This Week in Leadership: Networking is dead. Long live networking!

This Week in Leadership: Networking is dead. Long live networking!
September 14th @ 12:30 pm EDT | 17:30 BST 

It’s time to radically dismantle and rebuild. But when we remove ‘ego’ from the room – what is the point of business networking post-2020 ?

We are interested that covid has broken the mould of in-person networking and called for more innovative approaches to harnessing the power of community and a network, but this has also blown wide open what often becomes an echo chamber of like-minded people mingling in the same room.

Networking post-2020, in light of the conversations that have been happening around feminism, trans equality and black lives matter this year – should be less about building a collection of people the same as you and more about listening to people with vastly different life and professional experiences to you. And learning from them. Technology allows us to bring together truly diverse groups of people like never before. But when the time comes how can we still make sure this spirit of diversity, openness an opportunity for all exists IRL?

Do we need to shift our expectations of ’networking’ to be less about furthering one’s own career, and more about sharing ideas and experiences that may encourage us to radically reconsider our role in industry?

Let’s explore who has previously felt excluded from industry events and why?

Moderator:

Lotte Jeffs – Former Editor in Chief of Elle UK and Published Author

Prior to Portas, Jeffs worked as a creative director at Ogilvy and wrote her first book about harnessing the art of soft power in hard times. Jeffs continues to be a feature and profile writer for national newspapers and magazines. Ex-Deputy Editor of ELLE UK with six months’ experience as its Acting Editor in Chief. Strategic thinker and cross-platform leader – digital, video, social media, experiential and events. Award-winning writer (winner PPA Writer of The Year 2016 and shortlisted Columnist of the Year 2017). Ex ES Magazine. Ex High Life Magazine.

Speakers:

Hayley Sudbury – CEO @ Werkin 

Hayley Sudbury is founder and CEO of WERKIN, a company which helps to create, track and activate mentoring and career development programmes, supporting workplace inclusion like professional LGBT+ communities, and BAME talents.  She is an active mentor of Stemettes speaker for Founders for Schools.  She is an ambassador of LB Women, a network created to inspire, inform and celebrate success of professional lesbian and bisexual women.  She is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and in 2017 and ’18 Hayley was on the OUTstanding Financial Times Leading 100 LGBT+ Executives list.

Amie Snow-Mayers – Creative and WPP/Ogilvy Roots Co-Founder

Amie Snow is a first class forensic investigation graduate from south east London, who swiftly made a transition into the creative industry with no experience 3 years ago via an Ogilvy internship called The Pipe.

Since then she has been a trailblazing creative, nominated as a creative of tomorrow by the British Arrows, leaders with a social heart by The Dots, as a RARE Creative by Google, featured in campaign as a women redefining creativity & Top 10 Creatives to know, has also been invited to judge on panels for Campaigns female frontiers and D&AD whilst being apart of winning great business and campaigns such as World Afro day.

Amie is one of the co-founders of Ogilvy Roots, a BME network dedicated to championing greater ethnic and cultural diversity within the work, agency and the industry. She has also played a key role of it’s global expansion into WPP roots with other amazing colleagues and executive champion Karen Blackett, and is looking to take the industry by storm.

She believes that in this business, of course, the work in your book matters, but paving a way, being fearless, authentic and proactive in your creativity is key for the future of advertising!