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In this conversation you will meet Leanne Cahill, the Chief Executive of Bravissimo. I could have spent all day talking to her. She is ‘real’ and she sits confidently in her leadership space and the opportunity and responsibility she has as the custodian of their business culture.
Leanne was born with one hand and shares with us the challenges that she experienced as a child growing up while being a bit different. Her story is captivating. It’s the story of being human and wanting the best for yourself. And it’s the story of someone for whom their career success mattered to them from the get-go.
Her brand is characterised by navigating awkward moments and finding work-arounds to barriers. She doesn’t let the tough stuff eat her up. She learns, she is practical as she applies learning in all phases of her career. And her career is impressive.
Leanne starts her career at 16 with a part-time job in McDonald’s. It is customer-facing and fast paced. And it requires her to handle a lot of equipment. It does not enter her head that there may be any challenges.
In our conversation we talk about her career and her path through university, a junior management placement with M&S, how she specialised in finance and moved down to London to start her accountancy exams. We discuss how she went up the ranks in retail and professional services firms and then found her way to Bravissimo.
Leanne tells us how she makes conscious choices about how to meet and greet others and remove the awkwardness from situations. She does this in a way that does not diminish her brand but enhances it. She used humour and stories and she shares her vulnerability to build trust in her relationships and within the organisations that she leads.
We discuss the positive consequences that come from being a leader with visible limb difference which could well be one of the reasons why the disability metrics at Bravissimo are better than the average.
These interviews are brought to you with thanks to remarkable people choosing to share their learning about developing inner confidence so that others can learn faster. The first tranche of six films is brought to you with thanks to LSEG who are working to build a culture of belonging for everybody and accessibility is a key part of that. Once you have listened, we ask one thing from you: send the link to the film to five others who you think might be able to pass on the messages to five others.
We are on a mission at PurpleSpace to cascade a universal definition of inner confidence as a strong expectation of a positive outcome and to share the practical things we can do to navigate our working worlds while managing disability.
Enjoy this episode.
