“Be the Olympic gold medallist in your own job”
Sue Campbell meets some of the team
Bouncing ideas off talented, driven individuals is part of everyday life at The Beans Group, but a couple of hours with the inimitable Baroness Sue Campbell earlier this month left a lasting impression on the team.
Chair of the Youth Sport Trust and former chair of UK Sport, Sue’s parallels with The Beans Group might not appear immediately obvious - but five minutes into her dynamic talk on taking yourself and others from ‘Good To Great’, it was clear this is a woman who shares our passion for helping young people to thrive.
Sue’s keen entrepreneurial spirit was something that spoke to our founders Michael and James in particular, after James’ idea for a final year project while studying at the University of Birmingham led to the company’s inception. Nine years later and The Beans Group employs 50 people in two cities, with huge and exciting plans for expansion - and Sue shared her experiences on doing something quite similar.
Starting out at public sector body UK Sport, Sue saw huge alterations needed to be made to drive the team to success in the 2012 Olympics. After months of observation, she made seismic changes to ensure each individual was reaching their potential, propelling the huge success of our Olympic team.
How? By asking herself what her 'moral purpose' was - not winning lots of medals, not pleasing the powers that be, but helping young people who believed they could be the best in their field, get every chance to achieve that. We aim to make students lives a little bit more awesome and with Sue’s help, we’re feeling more than capable.
Here's what we took away from Sue's powerful talk:
- Ask yourself what your 'moral purpose' is and commit to that
- Everyone has a valid contribution to make, hierarchy is not important
- What’s stopping you from being great? Imagine if there were no constraints - what would you do? Discuss those ideas with colleagues and make changes
- Be the Olympic gold medallist in your own job - you can’t always choose your motivation, but you can choose your attitude and commitment
- In difficult times, remember resilience, resourcefulness, moral purpose and innovation
- Be proud of who you are and play to your own strengths
Another awesome day at The Beans Group, we're already feeling like we won Gold.