Anita Roddick : Authentic Leadership

Identifying your leadership inspiration is proven to inspire action, raise performance levels and ignite creativity. In her latest blog, Think People Senior OD and Talent Consultant Nicola Thompson tells of her leadership inspiration, Anita Roddick. 

After a high heeled dash to The Europa Hotel, I caught my breath while standing in line to have my book signed.  I hadn’t read “Business as Unusual” yet but, as a young consultant still working out her professional identity, Anita Roddick was mesmerizing to me. I had read about her moral leadership, charity work and activism throughout my teenage years, an era when I was regularly doused in her White Musk scent. It was The Body Shop’s recycling ethos that had inspired my dissertation, so I thought that would be a clever thing to share with her.  It transpired however that she wanted to talk to me about being a Mum. 

She caught my eye from her spot at the table as I looked up from picking a dubious baby related mark off the shoulder of my suit jacket.  Or perhaps she had picked up on a mascara smudge from my little cry on the bus after leaving my tiny boy off at my folks’ house.  

A few well-dressed people later she took my book, beamed at me, and asked me my baby’s name.  In awe at her untamed hair and seeming disinterest in moving the queue along, I rambled and gushed, and she listened, with her entire face and body. I recall no quotable moments from that conversation, rather the overwhelming feeling of being truly seen.   

I took my seat for the keynote address in a daze, clutching my signed book, the year 2000 equivalent of a selfie.  She was taking her place at the front of the room just after I had read what she had written, and I hoped she saw the gratitude in my face. 

“To Nicola & Harry, love until it hurts!”  Then a sweeping arrow to a message for my baby boy: “Learn to give hot wet kisses that last a weekend, and clean up your room, and tell your Mum you adore her!”.  Jacinda Ardern is the only other leader that for me has come close to the authenticity that Anita Roddick role modelled.  I think they would have got along. 

My enduring leadership lesson from this precious encounter with the late, great Dame Anita Roddick is the inexplicable draw of authenticity.  Authentic leaders are self-aware, values driven, and can resolve conflict in honest and non-manipulative ways. Since authentic leadership is still in its infancy from a research point of view, its components and characteristics are open for debate.  But one feature that stood out for me that day was the draw of Anita’s kindness. Not difficult for any of us to emulate. In her own words: 

“The end result of kindness, is that it draws people to you”