Leading Professional People: Bayes expert launches third series of successful leadership podcast
Laura Empson, Professor in the Management of Professional Service Firms at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) is joined by Tony Hall, Lord Hall of Birkenhead and former Director General of the BBC, for a third series of the popular Leading Professional People podcast.
Following on from the success of the first two series, the podcast will continue to meet senior leaders from some of the most prestigious global professional organisations, including Ernst & Young, Slaughter & May, MI6, Spencer Stuart and the BBC – building on their own insights from lifetimes of researching, leading and advising professionals.
Each episode focuses on the crucial leadership questions currently facing professional organisations and their leaders, and sets out to uncover the complicated, messy, and surprisingly emotional challenges of leading professionals.
Professor Empson said she was proud to launch yet another series.
“I have been researching and advising professional organisations and their leaders for more than 30 years, but I am still surprised at how fascinating the interviewees are.
“Professional organisations are so complex and compelling because they are basically just a bunch of highly intelligent, motivated, and opinionated people, trying to work out how to get stuff done together so that they can lead personally fulfilling lives and make money. In that simple sentence you encapsulate all the challenges, confusions, frustrations, and elations that make these organisations so difficult to lead and so fascinating to study.
The new series was launched on Monday 2 October. Professor Empson admitted that the success of the podcast had surprised her.
“The highlight of making the podcast so far is the phenomenal listening numbers. At the beginning I thought there might be around 1,000 people around the world that I wanted to reach in a fairly narrow range of firms, countries and sectors,” she continued.
“Instead, the podcast has tens of thousands of listeners all over the globe from a very wide range of professions and occupations. I was expecting consultants, accountants, and lawyers to listen, but it turns out the podcast is popular with oncologists in the United States, even though we have never covered anything to do with the medical profession.
“A lot of academics listen and have added it to the syllabus of their leadership courses. Although there are hundreds of leadership podcasts out there, this one is special because it speaks very directly to professionals about their particular preoccupations.
“Lord Hall’s addition for this third series has also been hugely beneficial.
“We talk a lot about power and politics on this podcast, and Tony’s leadership experience across a range of organisations, together with his long-term involvement with BBC News and his current role as cross-bench peer in the House of Lords means that he has been around power and politics all his career.”
Lord Hall said he was delighted to be joining a podcast focussing on subject matter that was of special personal interest.
“I really enjoyed being a guest on a earlier episode and listening to the previous two series as whole.” he said.
“As someone who has led professionals in various guises for many years, I think leadership is an amazingly important topic. Bringing together the leadership expertise of Laura as an academic with my experience of actually leading is a really powerful combination.”
“I have been astonished by the honesty of our guests. Senior leaders are coached by their PR people to reveal very little, but in our interviews they opened up about some really important and personal issues."
The Leading Professional People podcast is available to download from all good podcast providers. The first episode of Series Three, “Profiting from Sustainability”, features Steve Varley, Ernst & Young’s first Global Vice Chair for Sustainability. The next episode, released on Monday 16 October, is about “Subtle Power” and features Chris Saul, former Senior Partner of elite law firm Slaughter & May.
Find out more about the presenters of Leading Professional People.
Listen to the Welcome Back episode of Leading Professional People.