LEADERSHIP STYLES HOW I DID IT
‘Use each day as a learning opportunity’
Nick Sturge is director of Engine Shed, an enterprise hub based in Bristol. A member of the UK Tech Cluster Group,
he was appointed an MBE in 2019 for his services to the digital economy. He shares some of the key lessons he’s learnt so far.
Know the diff erence between director and shareholder. At Motion Media Technology, a business I co-founded in 1993, we hired a non-executive director to bring discipline and structured governance. This made its fl otation relatively smooth and helped us, the founders, to prepare for the rollercoaster of leading a listed tech company during the dot-com boom.
You need diff erent skills at diff erent stages. The qualities required to get a business off the ground differ completely from those needed to scale it. It’s rare for someone to excel in both areas.
Becoming a Chartered Director has been hugely beneficial. It taught me the importance of understanding the breadth of my business, while knowing which situations warrant a “deep dive” and which don’t. It also forced me to regularise the way I was operating my board.
Understand your capabilities. Be honest with yourself about what you don’t know – and use each day as a learning opportunity.
CONGRATULATIONS to the latest members to qualify as Chartered Directors: Mark Cleary, Wendy Dorey, Zaheer Esat, Adrian Hanstock, Hans-Christoph Hirt, Jonathan McGregor, Debbie O’Hare.
iod.com/chartered
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director.co.uk LEAD LIKE…
It’s 100 years since the US-born MP became the fi rst woman to take her seat in the Commons. Here’s what made her a pioneer Words Christian Koch
NANCY ASTOR
LADY OF THE HOUSE On 28 November 1919 Viscountess Astor won the Plymouth Sutton by-election, triggered by the elevation to the Lords of the sitting MP – her husband Waldorf. Three days later she made history as the first female MP to take her seat. For the next 26 years she defied the Tory whip regularly to vote for equality laws that would change women’s lives. She wasn’t the first woman to be elected (Sinn Féin’s Constance Markievicz had refused to take her seat in 1918) or even a suff ragette, but she surely blazed a trail for her gender.
UNIQUE INFLUENCER Astor recalled that her fellow MPs “would rather have had a rattlesnake than me”. When asking questions about women and children in the chamber she was “shouted at for five or 10 minutes at a time… They thought I was rather a freak, a voice crying in the wilderness.” Astor’s response was to take advantage of her uniqueness, delivering eccentric, humour-laced speeches. It worked: in 1923 she secured arguably her biggest political achievement in pushing through a bill that raised the legal drinking age from 14 to 18.
COMEBACK QUEEN Astor’s key weapon against misogyny was her razor-sharp wit. Enduring constant heckles in Parliament, the “ardent feminist”, as she later described herself, often turned the tables on her adversaries. Sir Winston Churchill once moaned at her: “When you took your seat, I felt as if a woman had come into my bathroom and I had only a sponge with which to defend myself.” Astor retorted: “You are not handsome enough to have worries of that kind.”
GLASS-SHATTERER Many of Astor’s views would be derided as discriminatory today. She once claimed in Parliament that a Catholic conspiracy was afoot in the Foreign Of ice, for instance, while the snob in her was so appalled by her son David’s friendship with “the son of a Welsh miner” at Oxford that she expected his professors to put a stop to it. Despite this, a statue of Astor is set to be unveiled in Plymouth. The constituency’s current MP, Labour’s Luke Pollard, proposed the move. “I’m not a big fan of some of the things she stood for,” he said. “[But] history should not be partisan, especially when Nancy Astor broke the glass ceiling for women.”
INTERVIEW: RYAN HERMAN. PHOTO: LEBRECHT MUSIC / ALAMY
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