Authenticity, harnessing strengths, and embracing imperfect: Our key takeouts from the UK & Ireland conference

During our UK & Ireland conference in London, we had the pleasure of listening to a variety of female leaders with unique perspectives on our conference theme The Power of You and anyone who attended would have inevitably left with a notepad full of inspiration, ideas and key actions!

So we thought we’d bring you our top key takeaways from the day.

Time and time again, we hear our community saying that they don’t feel that they have the self confidence needed to put themselves forward for job opportunities, promotions, projects or to speak up in meetings.

The self doubt creeps in and it’s sometimes easier to listen to that and play it safe by not putting yourself forward and stepping out of your comfort zone.

That’s why we themed our conference on The Power of You. We want every woman working in the meat industry to have the confidence to recognise her strengths, overcome obstacles and reach her aspirations, whatever they look like.

Make your strengths work for you

Finding and harnessing your own strength is key to building confidence. These strengths will differ from person to person, says Ramona Hazan, Founder of Ramona’s. “We have a lot of buzzwords like perseverance, hard work and flexibility and for me it’s about harnessing whatever your own power is, which will be different to everyone. It’s about having a bit of confidence to harness what your own power is and then owning it.”

For Ramona, walking into a meeting and saying this is MY power, embracing and owing it is key to success. “Let’s be teaching our children that – especially as women who are mentoring and teaching the younger generation into the industry that they have permission to speak and to show your power whatever it is.”

Authenticity is your superpower

It can take confidence to bring your authentic self to work, particularly if you are in a male dominated team. Lauren Lepley, Group Supply Chain Director at Morrisons says, “I struggled with identity when I started managing a big store, due to working with a huge team of men. But when I recognised my strengths, which in my case are dealing with customers, suppliers, teams I started to build my own confidence.”

Lauren says you’ll likely hear a number of different opinions on how you should deal with different situations, what you should say or not say. “You can spend forever and a day listening to what others think and ‘fitting in.’ But I didn’t, even though it was a difficult thing to do. You can completely consume yourself with what others think but the only person’s opinion that matters is yours.”

Good is good enough – let’s ignore perfect!

“Good is good enough” says Lauren. “It’s not that I want to be defeatist, but rather be practical and pragmatic. Life is hectic! And as women we are constantly feeling guilty about not doing enough whether that’s at work or in family life, so making decisions with the best intentions is key.”

“When being asked to work in supply chain there were decisions that I had to push back on before starting out in the role I was asked to do. That is extremely hard to do, particularly when speaking to a CEO! But I had to make it clear that I could only do what worked for me at that time.”

But Lauren says it’s critical that we carry on doing this in order, not only to influence the business and make life easier for ourselves but to help out others in the businesses as well.

The likelihood is that by making these decisions you are helping out others in the process, whether that’s other women who are climbing the ladder after you, or other teams members who haven’t spoken up.

Taking a leap of faith whilst battling self doubt is something that Ieva Gece, Senior HR advisor at Cranswick also spoke about her experiences with. “I came to UK 13 years ago, I had no experience in a totally new country. We all have that voice in our head that makes us question ourselves – ‘do I know enough, am I good enough, do I have enough English knowledge to take on a HR role?’"

But through all of that, Ieva went into new opportunities with an open mind and leant on the people she knew that would support her.

“I think we need to say yes to opportunities because without stretching ourselves we never really know what we’re capable of or can achieve."