probably going to be in quite a lonely position. And it may be much, much harder for them to raise their voice, because only is so lonely, than if there are some other people around the board table who they have natural points of connection with, they share some aspects of their identity with. So I think your fundamental premise is really important that we mustn't overlook intersectionality, but I think we want it to come back to let's think about the diversity of the board as a whole and let's think about making sure we understand what diversity we've got. Not all disabilities are visible, not all aspects of identity are obvious, sexuality being one. So it comes back to the responsibility of the chair, I think, to make sure they really know what they've got and to value those different perspectives.

Jackie - 00:23:02:

Absolutely. Laura, what advice can you share for underrepresented people who have not yet served on a board but are interested in becoming candidates to serve?

Laura - 00:23:16:

I love this question. So the first piece of advice that anyone interested in serving on a board is be famous for the thing that you're famous for, which that can be. Be very good at your day job. Basically, be very good at your day job because people who are appointed, whatever it is, or your combination of day jobs, people who are appointed to boards are appointed because their experience is relevant and they're very, very good at what they do. So actually focusing on Excelling in the day job is step one. The second tip is a little controversial when it comes to talking to people of color, but I want to give it anyway because I think it's important. It's actually really helpful to go out and get some voluntary board experience with voluntary organizations of whatever kind, because those roles are readily accessible. The barriers to entry are much lower, and they're great ways to learn the role of a board, what the board does to practice the role, to understand how to handle oneself as a director. The reason that advice can be controversial is, I think, asking people of color to do unpaid work. We got to be careful about doing that. But it is advice that I give to everyone across the board. The other reason that advice can be controversial is I think people from historically underrepresented groups can feel a little inhibited about the idea that they need to add more credentials, if you like, but actually being able to point to board service elsewhere on a nonprofit board or something like that. It's a very valuable piece of experience to be able to point to. The other thing it does is it gives you an instant network with your fellow board members on that nonprofit. And that would bring me on to the third piece of advice, which is to try and build your network as much as you can and to try and add to your network people who are doing interesting board roles. Because then people like me will be ringing them up and asking if they want to do more board roles and they'll be saying, well, no, I can't do anymore, but I know someone who can, and let me recommend this person from my network. So actually making those connections and networking, I think the final piece of advice is it's worth making a little bit of a study of what the different roles on the board are, because each board has a sort of limited number of seats and each independent director on the board will be playing a slightly different role. So there will be a role for the qualified financial expert, several of those that will be overseeing the audit commission and the finances. There'll be a role for someone overseeing the work of the compensation commission. There may be a role for a risk commission or a sustainability committee. There'll be a couple of roles for people who are specialists in the industry. And then there'll also be some wild card roles, if you like, for people who bring other areas of relevant experience for that particular company. But sort of trying to think about which of those roles one might be able to play in any given situation is also helpful. Because you then shape your CV around the role that you think you could play and you draw out your relevant experience. You're sort of fitting yourself into the board jigsaw puzzle, if I could put it that way. So, yeah, those would be some of the pieces of advice. And yeah, probably, I'm afraid, get to know some people like me, but we make a lot of effort to try and get to know exciting new talent for boards. So, yes, that's always welcome.

Jackie - 00:27:18:

Laura, thank you for that. That's helpful because people have the aspiration right to want to serve on boards, but really sometimes don't know how to get started.

Laura - 00:27:29:

Yeah.

Jackie - 00:27:30:

And then on the flip side, without giving away all of your secret sauce, what are some of the tips that you would give for organizational leaders that are looking to expand their board? I know that can be a question that really depends on what you have and what you need, but what are just a couple of general tips as they're looking to expand board and what they need to be considering?

Laura - 00:27:57:

The first advice on this is you want to start from your organization strategy. You want to start from where your organization is trying to get in the next five or so years, say, then you want to sort of rewind from that and say, okay, if we're going to try and get there by then, what skills and experience do we need now for this next phase of the journey? And think quite proactively about what are we missing, what do we have around the table that is good and we're going to go on needing it, but what are we missing that actually is new that we don't currently have? So that is the place to start. There's a US-UK difference here, which I think is worth just spending a couple of minutes on because it's a really important one, and it's a really important one in terms of making boards more diverse. So in the UK, our board members all have fixed terms of appointments and most of them are independent board members. Most of them will retire after having served between six and nine years and they must retire at the nine year mark, but many actually choose to retire earlier, having done about six years, feeling that during that time they've made a full contribution. In the US, you still don't have term limits for directors. And this makes a huge difference because in the UK we have quite a lot of churn built in, because every year you will have a director retirement coming up predictably, and if you are an organizational leader, a chair, you can therefore be thinking, okay, I've got this opportunity coming up to make a change. Bring in some new skills, bring in some different experience, bring in some different kinds of difference. Much harder if you're doing that from a position of having to have a difficult conversation with some of your existing board members about maybe it's time, so it's interesting. It's one of the things I would really like to see investors be much more assertive with US companies about this and encouraging the introduction of term limits, which are normal in most other parts of the world. But honestly, if investors started asking for that, investors care a lot about diversity because they know that it is an important predictor of performance. If they really wanted to move the needle on diversity term limits, term limits would do it.

Jackie- 00:30:41:

Absolutely. And you're right, very often here in the US, you have people serving on a board for years and years.

Laura- 00:30:51:

Exactly.

Jackie - 00:30:52:

And then, right, you have to have that conversation of, I think we need something fresh, which is negative versus understanding that there are terms associated, and then you kind of build in the evolution of what's next, what's new, more diversity. I think you're spot on with that. That's great advice. That's great advice. Laura, while we're on the topic of some of the differences between the UK and the US, when we think about DEI overall, from your perspective, what are some other differences in the challenges in the UK versus the US?

Laura - 00:31:34:

Well, certainly in the UK, because we have had some categories of difference on the agenda very firmly already for a few years now, including gender, including race and ethnicity. I think quite rightly. There is increasing amount of challenge around some other aspects of difference. I think disability is high on the list, actually, and also social mobility and difference of sort of educational background and opportunity. I think we're getting more and more interested by other types of difference. I don't know. Jackie, you'll have to tell me how much you think that conversation is now happening with boards in the US. I think it's beginning to, but perhaps we've had targets for women on boards and for increasing the representation of people from historically underrepresented groups on boards for quite a while, and that has changed the conversation in the UK. So you'll have to tell me the extent to which that's also happening in the US.

Jackie - 00:32:49:

Yeah, I think that more boards are recognizing the need for diversity on their boards and increased diversity among their C-suite and boards. But the challenge becomes, do we expand the board, do we ask people to step down from the board? So that's why when you said term limits, I was like, that could be a great resolution and answer to that, because you don't need a board that's too big, but how do you cover these additional things? And I really like that you said you really need to evaluate every five years, where are we going? And then as those seats are coming available, you know how to fill them, which is going to change every five or so years. Right. When people roll off, you're going to need something different. Maybe you need a certain skill set to get you through that first five years. Different sets. Of skills to get you to that next level in that next five years.

Laura - 00:33:51:

Exactly.

Jackie - 00:33:52:

I think that's a great way to kind of solve that conundrum that so many organizations have about how to continue to diversify their boards.

Laura - 00:34:04:

And Jackie, you're right to resist the idea that just adding to the board is the answer, because decision making groups to be at their most effective, they want to be between sort of six or eight and about twelve people in size above twelve. And it's no longer as effective as a decision making group. So there are all sorts of reasons why just adding more people is not always a good answer. But yeah, I think you've quite rightly picked up on the fact that this is really about making sure that you're in a continual process of board refreshment to make sure that you've got the right people for the next stage of the journey to keep the board sort of maximally effective.

Jackie - 00:34:55:

Absolutely. Laura, what did you want to share, apart from my questions that the leaders that are listening need to understand about how to appoint to their boards what they need to be considering what happens when they get it wrong? How do you go about removing someone from your board?

Laura - 00:35:21:

Yes. Oh, such good questions. Jackie, let's do that one first, because that's a hard one. How do you handle it when it all goes wrong? I think that brings us on to another practice that it's really important for boards to be making a practice of, which is regular board effectiveness reviews, ideally externally facilitated from time to time. They don't have to be externally facilitated every year, but best practices that maybe they're externally facilitated once every three years or something like that. But a good board effectiveness review should be an opportunity for every board member to give full on varnished feedback on how good a job they think the board is doing and also ideally feedback on individual directors. And then that means that and there are other mechanisms for this as well. But that does mean that it's much easier for the chair to be having a sort of ongoing developmental conversation with board members, actually, particularly first time independent board members. Nobody gets it. All right. First time. And you need to be on a board with a chair who is committed to giving you that developmental feedback and helping you be a great director. And so I think that probably feeds into a bit of advice, which is when you are picking your first board seat, we always say look very hard at the chair because the chair will decide whether or not it define whether or not you can make your contribution. And look very hard at the CEO, because the CEO will define whether or not you can sleep at night, but from a sort of due diligence point of view. But I think we could add to the look very hard at the chair. Look for a chair who will be a great mentor, who will develop you. And if that's the case, then hopefully it reduces the risk that you just have a situation which is not working. I think for any leaders who are listening, who do have that person on the board and however much feedback you give them, it's just not getting better. Again, I think it's well, at the risk of sounding like a stuck record, term limits help, board refreshment helps because you can retire people elegantly after they've completed a first term of three years. You can find a nice reason why everybody wants to part company if it's gone really wrong. You can usually find a pretext more quickly, but it's less embarrassing if it's not unusual for people to be leaving boards because that's happening on a regular cycle. Your other question about what do I really want leaders listening to? Sort of take away from some of this the idea that popped into my head. Jackie, we're in a funny position in the UK at the moment because we're very, very pleased with ourselves. After a little over a decade of hard work, we've got gender parity pretty much on footsie 350 boards. And I think at the time we're speaking, Jackie, we're waiting for the launch of this year's Parker Review, which will tell us what progress we've made on increasing the diversity of ethnic and racial representation on FTSE 350 boards. So we're looking forward to that one with bated breath, but we think it's going to be a good story. What people often say is, yeah, this is great, but we still don't have many chairs, senior independent directors, CFOs, and definitely very few CEOs who are women or people of color or whatever it is, and they're right. But what I would like, I'd like people to understand two things. Firstly, the number of people that we now have gaining board experience through being a nonexecutive director is an executive career accelerator. So I can give you lots of examples of people who are CEOs, but they were qualified to be CEOs because they had served time as a non executive director on a board somewhere. So that had given them some board experience prior to stepping into the CEO role and it had actually qualified them and made them eligible. Same goes for chairs and these independent directors, obviously. So I'd like people to understand that independent director roles are a great stepping stone in your executive career, not just your board career. But we can even go one further than that. It's very, very interesting. If you look at certainly if you look at FTSE 100 CEOs that have been appointed recently, if the company picked someone from outside the organization to take over rather than one of the internal candidates, they were quite likely, in several examples, to pick one of the currently serving independent directors who then steps in as CEO. And two of the FTSE 100 female CEOs became CEOs. That way, they were actually non-executives on the board, and then at the time of need, they stepped in as CEO. I'm always saying to my clients, don't forget that who you have on your board as non-executive directors, that is a part of your CEO succession plan. And I'd like to say that to your listeners as well, because as they're thinking about their board service or their boards, depending who your listeners are, Jackie

Jackie - 00:41:04:

I think that's great advice. Laura, thank you so much for that. Laura, how can people learn more about your work and get in touch with you?

Laura - 00:41:14:

Well, we have a website and we publish all of this interesting research that we've been talking about. Jackie on there, and there's a lot of it. So russellreynolds.com is our website. We tweet @RRAonLeadership is the Twitter handle. We're busy on LinkedIn, and we're posting interesting things all the time I'm on LinkedIn. So, yes, we're very grateful whenever anyone takes an interest, but we do, we're geeks about this stuff. We absolutely love researching all of this, publishing our findings, and all in the interest of trying to guide our clients so that we can help them, because we know what they need even better than they do, and we can anticipate what they will need in the future. We can help them anticipate that. So, yeah, those would be some ways.

Jackie - 00:42:07:

Awesome. Thank you, Laura. And tell us as we wrap up and this conversation has been so insightful and helpful, just as we have more of these conversations about creating diversity on boards and having that direction and thought process has been so helpful. What's the message that you'd like to leave our listeners with today?

Laura - 00:42:30:

I think it would probably be, look how far we've come, look how far we can go when we put our mind to it. And that makes me very, very hopeful for the future. So, as I mentioned earlier, as I sit here today, the point that we said in 2011 would take 70 years to reach, we've reached in 2023 in terms of female representation on FTSE 350 boards. By a sort of strange coincidence, if we carry on appointing female CEOs at the current rate, it's going to take another 70 years to get to gender parity. But I think we can do better than that. I think we've shown we can do better than that, similarly with people from historically underrepresented groups. So there's a long road ahead, but if you look behind and see how far we've traveled, I think there are a lot of reasons to be hopeful. If we all put our mind to it, we can make the change.

Jackie - 00:43:30:

Laura, thank you so much. What a great way to end hopefulness. I love that. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. I've learned so much and I appreciate your time.

Laura - 00:43:42:

I've really appreciated the cconversation Jackie, thank you so much. It's been a great pleasure.

Jackie - 00:43:56:

Thanks for joining me for this episode. Please take a moment to subscribe and review this podcast and share this episode with a friend. Become a part of our community on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. This show was edited and produced by Earfluence. I'm Jackie Ferguson. Join us for our next episode of Diversity Beyond the Checkbox. Take care of yourself and each other.