Sophie Williams
Sophie Williams is a speaker, the author of The Glass Cliff, Millennial Black & Anti-Racist Ally, a TED Speaker, the voice behind Instagram’s @OfficialMillennialBlack, and part of the UN Women UK’s delegation to the Commission of the Status of Women conference in 2023 and 2024.
She was an ex global Leader at Netflix, and has held the titles of COO and CFO in London advertising agencies. She is currently reading in her comedy era, enjoying the jokes and insights from the likes of Ed Gamble, Tim Key and Fern Brady.
‘I couldn’t find a book that acknowledged both race and gender and contextual obstacles - so I had to write it myself.’
Tell us about how you came to be an author.
I’ve been in the creative industries my entire life and career - I studied theatre at university, worked in events for a while and then I went into advertising. From what I’ve seen, advertising is very similar in a lot of ways to publishing: different agencies, ever-changing creative briefs, clients and outputs all in a very fast-paced environment. I got into writing books when I was working as a Chief Operating Officer at an advertising agency. I was quite young to be doing that, and was the only Black and Global Majority agency leader within the agency. I didn’t feel that I was a natural fit for that kind of role in other people’s minds. People would come into meetings and they’d give me their bag or coat or coffee order, and I wondered, ‘What if I need to change something as well? What if there’s something about the way that I’m showing up and presenting myself now that I’m a young person in a very visible senior role?’ I wanted to read a book on it and all I could find were books about business and women in the workplace that all came from the assumption and starting place of whiteness. It’s all very well saying, ‘Lean in’, ‘Use your voice’, ‘Advocate for yourself’, but I know from my lived experience, that as a Black or Brown woman or someone from a disproportionately pigeonholed background, that that advocacy can be painted as being aggressive, which makes it much harder advice to take. I couldn’t find a book that acknowledged both race and gender and contextual obstacles - so I had to write it myself. I couldn’t find the book that I needed and my authorship journey has been born from that need.
‘women in business are seen as more disposable and easily expendable.’
You talk about how being told about Glass Ceiling from an early age got you thinking about the Glass Cliff as you grew in your own career. What was it that sparked this realisation?
When I was researching for my first book Millennial Black, I was really looking for a success story because I was telling stories about Black women’s experiences in the workplace, but all I could find were negative experiences. I was hoping to find a positive story that could show that not only were Black women thriving in leadership roles but they can have this trickle-down effect of great experiences too. But in reality, that’s not what happened and this is where I came upon The Glass Cliff.
The Glass Cliff is a societal phenomenon where businesses suddenly become much more likely to appoint women and people from racially marginalised backgrounds into positions of leadership when those businesses are already in some moment of crisis. This is even more prevalent for racially marginalised women. It's felt that women are much more likely to have a greater degree of soft skills, so businesses start looking for those they presume will have them because they presume that those skills will be a really nice way to make people within the business feel better about the crisis situation. They tend to look for someone to bring in either as a scapegoat or a stopgap, either to put all of the crisis and failure onto that individual and exit her from the business and then say, ‘Look, she’s gone - so are all of our problems’, or so that someone can make people feel better for a while then exit them and go back to business as usual.
Businesses get a real halo effect when they do bring women, in particular, into these positions, as they get perceived as being more progressive, egalitarian and inclusive. But what we are seeing is they don't treat these women fairly. They don't give them the tools or the time that's necessary to turn these appointments into success stories. And so we just see the continuation of this idea that women aren't good leaders, but they're not failing because they're bad leaders; they're failing because of the context of the crisis that they've been brought in during.
Although we might not have heard the term for it, we have all seen it happening: Theresa May coming in to clean up the mess that was Brexit when she was on the Remain side, because suddenly none of the men who had led us to that position wanted the role of leading us through it; Dame Sharon White, who is just about to leave John Lewis after the company started to report losses as opposed to profits; Linda Yacarino joined Twitter a few weeks after Elon Musk stepped down from the role of the CEO of Twitter when there had been all this loss of reputation and ruin already. It's all the same, because women in business are seen as more disposable and easily expendable.
‘a huge part of recognising our different lived experiences is the willingness to see emotional intelligence as a core part of what makes a business successful and its people thrive.’
In an ideal world then, how would you reframe the idea of ‘soft skills’ to truly reflect their importance, and are there other qualities you would like to add?
I am an autistic person and so soft skills don't come incredibly naturally to me. I don't pick my battles and I’m very determined and justice-driven, but when I was doing this research into The Glass Cliff, I had initially thought, ‘OK, we know that women have been brought into these positions because of their soft skills and I thought the advice is going to have to be, ‘Women, it's time to move away from them.’ Yet the more I did this research, the more ridiculous I realised that was, because that's what women did for decades, right? History is littered with real-life and fictional women who have changed how they act and dress and sound in order to become successful. I think we've moved beyond that and I'm really pleased about it.
One of the most interesting things I found in my research was not that we should move away from soft skills, but the actual and very essential role that those skills play in a modern functioning business. Forbes recently reported that demonstrating empathy is a ‘strategic imperative in business’, with further research showing that 61% of people surveyed with ‘highly empathic senior leaders report often or always being innovative at work, as compared to only 13% of those with less empathic senior leaders’. Furthermore, 76% of people surveyed ‘with highly empathic senior leaders report often or always feeling engaged, compared to only 32% of those with less empathic senior leaders’.
When the World Economic Forum tested emotional intelligence alongside a set of thirty-three other workplace skills, they discovered that it was the ‘strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58% of success in all types of jobs.’ They found that 90% of top performers scored highly in emotional intelligence, versus only 20% of bottom performers, noting that, ‘You can be a top performer without emotional intelligence, but the chances are slim.’ Not only are professionally successful people likely to have higher emotional intelligence, there is also an incredibly strong relationship between the skill set and financial rewards, with the research finding that those workers with high emotional intelligence make, on average, $29,000 more per year than their less emotionally intelligent counterparts. The link is so strong and direct that ‘every point increase in emotional intelligence adds $1,300 to an annual salary’, a finding that remained true for people in all industries, at all levels, in every region of the world. The researchers noted that they ‘haven’t yet been able to find a job in which performance and pay aren’t tied closely to emotional intelligence.’ I just think we all have to really get better at recognising that as much as it might look like we're working in the same contexts, generally, we're not. We all have our own ways of thinking, whether that's inspired by our lived experience or by our race or by our neurodiversity or whatever it is. I think a huge part of recognising our different lived experiences is the willingness to see emotional intelligence as a core part of what makes a business successful and its people thrive.
As you discuss in your book and in your TED Talk, there’s a certain sense of ‘as seniority increases, diversity decreases’. You also outline some of the ways to combat this, but as so many of us are in different stages of our careers, is there one thing you’d want all women and people from marginalised communities to know and keep with them throughout their careers?
Unfortunately, I don’t think there is one thing - and that’s part of the problem. A phrase that works for me as a light-skinned Black woman will feel different for a dark-skinned Black woman, will feel different for a disabled person who's a wheelchair user, will feel different for a trans woman. I just don't think there is a catch-all thing that can encapsulate all of our needs and experiences and bring us all forwards because we all have different starting points and end goals. If I had to give one - and it’s one I first heard from a brand called Black and Beach although I don’t think it’s theirs originally - then it would be, ‘Do no harm, take no s**t’. That’s a mantra that I try to encapsulate a lot.
‘I’d love to see a bit more transparency and communication… both between publishers and authors as well as within the industry.’
As someone who has worked in the creative industries like advertising and also outside the publishing industry as an author, is there something that has stood out to you that you think would be great to continue to see change in?
It's really hard for me to comment in-depth about how publishing as a whole is structured because the author experience is incredibly siloed and individual. From my POV, I think about it as this transition from project to product. When you're sitting down and you're writing that book, you're doing this little writing project, right? You think, ‘Hopefully my words are nice, they make some sense, they're in a good order etc.’, and that's the project. When it gets taken to a publisher and the industry gets involved, it becomes a product. At that stage, even if you have product knowledge, your relationship as an author to that book and product becomes much more distant and at arm's length than when it's at the project stage and you're turning nothing into something. You are your own community as an author, and then all of a sudden, you have these points of contact and people working on your book. It can be quite jarring to feel so distant from your project. I think I’d love to see a bit more transparency and communication, although I know that everyone is very busy and working on a lot of different things, both between publishers and authors as well as within the industry.
This is where my experiences in advertising come in, especially when it comes to hiring. You have to deal with all kinds of different products, ideas and outputs that are aimed at all kinds of different people and you know you want the widest resonance possible. To do that, you need to have a team that understands the different demographics, interests and fandoms and all these things that you need to interact with. One time that I can really clearly remember is when we started working with a recruiter who would only ever bring us men and would talk a lot about his search for ‘the right man for the job’. The irony was that the candidates this recruiter was bringing definitely were not the right men for the job. I raised this because it was really frustrating and I said, ‘I don't think that's encouraging me that I want to continue to work with you as someone who we are paying to bring us relevant talent.’ When that person left the meeting, my boss at the time tried to give me some advice which was, ‘You will have a much better time, much better life, much better career if you stop saying things like this, if you stop making gender an issue, if you stop having these conversations.’ My response was always just no. That’s just not good advice for me. It's also not going to get your business to where you need it to be because you're not being inclusive.
In one of my first jobs in advertising, in one of the bigger agencies I worked for, when I walked in on my first day, the office was covered in Union Jack flags and Saint George's flags. I was so floored, but it turned out that there was some kind of sports event that I didn't know about, and that is absolutely OK but I don’t think anyone had stopped to think, ‘What are other people’s relationship to this flag?’ It was a deeply white male office, as advertising is overall, so when they see that flag, they think of going to the pub, watching football etc. But if I go past the pub that has that flag outside, it signals to me that I’m not safe there and I shouldn’t go in. So my first experience of walking into that agency on my first day was, ‘Oh, I'm not safe here.’ But that's because there weren't other people at that level who had that lived experience of even understanding that that flag could represent something different to people, or if there were people, they were too junior to be heard or too busy being told that they should be happy to even be there. They didn't feel comfortable saying, ‘We probably shouldn't do this’ or ‘Let’s find a different way to show support’, showing that we can't just bring in people to be our diversity sauce. We have to bring in everyone with a mind of what they add, not because they match our baseline.
‘We should be looking for ‘culture-adds’: people who contribute to our culture that we don't have, who give us a perspective or a background or a skill set that we don't already have.’
So what should we be looking for when we seek to hire people who will help to create an inclusive culture that leads to a successful team or business?
I think one of the biggest things to think about is culture-fit vs. culture-add. The idea of fitting a culture has led to really homogeneous workplaces and teams, and it goes back to that conversation about having a range of perspectives and backgrounds and experiences in the room to be able to make the best product that will resonate with the widest range of people. I don't think we should ever be looking for culture-fits. We should be looking for ‘culture-adds’: people who contribute to our culture that we don't have, who give us a perspective or a background or a skill set that we don't already have. We should stop expecting people to act like us because although a lot of our baselines are the same, they're not identical, right? We all have inherited some of the cultural norms and expectations and attitudes of the background that we come from. If you're not white, you're also often cosplaying as white, right? No one's doing it consciously. I don't think people who are in positions of power are saying, ‘I want you to behave exactly like me, be it in terms of race, gender, identity, education...’ but they're just saying, ‘I want you to behave in a way that I'm familiar with. I want you to behave in a way that I'm comfortable with. I want you to behave in a way that is non-threatening to me. And the thing that's least threatening to me is me.’
I think that's why for so long we used to look for culture-fits. Yes, it’s nice to have someone on your team you want to go to the pub with, but it might not be the thing that helps you to do good work. However, it doesn’t mean that you can hire individual people for culture-adds. Every single person has to be there because they add to the culture. It’s not enough to pretend that we are all the same and then add in an individual from an underrepresented background for a bit of diversity sauce on top. We had so many conversations about this in 2020 and then people hired “diverse employees” but what they generally did was they hired Black and global majority people at junior levels because they were inexpensive and they were easy to bring in, but they didn't do any work around addressing those higher levels. They didn't do any work to make those people feel safe or comfortable. Instead, they brought in these people, and highlighted their differences, but didn’t do any of the necessary work of making sure that the spaces that they had created, which they were bringing these new hires into, were fit for the purpose of being inclusive. Instead, they did what we’ve been talking about - they expected the new hires to edit and mould themselves into businesses' pre-existing image of professionalism and ways of working, without recognising that in order to lay the basic foundations for success the businesses themselves, their internal cultures, would also have to grow and adapt and change to be welcoming and safe spaces for people who they have historically excluded.
The problem is, there's no 'just do this solution' but businesses can start by being honest with themselves about who they have valued. They need to keep track not just of hires, but of promotions, of retention, and of pay gaps at a demographic level. Once they can see, clearly, and be honest with themselves about their values up to this point they can begin to readdress them, and strive for equality. But if they refuse to take stock of or responsibility for where they find themselves currently, they won’t make better choices going forwards.
After all, a business is a collection of people, and those people have to see and understand the issue, and care about it enough to make meaningful change to their habits, biases, and ways of working. But most people aren't willing to do that work. If they could sign a petition or post a black square and that would mean we have equality, I think most people would. But asking people to really examine themselves, their practices, their biases, and make long term deliberate change - that's much more work than most people have proven willing to make.
‘there's no 'just do this solution' but businesses can start by being honest with themselves about who they have valued.’
Tell us about a woman in publishing or the creative industries who inspires you.
It's tricky, because it's a huge group right? But as an author, I admire Fern Brady so much. She's having really necessary conversations about neurodivergence, in a way that's making people listen, her book is great, but also the authenticity she's showing in the promotion for it - doing interviews where she's unapologetic about who she is and how it's received, is really wonderful to see.
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