New Leeson Life

I had a Bloody Good Cry yesterday. A 'BGC', if you will. My friends will tell you that I am a pretty good crier.  A sweepstake was taken at my wedding to see how long it took before I welled up (I confounded the lot of them by not shedding a single tear on the day and then bawling like a baby a week later on honeymoon when we renewed our vows with Elvis in Vegas. Go figure.) I cry for many reasons - hormones, tiredness, frustration, happiness, acts of kindness. I used to be ashamed of it. It isn't good to cry, so society will tell you. Big girls don't. Babies do. It's weak, unprofessional, manipulative, selfish, makes other people feel bad and you look bad. So many reasons to bottle it up, keep a stiff upper lip. But these days I am not ashamed of it, and here's why: Science Crying is one of your body's ways of getting rid of chemicals that you don't need, and generating those that make you feel better. When you have a BGC you shed hormones and ch...

Contentious topic. Especially as people in this space get very excited on blogs and t'internet. I know I'm venturing into the lions den. Or at least the monkey enclosure.  But I need to talk about in-house recruitment. I have an issue with the way we're doing it. By 'we' I mean businesses, HR, people who are 'doing it'. I should caveat this entire post by saying that one of the teams I'm responsible for is an in-house recruitment team. A bloody brilliant in-house recruitment team as it happens. This blog is not about them. Further disclosure: this is also my own heritage. I'm not talking about any of the places I've worked before.  Having established that I am actually speaking with no live first-hand knowledge on this, I'll plough on... My main issue with in-house recruitment is the model of origin that a lot of businesses base it on. Namely, the recruitment agency model. While there are lots of similarities between agency re...

This is the transcript of a talk I gave to Northampton School For Girls on International Women's Day. It was a 30 minute talk, so for that reason is longer than my usual posts! Before I began I asked each of them to write down the positive things that made them unique. Their core values, strengths, abilities, personality traits. (I also talked a bit about the business I work for. Because this is a personal blog I've taken that part out.) So. What am I going to talk to you about?  I was going to talk to you about International Women’s Day. I was going to talk about how today should have been my birthday, which would have made my feminist mother proud, except I came two days early instead. I could have talked about how that was a good metaphor for my impatience and the ways in which we can unwittingly confound our parents’ expectations. I was going to talk to you about all the things that my mother’s generation achieved for women, and all the things we still need t...

As part of my work over the past few years I've spent a lot of time in project meetings relating to HR Systems implementations - first UK wide, now global. I'm not a systems guru, or an IT geek (in fact the thought of me tinkering around with tech would make my brother - our family's actual IT guru - cry with laughter) but I love a problem to solve and the utopia of reliable, accessible, agile data that drives all the transformational activity we as a business want to achieve is one I've been determined to reach. Consequently, solving that problem landed with me.  It's not glamourous. In fact if you want to send most HR and operational people into a mild coma, you could do worse than start talking about data fields and user profiles and interfaces. The challenge with HR and systems is that HR people LOVE the front end. They are crazy about shiny techy toys, about getting stuff online, about social and intuitive and all that jazz. But they don't want to lift th...

I have done a very silly thing. With just 13 months to go until my 40th birthday I have signed myself up to be in a dance show. It all began rather innocently when I found out about this brilliant dance studio, run by ex-West End and Royal Ballet dancers that offer classes for all ages and abilities. I danced in my teens and early twenties and it was my first love, before even Jason Donovan. I wasn't bad at it either. So when I found this place I wanted to recapture some of the pure joy that dancing first gave me. And it was cool because, along with the very bendy glamourous young things, and the cutest toddlers in tutus you've ever seen, there are enough other 'old birds with day jobs' to make me feel safe. And, oh, its brilliant. I adore it.  Except this week something happened. With just 5 weeks to go until this show (that seemed like a great idea at a distance) reality has hit us. You see, we aren't dancers. We don't do this every day. We are a bit s...

I love writing. I enjoy the way it organises my thoughts. The way it allows me to think a thing through to a conclusion of kinds without interruption. But I haven't done much of it recently. Partly because of, you know, life. Partly because the last but one time I wrote a post - on what HR isn't - some charmer felt the need to respond with a comment along the lines of "I think the lady doth protest too much". Which I took to mean "Yeah, yeah, HR is whatever I say it is so stop pretending to be something you're not and take some notes in my disciplinary woman". Ironically I think he was trying to sell me his services. Not ironically, I think he had a point.  HR is what other people think it is. And lots of people think it's something akin to a note-taking, argument-refereeing, employment-tribunal-avoiding, counselling service. I sat in a seminar the other week, surrounded by senior HR types, with a panel discussion on  how organisations with clear ...

So, it's exam time. Which means that around about now thousands of knackered excitable university students are getting ready to launch themselves onto the job market. My own graduation was fifteen years ago. I like saying that because the fact that I took two years to decide what to do about university now makes it seem like I'm two years younger than I actually am. Top tip, handy hint there for A Level students - take a few years out, pretend you're younger than you are later in life. OK, maybe not the best top tip, handy hint I'll offer in this post, but you need to start somewhere. I've interviewed quite a few fresh faced graduates over the past 15 years or so. I've even employed a few. So I thought it may be useful to share some of my advice and the stuff I wish someone had told me as I readied myself to enter the world of work. Get over yourself That degree that you've just spent the past three or four years sweating blood and vodka for? The o...