A Business Trailblazer Shares Her Inspiring Mission

I'm a corporate finance lawyer by trade. As such, I had the privilege of attending award ceremonies but what was always conspicuous to me as a Black woman was the absence of Black people in the finalist list and therefore the winners.

This underrepresentation was permeating through society. When I would visit schoolchildren in Hackney as part of my outreach work, for example, I could tell they had these self-limiting beliefs based on the content they consumed. It was pretty obvious we needed to do something that shone a light on the talent that exists and prove it exists in meaningful numbers. The thing that was probably most concerning was the language you would hear from senior leaders who were leading FTSE 100, FTSE 250 companies talking about the reason they didn't have Black non-exec directors or Black senior leaders in their organisations. They said it was because the talent pipeline was thin. We felt we had to demonstrate beyond doubt that the depth and the quality of the talent pool did exist in the UK.

The first Black British Business Awards ceremony took place in 2014. But the work to secure sponsors began back in 2011. It took us two years to find what you might call ‘cornerstone’ investors because of the level of discomfort around the use of the word ‘Black’. We could have labelled the awards differently and used a less direct word – back then, organisations preferred things like ‘multicultural’ – but we thought part of the work was to normalise the conversation, to get comms teams, learning and development teams and managers comfortable with this idea. Today, we’ve managed to build an enviable portfolio of corporate sponsors who are standing behind the work that we're doing. It proves it's not just us who think we’re great – we've got some of the world's most iconic and systemically important organisations backing our work. 

We didn't want to be just a red-carpet event with champagne, music and photographs. So, between 2014 and 2020, we built some leadership, talent development and culture change programmes. By the time we got to 2020, it was great because companies needed those products and solutions because, finally, everybody was prepared to admit that we did have a problem here.

A lot of people won’t realise that this is not my day job. I am the chair and the executive founder of the organisation, but this is not the thing that pays my bills. This is the thing I do to give back and pay it forward. I actually run Nandi Life Sciences by day, splitting my time between London and New York.  But the UK is where I started my career, and I launched the Black British Business Awards to honour that. To allow me to do both, I have an amazing team behind me.

This year’s ceremony has just taken place and there were some standout winners. Our person of the year, Pamela Maynard, is fantastic. A veteran in sciences technology, she was the CEO of an organisation called Avanade, a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft. The world had not really heard of her and yet she was employing close to 60,000 people. She's now been recruited by Microsoft to become head of client partnerships, focusing on leveraging AI to improve client delivery and experience.

Then we have Geoffrey Williams. He’s at Burberry and very much involved in the strategic thinking about how the Burberry brand plays out in the public domain. He’s thinking about what it means to be British and inclusive at the same time. We also have Ize Idemudia, a brilliant woman in asset management. You don't often see women of colour celebrated in this way. She’s at Morgan Stanley in the legal and compliance function, and has helped a lot of other Black women navigate their careers in such a niche space.

Our primary mission is to shine a light on the existence of Black talent in meaningful numbers. But number two, we're a campaigning organisation. We’re challenging business to ensure Black representation in at least the numbers that we see in the census. To say we've been successful, we need to focus on representation at decision-making tables. We have a mid-career talent accelerator, where we put high-potential, mid-career individuals into a programme with their line manager, an exec sponsor and their HR business partner to help them thrive. Oftentimes, these people don't need more mentoring. They need advocacy, sponsorship and people in the room who are going to vouch for their successes. We try to create the conditions for that to be possible. Ultimately, it’s about trying to get companies to recognise what they have in their own talent pool, as well as how to promote it and make it better for people further down the pipeline. 

The work that we do is only possible because of organisations that are committed to investing. But even more important is the person in authority who has the power of the purse – and who is, frankly, not likely to be Black. That’s why we also have an ally accelerator. A lot of line managers and exec sponsors tend not to be people of colour, so it’s about helping both sides recognise the need for an emotional connection. The world is not full of racists but there is a barrier, and I think it comes down to a lack of trust. People of colour don’t trust that the system was ever designed to produce the right outcomes for them, so we have to create authentic relationships of trust to get the right sponsorship and advocacy. When you bring our community together, you see the magic really happen. 

The legacy I want to create is better representation at decision-making levels – in actual metrics and numbers that we can all be proud of. I also want every person who touches this organisation to be an ancestor that their descendants would be proud of. 

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