Leadership Stories: Dana Denis-Smith

My relationship with “leadership” has evolved in the last decade, especially so since I founded Obelisk Support and I have had to consider how my leadership style impacts the team.

As I set off as an entrepreneur and employer and started to reflect more and more on the role of ‘leader’ I became aware I was holding very negative views of leadership as shaped by my growing up in communist Romania under what was widely considered one of the most horrific and repressive regimes in Eastern Europe.

Leadership was often perceived as a method to exploit and dominate and never through consensus-driven methods. Outcomes were terrible under this style of leadership with widespread suffering and huge restrictions around freedom – from movement to thoughts and just being yourself.

Private business was forbidden, and views about it were mixed with anti-capitalist propaganda of exploitation of the ‘working classes’. I hadn’t appreciated how deeply affected I was by these messages and experiences until I found myself a business owner and had to embrace leadership and its “positive” attributes.

I realized leadership can be a force for good, able to shape outcomes and divorced from greed. My business was solving a social issue: many women lawyers were being forced out of work due to a lack of flexible jobs available in the legal sector compatible with their desire to have a more flexible schedule to allow them to work and look after family.

I created a business to create flexible jobs in 2010 and to return talented lawyers after a career break to legal careers they worked hard to build. This was a bold move in times of huge dominance of presenteeism as a culture in the legal sector, but it taught me that leadership – with courage – can create positive outcomes and it is not a zero-sum game, as I had been led to believe as a child.

My leadership approach was to be inclusive and to ensure a win-win-win scenario for all those involved with our work – from clients to lawyer and to my HQ team.

In 2014, I also looked to take my baby leadership steps to the wider legal sector by founding the First 100 Years to celebrate the journey of women in law over the first 100 years. They were admitted to the profession from 1919. This showed me again that one can build a movement through a positive approach to messages and leadership – highlighting milestones, good and bad, and shaping a future that sees talent in all corners.

It’s been helpful, if painful at times, to have pitted 2 extreme versions of leaderships against each other – each a lived experience for me- and to see what works best and makes the most impact.

I can finally say I have made peace with being a leader and I am constantly working on myself – often with coaching help – to be the best version of leadership I can be.

I guess my first challenge was to learn English in a village with no English teacher as a teenager just out of communism. I had made the decision I wanted to become an international journalist primarily driven, I think, by my experience witnessing the collapse of an old regime. In Romania the violence and the transition that followed was extremely painful for a lot of people who did not have anyone to speak for them.

I wanted to be that voice on the global stage, but I decided I had to speak and write fluent English to do so. I had to petition the school leadership with the new education law in hand to allow me to take English for A levels and to cram 8 years of study in 2!

It was very hard work, with only the help of the BBC world service and second hand materials as my parents were too poor to pay for private tutors. Needless to say, I got my A and the rest is history.

It’s been amazing to look back to see I learnt English just at 16, managed to do my undergrad studies at the LSE in 2 years instead of 3, became a solicitor and now even hold an honorary doctorate in laws from the 4^th oldest English language university in the world, University of Glasgow!

• Don’t overthink leadership and go for it!
• Don’t accept the advice from people who tell you that you have to keep going on a leadership progamme to become a leader.
• Ask to do the leadership role and show you want it as opposed to being put on the slow lane to ‘prove’ you deserve it.
• Women are qualified and have amazing leadership attributes.
• Don’t let anyone convince you it’s not the time!
• Be bold –leadership needs courage!