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Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Hello. Welcome to the UCL Astrea podcast. My name is Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman and I'm the academic development lead in the Organisational Development Team at UCL. I've also had the pleasure for the last two years of being co-chair of the Astrea Network alongside Joanna Marshall-Cook, Senior Sustainability Manager at UCL. Astrea is the university's network for Women in Professional Services, who share a desire to get on. It's open to all women, and our members share a belief that everyone in the network has something to contribute.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
No matter how junior or senior they are, Astrea works on the basis that there's a great untapped potential for women to learn from other women, and it's built around us sharing that knowledge. So this podcast is an interview with Dame Nicola Brewer, Vice Provost of International at UCL. Nicola has always been a keen supporter of the Astrea Network, and so we took this opportunity to reach out to her for this podcast to learn more about her career and particularly about her experiences of leadership and to inspire and encourage other women at UCL.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
We recorded the interview itself in Niclas office, where I was joined by my fellow Astrea committee member, Hannah Legg and by her colleague Geoffrey Okol. And they're both from Communications and Marketing (CAM) and they kindly made the recording possible. However, I'm now recording this message at home with my study in the midst of the lockdown of Spring 2020. So the editing has been done on a very basic editing suite on a laptop. The sound quality may be slightly imperfect, therefore.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Nevertheless, I hope you really enjoy listening to this conversation. Nicola is an absolutely fascinating person to talk to and she's very generous with her time and experience as well. So I really hope you can enjoy listening to this conversation. I began by asking her to share with us some experiences from her career that women at any career stage can learn from.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I think one of the hardest questions to answer for some people, but it's really useful to try and work out for yourself what is it you most enjoy doing? Because what do you most enjoy doing, is likely to be what you'd be best at. What you're looking for is something that you can really good at and really enjoy. [And you're not probably...] there are few people in the world who get a blinding flash and they know they want to be an eye surgeon.
Dame Nicola Brewer
But for most of us, it's not like that. And I think just working out partial answers. So for me, I have a vivid memory of sitting in a little glassed stained room, in a basement, in a library, as I was writing up my PHD thesis and I suddenly, in a blinding flash, I realised: 'I don't like being on my own'. I don't like having to have been tasked with the idea of coming up with great thoughts by myself.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I like being with people. And that didn't answer for me what I want to do with my career, but it did lead me in one direction rather than another. So piecing together what are the things that you like. So, I enjoy listening to and talking to other people. I think collectively you come up with some amazing ideas. A single person, certainly if you were me wouldn't come up with on your own. I also really like variety. I like learning new things.
Dame Nicola Brewer
So, you could say and this goes to the heart of a lot of careers. 'Do I want to be really, really good at one thing?' So, do I want to be a specialist or 'do I want to be able to be a generalist and go from different things and different skills and experiences together?' I like making connections between things. And I've listened to women who've made a fabulous career after really focusing on one thing, and that is a route.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And if that's what floats your boat, probably that's the one to take. But if you're somebody who likes variety, then recognise that and turn it into a strength rather than a weakness.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
That really resonates with me because I had a similar sort of thing. Well, I went through a similar process when I was doing my doctoral research. And it's interesting because right now I'm a research developer. So I work to support researchers, to be better at what they do. But at the same time, I also discovered, I don't want to be on my own all the time. As much as, you know, put me in a lovely old library and I'll have a fantastic few days. But, you know, I don't want to forget how to interact with people and that's where I get my energy from, I think.
Dame Nicola Brewer
Well, I think one of the fabulous things about UCL and I've heard Michael Arthur say this, that, a lot of other universities, you have to really encourage and try to incentivise interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary. At UCL, it just happens. And there's something about bringing together different perspectives to bear on a particular problem that I think is a fantastic way of solving problems, and a really interesting process to be part of. I guess at a similar point really is, don't just have other people put you in a box.
Dame Nicola Brewer
So I've always [...]. If somebody said, you know, we really want you to do X next, I would always kind of push back and say," well hang on, what if I don't want to do X? What if I want to do Y instead? That kind of works if you really like variety. Maybe in retrospect, there were times when I accepted a bit more advice. So one of the things I think Astrea is really good at doing is letting women help other women and making women feel comfortable to ask for help.
Dame Nicola Brewer
It was a former US ambassador to the UK. He was appointed by Barack Obama. Matthew Burleson, who came to UCL recently and accepted an honorary fellowship. And he said that the three most important was in any language ask for help. And I would add to that. Also recognise when other people are trying to help you. So I think earlier on in my career, I think I was very lucky. I probably had a couple of sponsors, who I probably didn't know about because they didn't so much talk to me.
Dame Nicola Brewer
They talked about me and they suggested me for different roles. And I think often early or mid career, that's that's quite critical in your career progression. And I would just encourage people to be a little bit more aware of it than I probably was. There's a very good definition about the difference in a sponsor and a mentor. So a mentor talks to or with you. And a sponsor talks about you. You know, have you thought of Rochelle for this role?
Dame Nicola Brewer
For example, you may not even be in the room. And I think that perhaps we focus too much on mentoring and not enough for on sponsoring. I try myself to do a lot of thinking, if I was to be involved in a recruitment process, not just to think of the usual candidates, but who might bring a different approach. That could be really positive to this role. Think of the more unusual suspects. And often you may find that, you know, the obvious candidates would be three white men.
Dame Nicola Brewer
But what about looking more broadly? I think you have to look for talent in the widest possible pool and not narrow your definition of what talent looks like.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Following on from what you've just said, I feel that you touched on three key lessons. Figure out what you most enjoy doing. You know, even if that's not a lightning bolt but something, you know, a direction of being that you might want to go in and then don't let people put you in a box and recognise when others are trying to help you. And would you be able to tell us a bit about your career story.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I had never thought about becoming a diplomat. I thought I was going to be an academic when I grew up. But much as I loved my research, I didn't at the start of my career, I didn't think I was very much good at teaching. Probably because I was too young. And so the combination of knowing I wanted to work with people and not be a pure researcher led me to just look round and scan the horizons a little bit. And I was lucky enough to have a professor who said to me, "have you ever thought about joining the Foreign Office?"
Dame Nicola Brewer
And I've never thought about it. No family background. And he said, Go meet a friend of mine who's in the Foreign Office and hear what he says. And I nearly didn’t do that because I didn't have some money for the train fare down to London. And then I thought, no, surely, I mean, I can get enough [..]. So one of my other tips. What if somebody offers to help or offers to make an introduction?
Dame Nicola Brewer
Go along with find out. You never know. So it was it was following up that offer that led me to think about it. And then the next thing that happened was I asked the career's office for advice and they said, oh, the Foreign Office won't take you a woman. And, you know, you're from a redbrick university. And I thought, that can't be true. Gemma Chiver's got a lovely line and I'm not going to quote it properly, but it's something like 'don't take no for an answer.
Dame Nicola Brewer
Have a go. You never know. And I, I guess, always kind of just reaching for something that you think might just be out of reach. And I suppose one of the other things I've done, I changed career track several times. So it sounds similar, but moving from the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development. Yes, it's still a Civil Service, but it's quite a different the culture is quite different. The role is quite different. It was much more focused on delivering international development programs, much more about budget management.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And I did that because I wanted to stretch myself and see if I could manage large, large budgets. And I also wanted to work with Claire Short. So looking for who you want to work with and in what field? I think the longer you work, you feel you you can choose who you work with. I guess it's true for everybody. Do you look forward to coming in to meet your work colleagues? Every day is a big part of what makes a job enjoyable.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Yeah, I see.
Dame Nicola Brewer
So looking looking for people either because you admire them or because you like their values or because you respect what they've achieved is a is a is quite a pull factor for me. Just keeping your eyes open. So I, two of the.. if not, three of the jobs I've got, which meant moving career, I got for applying for an ad in The Economist. So the Department of International development one was an advertisement in the Economist and so was when I went to the Equality Human Rights Commission and that the second advert, it really caught my eye was it was very clever marketing.
Dame Nicola Brewer
It said, do you want to join the next adventure in social justice? And I thought, that's that's really what I want.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Really? And how was it work with Claire Short?
Dame Nicola Brewer
Oh. She was amazing. And and I think I learned so many things from her, including one that I think is particularly relevant for women only networks, because the two things really, she she told me that people who live in poverty: don't look at them as victims because they are incredibly resilient. To survive in those circumstances requires amazing resilience. And kind of portraying them as victims is a profound misunderstanding. And the second thing is, she said, if you could only make one development intervention, obviously you want to do lots of things, but if you can only do one, you should educate a girl child.
Dame Nicola Brewer
It makes more difference to her life and how community and her family and ultimately to the whole society than anything else. And that's always stuck with me.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Amazing. There's a lot of skill sharing and sharing and of knowledge in Astrea, even at a very informal level. We're all volunteering, really kind of making additional time with busy schedules. But we find it's a really generous network and people are constantly coming up with ideas.
Dame Nicola Brewer
One of the other lessons I've learned . Another way of looking at career moves is in terms of whether as well as doing your own job, are you managing and leading others? So, I vividly remember moving from managing two people to managing 20 and then from managing 20 to 200 and 200 to 2000 and then back again.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And I'm one of the stories I tell quite often is just at the end of my time, I lived and worked in India for three years and I had a fantastic team of mixed Indian and British staff. And by the end of the three years I was and this was because of the intervention of a sponsor I didn't know I had. I was moved back to London early on promotion. And we had an we had an away day and it was preplanned before I knew I was moving on and it was all going absolutely swimmingly.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And the facilitator was brilliant and the team was buzzing. We had a great time. And then the facilitator asked my team, she said something like. So you told me about all these fantastic things you're doing. Can you tell me what you're doing it for? And I open my mouth to ask the question. Then I thought, no, I shouldn't answer. I should leave it to the team to answer. And if I'm if I'm doing this presentation, I then pause and say, what do you think they said?
Dame Nicola Brewer
And let the silence extend because they said nothing. They didn't they didn't address the question. And the facilitators saw me looking quite frantic. And so she she piled into she said to them, well, if you don't know what you're doing, all of this great activity for, how do you know when you're getting it right? And they laughed my team and they said, oh, we know that the answer is that Nicola is happy. And I laughed, too.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And then the facilitator said this was a really quite damning follow up question. She said, but what are you going to do next week? Because next week Nicola is going to be on a plane back to London. And so what she told me was that you have to communicate the answer to the 'what for' question. You have to, with your team, be able to explain what are they doing all this work for? What's the purpose? What are you trying to achieve?
Dame Nicola Brewer
And I had failed to help my team answer the question. And so when I took up my new job, it was the first question in my mind. It was a completely new job. So I didn't know the answer to the question. So I asked my team and and they didn't have an immediate answer. So I put together a working group and said, let's work on it together. And we came up with the answer, period of about six to eight months, and it came in the form of a kind of mission statement.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And it was so successful that it was pinched by the whole Foreign Office.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
And you mentioned that the jump from managing two to 20 to 2000. What did you find - that there were certain things that applied across. What were those transitions like?
Dame Nicola Brewer
They're difficult, and I think recognising it's a big step to take and that you're going to have to adapt how you operate. So two things I'd say. One is whenever I've made either big career switch or big career step up, most times I've been lucky enough to have a really good coach.
Dame Nicola Brewer
Once it was by chance and after I realised how helpful that was, I'd make sure if I was making a big career switch that I had a coach to talk to and to ask for advice and to just spend time listening to me, trying to figure out how to do things differently. The second one, I guess, is when you move 20 to 200, then to 2000, you realise you need to find local champions and you need to work through networks and you need to find people who are like minded and who will lead working groups or networks themselves.
Dame Nicola Brewer
So you need to find people who've got potential and talent and then talk with them about what you'd like to achieve together and then kind of step back. Delegate, I suppose, step back and see that person deliver something that was in line with your vision. But probably better, maybe better, certainly differently than you would have done yourself because you can't know two thousand people as closely, as you can know 20. And I think some of the jobs I've done, I've always recognised that some people come in and they immediately make a structural change and they change the organisation or the way who reports to whom.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I think that structural change is the thing you should do last. I think you always have to think about the answer to the 'what for' question. So what's the strategy here? What's the purpose, before you do any structural tinkering. Because that creates quite a lot of, it absorbs a lot of time, and it distracts people. And a lot of people are very uncomfortable with it for understandable reasons. So I always resort to structural change, the last resort. But somebody it's a well-known saying.
Dame Nicola Brewer
So you put strategy before structure, but there's something that's much, much more important in strategy and that's culture. So that sense of how do we do things around here? What do we care about? What do we value? And I can think of one of the things when I was Equality of Human Rights Commission, I paid close attention to structure and we had a really short time frame for doing the merger and opening for business. And I didn't pay enough enough attention to culture.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And so in other jobs, sitting down with a team and talking about how would we like to behave, what do we think is most important around here? And that almost always leads you straight back to trust something that you've said you were pointed to it. An important aspect of how you learn to be a leader. It's not always at work. It might be in a charity work way. So informal leadership. People often don't recognise that, you know, maybe you work in the local housing association or with some local group.
Dame Nicola Brewer
You can be exercising and developing leadership skills through that as well.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Something I think concerns our membership. A lot is leading from below. How do you lead without authority? It concerns a lot of researchers, but also to members in professional services. Do you have any tips for that, from perhaps early in your career?
Dame Nicola Brewer
I would say, you could all be leaders at different levels in the organisation. It does mean that you need to acknowledge you're taking a responsibility for something. Usually something you want to start or something you want to change. It's not just within your own specific job description. So, the example I would give, and it was with the team I moved to, after India. Do you remember Investors In People (IIP)? So there was a process and it was quite a good way of getting to understand what the culture of the organisational path in an organisation was so that the presenting task was to get IIP accreditation.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And I asked people to work on what we were all working together for as part of clarifying our purpose through the IIP process. And there were some people who were quite sceptical about it. And we got people at all different levels in the organisation. But they all took responsibility for different aspect of the IIP accreditation process. And then together it added up to the fact that we were part of the organisation that got it very early on. So they were, there was a loose aim, which was to achieve iIP accreditation.
Dame Nicola Brewer
But in order to achieve that, you had to be clear about things like how were going to behave to each other, work how we would articulate our mission or our purpose, how we would show kind of. I suppose this comes back to your question, Rochelle, about how you can be a leader from below. You can set a good example. So not only help other people get access to training, but do some yourself and talk about what you learned.
Dame Nicola Brewer
Managing upwards is a different world, I think. I don't think I suppose you could say that's leadership. I would see it as closer to negotiating. And sounds like a rather grandiose way of putting it. But how to understand power? There were some people who are really good at managing. And their bosses think they're wonderful. But that peers all the people who worked there don't think they're wonderful at all. So I'm a big fan of 360 degree reporting.
Dame Nicola Brewer
So that gives you a real sense, not just usually, you know, what your boss thinks of you. Um usually, unless you're really not paying attention, you know what people who work to you, think of you. It's often quite hard to know what your peers think of you. And I think I think having that full 360 is is really interesting.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
I wanted to just quickly answer a question about the coaching, the coaches, you had. Were they always conscious choices? Did you go out looking for a coach or did some of these things come about informally or accidentally?
Dame Nicola Brewer
The first one came about. I mean, I think I had done some formal coaching, but I can't remember. And therefore, it probably wasn't all that successful. The first one came about when I was moving out of the Foreign Offices, on secondment to the Department's International Development. [..] That was when I went from two hundred to two thousand people I was managing and it was going into a very different culture, although I didn't really appreciate that at the time.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And somebody I've been working with on the diversity agenda for quite a long time, including probably about five or seven years. And we've been working on a training program called Managing Inclusion. Anyway, he was doing an M.A., I think, and he said, "I need some guinea pigs for my case study I'm doing on senior civil servants who use coaches can I coach you?" And I said, "wow! Yes, please!" And he was brilliant. I'm still in touch.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I'm still really value the work that he's doing. And one of the things he taught me was he said, as you have set the agenda, not maybe so the coach doesn't set the agenda. The person being coached does. And so we'd meet up somewhere outside work. And I always kind of give him a sort of Three-Point agenda. And after about three meetings, he looked to me and he said, we stop pushing this on the agenda.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And then he pointed and it said, work life balance. And I kept putting it all on the agenda. And he said, What you have to understand is that for you, work is a hugely important part of life. It's not either or. It's part of it. So stop treating it as as, you know, as complete opposition. And that helped me along to relax and just recognise how much I enjoyed working and to remember that it's not like that for everybody.
Dame Nicola Brewer
There were two points in my career where I really consciously put my family before a job and I need to change the job I was doing because of my family. And it was entirely conscious. I had two children under three and I had a job that involved lots of travelling. And one morning, my daughter, who was about three, she's sitting on the bottom, stepping out for the stairs. And she put arms on my legs and said, "Mummy, please go to Brussels today".
Dame Nicola Brewer
And I thought, I can't do this job anymore. I just can't do this job anymore. I cried all the way to work and I said, I'm going to have to do something different. So I've just been promoted. It was a great time to say I can't do this job anymore. And I applied for a jobshare. So I worked three days a week. And that just gave me and the children we had a four day weekend every week.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I probably did a 40 hour week in three days, but then I had four, four days off properly. And I chose the job. I could do a jobshare, not a job I wanted. But actually, because I love variety it was a very different job. I went to work in HR. I, I found it one of the most intellectually stretching jobs I've ever done. Because you're constantly looking at a presenting issue, plus an individual and you have to think about what is the right approach, not just for them, but for other people and the whole organisation.
Dame Nicola Brewer
So what should the policy be and how should you apply it to an individual? And it was also quite emotionally draining because you're constantly dealing with the difficult circumstances people are in. So although I didn't do it, so I wanted to do the job. I actually learned a lot about it. It gave me huge respect for people who work in HR all the time. It's a very hard job. Yeah.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Even though you took the job share, do you feel it propelled your career on reflection?
Dame Nicola Brewer
Well, at the time I, I remember where I was. I was in the central bit of the Foreign Office and one of our very grand corridors. And somebody said to me, oh, you've joined the mummy track. And I was furious, but I also knew in a sense that maybe was what I was doing. And, you know, like you, you take a big cut in salary and, you know, you still have to have organised childcare because you working three days a week.
Dame Nicola Brewer
It was it was difficult to do. And I was battling against the feeling that I was never going to get out the mummy track. And I did that. It also taught me how difficult it is to job share. I had a fantastic jobshare partner. She couldn't have been she could have been better. We're still in touch with some friends, but it's hard during a jobshare is that handover moment is difficult. And then after 18 months, I applied to go back to work full time.
And that transition was hard, too. And it made me realise. And also the other time I took I took a year off when my second child was born. And both go back to full time work after job sharing and going back to work after maternity leave, even though I was only away for 10 months. It really knocks your confidence. It really not. So as you think, can I do it? So what it must be like if you take five or 10 years off.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I can just about imagine. And I think helping people back, just for the first couple of weeks maybe. And listening to other women saying my confidence was knocked too you can do this, but I'm sure you don't feel you can at the moment. I think it's I think it's important to talk about that. I think not making assumptions about what people will want to do. You know, young mothers with children won't want to do X, Y or Z.
Dame Nicola Brewer
Don't say it. Ask them. The value a network like Astrea at those critical moments in a career. Can be really, really helpful.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Yeah. Us as a resource for women who tend to work, for example, after career break or period off for maternity leave and things like that . Definitely. I think we have a role to play in terms of boosting confidence in providing networks and friendships and things.
Dame Nicola Brewer
Two of the things I'm really pleased about. I was gonna say proud, and that's a bit ...it was somebody else's success I'm talking about. But I felt I was able to kind of facilitate or support it. On at least two if not more occasions when I've been interviewing for jobs, the best candidate has been a woman who was pregnant and about to go on maternity leave. And the first time I'd appointed to somebody who's just about to go on maternity leave, and I needed that person in the job straight away.
Dame Nicola Brewer
But I reckoned, she was good enough. It was worth waiting. The sense her commitment and knowing that I believed in her enough to wait a year for her, because she took a year off, meant that she just exceed all expectations, she was brilliant. And it wasn't because she was working. mad hours.
Dame Nicola Brewer
She kept a good balance and she's just been made ambassador somewhere.
I would like and we are not there yet, when a young woman or young man, anywhere, I dont know in their 20s, 30s, whatever, applies for job, either of them could say I'm just about to go off on parental leave and they if they're the best candidate, you take them anyway. And I know that a lot of employers do look at young women and they think how long does she stay before she goes, before she starts family. You know, it's not acceptable. It's illegal. It's discrimination.It still goes on.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Yeah. So we have a question about English heritage competition. I wondered, we're really excited about it in Astrea. We want to put forward some suggestions. I have some ideas and then to my embarrassment, I discovered they do actually have a plaque!
All
[Laughter]
Dame Nicola Brewer
Now, without thinking about this, probably do have a plaque already. So, amazing that it was only in 2018. That statue Millicent Fawcett, was in Parliament Square. And, I had to check that it was only 2018. How. I mean I think that's amazing. I'm delighted and delighted, it was a female sculpture but it took a campaign. For Christmas, my family gave me a book called 'Bloody Brilliant Women' and it's by the journalist called Cathy Newman. And I've just read it and it's full of women I've never heard about or had heard about. But I've forgotten like Annie Besant, who organised the strike? The match girls in the Bryant & May factory. Because the phosphorus they were dealing with was causing huge fascial disfiguration. So I don't whether she's got a blue plaque anywhere, but if Annie Besant hasn't got one. She should have.
Dame Nicola Brewer
My other leading candidate would be Jo Cox. And I don't know whether she's got one. And it's it's not because she was murdered. I think she deserves, though, though I do think we need to pay attention as a country.
How could that happen? How could an outspoken female politician or a female politician, somebody in public life, get murdered in those circumstances? What does it say about our country? But it's for what she said, and I quote it in my graduation speeches sometimes. She said something like, "we have more in common than, there is difference between us." She expressed it more eloquently than that. But, you know, we have more in common and that's what people forget.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And probably because of my background in international affairs and because I'm a feminist, all of the names tend to be women in public life. So I think at some point Jess Phillips, you know the MP? Jess Phillips deserves a blue plaque. Just for being Jess Phillips.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Yes, exactly. I saw her speak at the British Library. I agree. Yeah. She's brill, I really like her.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I'm hugely supportive of the full stop campaign, and I think it's absolutely needed and absolutely the right thing to do.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And it's probably the most important thing in higher education right now. Recognising, you know, where to draw the line. What kind of behaviour is not acceptable. And it goes right to the heart of the informal power structures in universities, which revolve around senior professors and how almost total control, they can have over doctoral and post-doctoral students or even earlier. So I think that's exactly what I think. And that's why I put my focus. The other one I've already mentioned, which is around parental leave.
Dame Nicola Brewer
I'm really, really delighted that in my small office, the engagement office, we've had several men who've taken parental leave when they're children have been born. I think that's really, really, important. And I guess the three priorities I would highlight would be the full stop campaign support for people with caring responsibilities and encouraging more men to take up parental leave. You know the expression women hold up half the sky. Well, that means that the other half is held by men.
Dame Nicola Brewer
And I don't think we'll have genuine, genuine equality unless both men and women care about it and work for it. So one of the things I'm trying to get off the ground, UCL, is a male allies network of men who absolutely believe in gender and other kinds of equality and want to stand up and say, you know, you need and deserve my help for this, too, because I think making the problem, making women the problem is so.a) it's not accurate. And maybe it's a recipe for never really having a transformative effect.
Rochelle Rowe-Wiseman
Brill. Thank you so much!
Dame Nicola Brewer
Ok, it was my pleasure.
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