The Culture Coach

E001: Be Her Lead: Creating space to empower the next generation

The Culture Coach

Published: 12 December 2022 at 16:28 Europe/London

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Episode notes

ABOUT THE CULTURE COACH:

We discuss all things culture - from creating a great company culture to what contributes to a toxic one. What does a strong culture look like? How do some organisations get culture so right, and some so very wrong? How can you create lasting, positive cultural change within organisations? These are the sort of topics we cover on The Culture Coach podcast.

EPISODE 001 - NELL BYRON. BE HER LEAD:

In our very first episode we sat down with Nell Byron, the director and co-founder of Be Her Lead - a non-profit social enterprise on a mission is to create intersectional feminist spaces in schools, delivering workshops for teachers and pupils across the UK.

Before leaving teaching to run Be Her Lead, Nell taught Spanish and worked as Deputy Head of Year 9 and Assistant Duke of Edinburgh Coordinator at Villiers High School in Southall, West London. She trained with Teach First after first working as an Advertising Sales Executive.

Nell is passionate about creating safe, nurturing environments within schools for young girls to be able to express themselves. She reveals how the pandemic and social media have been adversely affecting young women and girls, and the differences between boys and girls behaviour at school.

She tells us that through their focus groups at Be Her Lead, they discovered that the main emotions young women are feeling is stress and anxiety, and how this can be addressed by working with teachers to create bespoke programmes for their schools, creating open spaces and communities to learn and discuss everything from friendships and failures to periods and social media.

Nell reveals her top tips for creating positive cultural change within schools and organisations, and why listening to everyone is key. Be Her Lead currently run programmes in a total of 65 schools serving disadvantaged communities, training over 300 teachers to run workshops for over 900 girls aged between 8 and 18.

Topics:

Early context

The difference between boys and girls at school

Feeling inferior based on your gender

The impact of the pandemic on girls’ mental health

“33% of young girls feel sad most of the time”

Training teachers to support their student to be human beings

Social mobility and breaking down self-limiting beliefs

Does anyone ever ask if you’re happy?

The importance of community

Needing help doesn’t equal failure

Ticking boxes rather than changing the culture