AN INTERVIEW WITH Dr Claire Antrobus and Sandeep Mahal
Here’s an extract from my conversation with Dr Claire Antrobus and Sandeep Mahal on my podcast, Do Good & Do Well.
To listen to the whole conversation click here.
Dr Claire Antrobus works as a leadership coach and trainer. She is passionate about developing more diversity in leadership and developing leaders. She also recently qualified as a mountain leader in which she's broadening access to the outdoors and helping people connect with nature and care for our planet. Claire is mum to two teenagers, a green runner and she lives in New York in the UK.
Sandeep Mahal MBE is a senior management consultant in the arts. Her 20+ year career spans both creative and executive leadership roles, including at Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature and the digital arts commissioning agency The Space. Sandeep joined the Royal Shakespeare Company’s senior leadership team as a Leadership Associate in January 2022; part of the RSC’s commitment to diversify the voices guiding their decision-making at the highest level. Sandeep also runs the Office for Leadership Transition at people make it work, where she supports cultural organisations to re-shape develop and embed inclusive leadership models that deliver their change visions and strategies. Sandeep currently serves on the boards of Women’s Prize Trust, World Book Day and Jaivant Patel Dance Company.
SARAH
Hello, Claire and Sandy, welcome to the Do Good and Do Well podcast. I would love for you both to introduce yourselves. Tell us who you are, what do you want us to know about you? Shall we start with Sandeep?
SANDEEP
Thank you so much, Sarah. So hello, I'm Sandeep Mahal. I joined the Royal Shakespeare Company senior leadership team as a leadership associate in January 2022. And I work a lot alongside Justine Thaman, who was also recruited as a leadership associate at the same time. And our roles were recruited as part of the RSCs’ commitment to diversifying the voices that guide their decision making at the highest level.
And we can-, I'm sure we'll get into the detail of that as we begin to unpack the co-leadership model that has emerged as a result. But alongside my RSC role, I'm Director of Sector Change at People Make ItWork, where I support cultural organizations to shape, develop and, embed culture that delivers their change visions and strategies.
And a big part of that is about achieving greater representation and, positive change at senior levels within the cultural sector. And when I think about how that, how I came to this sort of desire and passion for changing who gets to lead. My background is in what is working in community libraries.
So that's where I started my career 25 years ago, working in very diverse communities and, a variety of outreach and engagement roles to widen access and participation in libraries. And it was about cultivating a culture of reading and writing in socially deprived areas. And I've worked nationally as well with the book publishing industry.
And then I went back into community literature and literacy project. So my passion has always been about spreading the sheer creative joy and power of stories as a movement for change. And I've always been motivated by a social ambition as well, alongside that artistic vision that is to create a more inclusive world where amplifying diverse stories and diverse talent is not just accepted, but actively pursued.
And it's what I've done throughout my working life. So that's where my passion and I think my experience really intersect and my work now is so much about helping boards and cultural leaders to combat that underrepresentation in the arts in their organizations by supporting them to push forward their diversity, equity, and inclusion agendas.
We're seeing so much good intention, but not enough concrete action. I love collaborating and guiding them to sort of implement their intentions for structural and systemic change because that's what it requires. And it's been really wonderful for me to be able to collaborate with Claire on leadership transition projects.
And I think her research, which I'm sure she'll talk about is so timely given the context that we're in. We are seeing so many leadership transitions. So yeah, really look forward to talking about that too. So that's me.
SARAH
Thank you. Claire, how about you?
CLAIRE
Hi. Well, thanks Sarah for inviting us on. It's great that your first double guest episode is about co-leadership, isn't it? It's very fitting. So these days I'm a leadership coach and trainer. And I'd say most of my work is about developing leaders and diversity in leadership.
And I do that independently and I also do it through People Making Work, which is how I met Sandeep about 18 months ago now. So we worked together on-, initially worked together on a leadership transition project, helping a small arts organization think about how it wanted to move on. After its founders were one of whom was ready to leave and on what emerged was that this organization suited co-leadership.
So Sandy and I were talking a lot about co-leadership earlier last year, and I had done research about a decade before when I was a Claw fellow. I'd come across co-leadership in theatre. My background's in visual arts, and I hadn't come across it before. I was really interested in why we weren't using it more widely and what it could offer.
And back then, I had two really tiny kids and now enormous. In fact, today my son's just finished his GCSEs, but back then they were two and three. And I was in leadership roles in galleries and museums, but there was no flexibility that it was 60 hour weeks minimum. And I had to leave that role. I loved my role, but I had to leave it because that wasn't the working pattern I wanted when my kids were that age.
So I've been interested in co-leadership for a long time, and Sandeep and I started talking about it last year. So when leadership had this kind of opportunity. They had some grants last year with Arts and Humanities Research Council to enable people to do a bit more research. I asked Sandeep if she'd be involved and I put in this research proposal to look particularly at co-leadership and diversity.
We'll talk a bit more about it then, in terms of who I am, just also mention, I have recently qualified, which I always thought is bizarre. I was like, this is my hobby. But it's actually aligning with my work as well because I've got my first paid mountain leader job in a few weeks and I'm working with a charity called Millimeters to Mountains, which is about helping people who've experienced trauma, experienced the outdoors as part of their recovery.
And I've got into that through working with a really, really inspirational coach who herself has made that journey. So yeah, I'm now helping broaden access to the outdoors and connect people with the outdoors and the planet, which is a big passion of mine. And like something, you know, I've got a background, which means I'm interested in.
I'm committed to diversity. I grew up in an area of Sheffield where it's, what it's currently is, part of this awful blue wall we've got up in the north of England. But I grew up with people who didn't go to galleries and museums, didn't go to theatre, people who I went to school with. Culture wasn't part of our life for class reasons.
And so I think ever since I've been involved in the arts, that's been about increasing access to the arts, cultural democracy. And my first job was a curator at Yorkshire Sculpture Park where most people came because of the park, not becuase of the art, but hopefully we engaged them with art whilst they were there.
SARAH
For those of us that don't know, I mean, it sounds obvious what co-leadership is when you say it, but what is it? What is this thing that we're talking about today?
CLAIRE
So, well, I think there's a really practical, descriptive answer to that, and I think there's a more important answer to it actually. So, I'll go with important first. I think co-leadership is about enabling diversity and collaboration and flexibility to be at the core of your organisational culture.
And by embedding it in your leadership structure, that's what I think it's about. One of the co-leads I interviewed was a really inspiring woman called Euella Jackson. And she kind of described it like this. She said it's about a leadership style which challenges the traditional notions we've got about leadership.
That it's one person, it's usually a man, usually a white man, and it's about this great man. And she says, no, it's about co-leadership as a collective effort sharing power, resources and responsibility. And I think that's what it is. And I think what excites me about it is I think it can be a more effective way to run an organisation, especially the complex organisations and businesses we're running today.
And we're seeing this coming up in the commercial sector. A lot of tech companies use co-leadership. It's popular in healthcare and education as well as in the kind of complex nonprofits that we run. So I think it's a really good way to run a business. In fact, I was intervidewing last month the woman who runs Yorkshire Tea and Betty's tea rooms and they've been using it for years and they think it makes commercial sense.
But I think co-leadership, what excites me is as a leadership coach and working in a sector where we've got a real problem with a lack of diversity in terms of ethnicity, disability, class, gender, in the arts, it makes leadership a more attractive proposition to a much wider range of people. Practically I would define co-leadership as a structure where more than one person is involved in a role where you've got equal authority and shared responsibility and it's highly collaborative.
So it's not about dividing a job in two. But those co-leaders usually have slightly different roles. So there'll be some areas of overlap. I sometimes describe it like a Venn diagram, so there's some stuff in the middle that both of them share. But there's usually some differentiated responsibilities because at the heart of it, you've got differences.
That's why it's useful is you've got different perspectives, different skills, different backgrounds, and that's why it's brilliant. Cause we know from wider research difference, diversity, if it's as long as it's well managed, produces better results. Whether that's in two people or a team, or an organization or a society.
Diversity makes us better, makes us stronger. And co-leadership is a microcosm of that. So it's about shared values that different styles, different people. And often people say, is co-leadership always a job share? It can be, and it really enables flexible working, but it doesn't have to be, it could be two full-time people or two part-time people, but it's often a feature of it. I don't think it's defined as, it has to be job sharing, has to be part-time.
SANDEEP
I think that's a really clear descriptor. And to say that it doesn't have to be a fixed, fully formed concept that you enact on, say at the beginning of a recruitment process or on day one, it can emerge like it did for me at the RSC. So despite not knowing, Justine Thaman before I started, you know, we were recruited separately, independently.
That decision to collaborate closely emerged quite quickly. A few months of us starting. We were initially tasked with delivering a major strategic consultation, which meant that we needed to be able to work together very closely to work well together and at pace. I just saw firsthand like the value of collective thinking, of having the conversations of collaborating.
So we both inclined towards co-leadership. It just became very obvious and that wasn't the way that we were contracted formally by the RSC. So I think that's really interesting that you can think about it at the beginning of a recruitment process when you're beginning to think about designing your leadership model, but it can also emerge.
So I think there are some fundamental things that you need to have in place. Of course, just in, we didn't know each other. It does take time to build that trust and that mutual respect. And so yeah, we took that time. And for me, I had been thinking about co-leadership in the way that Claire has described as we were beginning to emerge from lockdown.
I was like, we need a different way of leading because this job of cultural leader is now so big for one person, given everything that we had experienced. You know, no single individual has all the answers. We need a more shared, collaborative, distributed leadership model that responds directly to that context, that context that emerged during the pandemic, during the Black Lives Matter movement.
It's so vital, I think, to this conversation because I think that context is crucial. It brought to the surface all kinds of systemic inequalities and vulnerabilities in our society and in our sector. Our eyes were opened up to those challenges and to this idea that actually we so need to do things differently.
And Claire actually, I've always loved, um, the description from Euella and Jess that they've talked about. So they're co-directors of Rising Arts in Bristol and they describe co-leadership as a direct challenge to the traditional, often masculine, ideas of hierarchies and leadership. And so they see co-leadership as a community effort is-, it's bigger than a single individual. And is about, as Claire said, a sharing of power or resources of responsibility and accountability and, and they're really modelling that. And I'd love to see more of that because I think it's a really powerful thing actually to take that community approach and effort.
SARAH
I've been working with a coach called Keri Jarvis, and she supports people on their businesses, but how to make it feminist. And as you were talking then, I thought, this is a really feminist approach. Hearing that sense of collaboration, shared responsibility and support for each other.
And it was so lovely hearing you talk Sandeep about, because that could be quite scary if you're going, you know, I know that you were contracted to do something different, but even working alongside someone so closely who you don't know the fear of are we going to get on, are we going understand each other? Are we going to share the same values? And then for that to come together and for you to see that actually this is a path that you were both really up for and wanting to test and try.
SANDEEP
And this is where the context is really crucial because Justine and I are the only brown and Black people on the senior leadership team. So there is something about providing that practical and moral support. We're not the only ones, you know, we have each other's backs. And that has been incredible.
Like that generosity, that level of support, kind of emotional support has been really crucial. And as I said, that sort of thing takes time, but became quite apparent quite early on as well.
To hear the rest of the conversation, listen here.