Leading In The Time Of Virus
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 224: Nicki Sprinz
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business.
This episode is part of Season 2 - which we’ve sub-titled, “Leading In The Time Of Virus”.
In today’s world, leadership means meeting the challenges of two viruses - COVID-19 and racism.
In this environment, unlocking creative thinking has never been more critical
This conversation is with Nicki Sprinz. She’s the managing director of B-corp digital product studio ustwo. In the six years that she has been with the company, she has eradicated the company’s gender pay gap .
In her past, she’s been a journalist for the Sunday Times and The Guardian, before going on to work in the NHS. She also co-founded Ada’s List in 2013, a supportive global community of more than 3,000 women working in tech.
That is an extraordinary list of achievements. What makes her story even more compelling is what she has overcome in her personal life long before her professional life began.
As a teenager she overcome viral encephalitis- a life threatening illnesses that forced her to literally learn how to walk and talk again. And then she overcame Graves disease.
As a leader, she has brought gender pay equity to her business. A challenge at which most businesses are absurdly still failing. And she brings relentlessly positive and upbeat energy with her.
As Anne Richards once famously said, “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.”
She left out, with a smile.
In an era in which we are faced with enormous challenges, challenges that some days seem insurmountable, Nicki’s story serves to me to as a reminder of what human beings are capable of.
And what women leaders are capable of.
Here’s Nicki Sprinz.
Charles: (01:59)
Nicki, welcome to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Nicki Sprinz: (02:02)
Thank you very much for having me.
Charles: (02:04)
Tell us where you are at the moment and who you are with.
Nicki Sprinz: (02:08)
So I'm in London in lockdown with my 12 month year old, seven year old, and my partner and it's hot as well. And I think it's particularly difficult as you say, we're just not a city designed for that at all. But we will have our health. So it's okay.
Charles: (02:27)
That's a perfect segue actually, because there was a period of time in your life where you did not have your health. You suffered from viral encephalitis growing up. That's right, right?
Nicki Sprinz: (02:37)
Yeah, no, that's right. I've actually had, I suppose, two big illnesses. I haven't written about the other one, but when I was 13, I had something called viral encephalitis, which is inflammation of the brain stem. And so I was temporarily paralyzed for quite some time. We were on holiday in Majorca as a family. I was flown back by air ambulance after being in intensive care there and then slowly recovered at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital here in London. And then much later actually I also had something called Graves' disease, which is an autoimmune disease at the endocrine system. So I've had both the kind of, I guess, a nervous system illness and also a endocrine system illness.
Charles: (03:18)
And what caused either one of those? Do you know?
Nicki Sprinz: (03:22)
No. Viral encephalitis I learned to understand is a diagnosis by sort of omission. So you test for a number of things. When I was first hospitalized, they thought maybe I had a brain tumor, then they thought I had thrombosis. When I was flown back to the UK, they tested for other things. It can be... They did discover that I had had glandular fever when they did a lumbar puncture. And I believe it's a viral thing that there are lots of causes for, but we never understood. And then Graves' disease is essentially a kind of genetic predisposition that can be brought on by stress or a particular set of circumstances. But again, I'm not sure of either. What I suppose I have learned is I'm a survivor, which I sort of take quite a lot into my everyday life that I sort of try and have that outlook of no matter how bad it's going to get, there will be a way through this.
Charles: (04:16)
The viral encephalitis took a long time to recover from, right? You had to sort of teach yourself how to move again.
Nicki Sprinz: (04:23)
Yeah. I mean, I had to learn how to walk, to speak, because the whole of the left-hand side of my body was paralyzed. I'm left-handed. And I was sort of barely at school for about a year. And then I became this very, I guess, protected person in my family, as well. So I was forever tired. I had permanent headaches. But I did make this fantastic recovery and I talk now, I guess, as a leader about what was the kind of 95% recovery, but this 5% both having been pregnant twice is hugely exacerbated. So the first time I was pregnant, I actually had to see a neurologist because they were concerned that I was having symptoms to do with my pregnancy. And in fact, it was just to do with a legacy hangover of having had viral encephalitis.
Charles: (05:13)
What was your mindset as you were going through the recovery of that? Because I imagine as a teenager where everybody else around you is literally running around and growing up fast and hugely active. Social dynamics are such an important part of that particular part of our lives as well. How did you literally fight your way through that? What was your mindset?
Nicki Sprinz: (05:33)
I mean, I think I was pretty lost. I mean, I talk now with my parents that we were all so overjoyed that I'd recovered, that I was alive, that sort of the Irish relatives weren't praying anymore for my survival, that we skipped over the part of what is that like as a 13 year-old to go through a process of losing your ability to communicate, being absolutely petrified, and then essentially having to almost opt out of school and not have the teenage rebellion until many years later. And I definitely did have several rebellions, much to my parents' disappointment.
But I do think that the mindset piece was, I flitted between those two extremes, I think of, “Wow, you've only got one life and you have to live it to the full,” which of course is the positive outcome, but also the other end of the spectrum, which is much more this destructive, “My body's let me down. I might as well just go out and sort of, I don't know much later on, get drunk, push myself to the extremes.” And particularly actually that came to the fore with Graves' disease because one of the side effects there is that you can lose proper use of your quads and your bicep muscles. It's a sort of a weird quirk where they turn almost to jelly. And my body was so physically exhausted when I was at university, but I sort of pushed it to extremes. How drunk could I get? How late could I stay up working? What could I do to sort of push my body to the absolute extreme?
Charles: (07:05)
How has that affected your mindset today in terms of how you see yourself? Do you still see yourself as a survivor? Do you see yourself as somebody who's always pushing the limits? What's your mindset now?
Nicki Sprinz: (07:16)
I mean, I think age has put some wisdom, probably not enough. I'm sure there's more I'm going to learn. And so I think I've moved more into an acceptance of understanding my limits. That certainly wasn't something that I recognized in my teenage years or my 20s at all. And I do sometimes think of myself as a survivor. And what I mean more by that is just that no matter how difficult something is, we can get through it. And I suppose, as a leader, I try to bring a level of empathy where I start from a position of knowing that we don't know what anyone's story is in the room. We don't know what pain they're going through or what their journey might have been. And that's particularly actually relevant to one of ustwo's, where I work, one of the biggest values, which is be human. And that really is always sharing empathy and leading by example. So I think that's something that I've learned.
Charles: (08:13)
Do you worry about your health now? I mean, have you turned into a hypochondriac or have you gone the other way? How do you wake up in the morning?
Nicki Sprinz: (08:21)
I am not a morning person. So waking up in the morning is my least favorite thing to do, but I would say that I'm quite blasé actually. I think I need to sort of feel very sick to take that seriously, more because I think I've just learned to know my body better. So I've become more accustomed to, "Oh, wow, I've had a headache three days. I'm not doing something right." Versus, "Oh, I've got a headache. There could be something seriously wrong."
Charles: (08:50)
So from an emotional standpoint, how have you dealt with the pandemic?
Nicki Sprinz: (08:55)
Yeah, I mean, look, it's tough, right? It's obviously been hugely tough for a number of people in different ways. And as I said at the very beginning, I'm very lucky, all of my family and people I know very close to me have all still got their health. And I'm very grateful for that. From a practical perspective, we're all working from home. We recently declared that we wouldn't be returning to the studio until April 2021. That was quite a positive moment, I think, because we were living in a lot of uncertainty. I think everyone's living in the day. And I find a very good reminder is that you are not working from home or working remotely. You are living at work in a pandemic. I mean, I think I didn't coin that phrase, someone far smarter than me used that, but I think that is the correct analogy.
And so practical ways is we've been teaching. The schools are shut, so there's been childcare, cooking, cleaning, teaching, trying to also do the day job. So introducing a lot more flexibility and understanding. And I think taking it day to day is a big practical part of surviving this.
Charles: (10:06)
So as you are taking it day to day, what do you see, and you talked about the fact you're not going back into the office until April 2021, how do you marry those two pieces? How do you marry the, “We've got to build a plan, we have to build a vision for what the future could look like.” And we have to deal the very real present day reality of, “It's 95 degrees in London. There's no air conditioning, I've got three kids. I've got to worry about their education. I've got to keep this business going.” How do you juggle all of that?
Nicki Sprinz: (10:36)
I think that's one of the biggest challenges of being a leader at the moment. And I try and focus on a balance between honesty, reassurance and I guess realism, and some hope in there as well for good measure. And what I mean by that is sometimes you need to draw a line like we did around the decision that we're going to return in April 2021. We don't actually know what the future knows... What the future holds, sorry. But we do know that some people were struggling with this sort of unknown concept of how long are we going to be working from home.
So I think you've got to do some things that are just about the today and that might be stylistically when you start every meeting, you have a check-in and you just say, "How are you?" And you pause to enable everybody to share how they're feeling. So that's sort of the day to day element. But other things that you do need to craft a strategy that talks about what might 2021 look like for the businesses and clients we're working with, even if you're going to have to review that every few weeks or even leave it in the drawer because we have to abandon all of those plans. And that makes it hard to be a leader, but it's also hard for everybody who's working with us and part of the team, right? So it comes with the job.
Charles: (11:50)
Within the context of all of that you have been a huge, not just proponent of, but hugely effective within the environments that you are responsible for closing the gender gap, certainly from a pay standpoint. And I'm interested to know how else. How do you maintain your focus on those issues? Which obviously are everyday issues that have to be constantly monitored and checked and brought together, right? Those things don't just happen automatically. There's no automatic pilot for those things. How do you maintain your focus and your commitment and your ability to close the gender gap within the environment that we've already talked about that you're currently living in?
Nicki Sprinz: (12:30)
I mean, I think it's harder. So this year we published that our gender pay gap is minus 1.84%. So effectively, the minus means that it's 1.84% in favor of women. And that has been a fantastic journey since 2016 where our gender pay gap was 13%. And to your point around the gender component, is it more than pay? When we did that report for April this year, it was actually a 50/50 split between those who identify as men and those who identify as women in the studio, which was a really extraordinary moment because it wasn't just about the pay gap reporting. And we've also got more balance in the kind of levels and hierarchy.
But to your original point, I think it's just trying to, again, keep hold of that real focus of, what are the things that we really care about. I'm working with an extraordinary team and we have such a committed people team. We have a self-organizing diversity committee, a diversity and inclusion committee. So a group of represented individuals from across the studio who meet on a monthly basis, talk about the things that we're concerned about, ensure that we're paying attention to the issues that we raised before and that they're not being dropped.
I mean, I do think, obviously in a pandemic, some things are going to get dropped. I hope this isn't one of the issues and I certainly will be holding myself to account on that point. I know I've recently been doing some mid-year check-ins with people and everyone so far, the top goal has been, survive, that kind of, survive the pandemic. Even though there are lots of things that we all want to do and achieve, actually, there is just this, let's get through the day.
Charles: (14:11)
Yeah. And it's hard to move past that, isn't it, with everything that's going on. And yet I'm conscious of the fact that I think the companies that are going to thrive coming through this and the leaders that are being most effective are the ones who are able to juggle that longer, maybe not long, but midterm vision anyway, with the present day reality. And are able to imbue that with an orientation towards a consistent set of values that create some cohesion among the people that work with them and for them. What are you focusing on in terms of keeping people together? How do you make sure that people are really feeling supported and that they are working cohesively?
Nicki Sprinz: (14:57)
This is a great question. And I think particularly the point you made around values, I think that's really important. I think organizations that are values-driven and have always had a real kind of buy-in to those set of values and everyone's behind them will actually do better in this time. So at ustwo, oh my God, I'm already putting myself up for a test, but at ustwo, our values are be human, raise the bar, use the freedom, learn together and enjoy the journey. And enjoy the journey is this piece where we collectively celebrate the successes and failures and we celebrate those wins. We have those moments.
So for example, we've always had a Friday afternoon company meeting, which is completely run from the ground up. There's a kind of voluntary host and people talk about the work or interesting things that they're doing. And because it's Friday afternoon, that's always a tricky time. You might argue, "It's not the most inclusive. Some people who've got kids might have to pick them up from school." Amazingly in this pandemic era, we've had the best attendance we've had ever since that meeting started. So everybody tunes in no matter where they are. I'm often not working on a Friday just so that I can pick my kids up from school at least one day a week. And I'll dial in kind of with the baby on my lap and people are giving updates and they're sharing things. And it's really fantastic.
So that's one touch point, but we're actually having a conversation at the moment about what rituals might have to change, because at the beginning there was loads of enthusiasm for things like Through the Keyhole. So people would post photos of their bedroom or kitchen and we would guess. And there was amazing engagement on Slack, which is a brilliant tool in the pandemic era. But obviously over time, once we moved from that period of, "Oh, wow, this is a bit of a shock," to, "Oh, this is our everyday lives for a while," now we really need to focus on, "Okay, meetings are draining. This Zoom fatigue is very real. You're all being extraordinarily productive. But in fact, are we asking too much, what things are we going to put in place so that we kind of connect and have those touch points?" So we're going to have a series of focus groups over the next couple of weeks where people share what would be really valuable for them.
Charles: (17:12)
I want to go back for a second to gender equality because obviously within the current world in which we live, there is an enormous focus on anti-racism and racial equality.
Nicki Sprinz: (17:22)
Yes. Yes.
Charles: (17:25)
It's easy, I think for people to conflate the two that if you're interested in gender equality, then racial equality comes along for the ride or vice versa. That's not true, I think. And it's also easy, I think for organizations to get focused on one and to kind of not be very good at dealing with the other. How are you approaching both of those? How are you approaching racial equality, given your success in getting closer to gender equity?
Nicki Sprinz: (17:52)
I actually think it's one of my failings. I would say that as a leader, I think perhaps five years ago, I was not paying enough attention to anti-racism. And I would acknowledge myself that far too much of my feminism was too easily, a white feminism. And that's a journey that I myself sort of in the past five years have gone on. In the studio, we've had a very active conversation before the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, because actually that's been around for nine years, but particularly brought to the fore recently with the horrendous multiple killings of black men and women in the US particularly. But actually the UK is not exempt either.
We have been talking for the last year that the racial and ethnic diversity in the studio has dropped in the last year. And so we have now set very intentional targets that we wish to mirror our local community. So what that means is instead of saying, “The UK,” our studio's actually in London. London is a very diverse city. And so we have given ourselves, for example, the target of saying our studio is currently 6% black. We want to ensure that we are 13% black by X date, or try as best we can and ensure that we use that type of target to frame, where are we investing in initiatives? And how are we talking about not just diversity, but what does inclusivity mean? Because I think it's all very well to spend additional time on recruitment and that is important. And we recognize that we need to do better in terms of the networks that we recruit in.
But if you recruit people and they don't actually feel at home and they aren't able to look up and see someone who looks like them. And that for me, was a big driver on the gender equality piece. I arrived at ustwo, a fantastic company. I looked upwards, there wasn't a single person who looked like me. And so I beat that drum for a long time there. And I think there's a similar argument for a lot of the underrepresented groups at ustwo, as well. So we're on that journey and we know that we need to do better.
Charles: (20:02)
And how do you do that? Or maybe better put, that must be even tougher in an environment in which you can't come together as a group. I mean, obviously you can do screen shares and so on, but I think we all know that three-dimensional connection with each other is just a different experience, right? On all kinds of different levels. How do you create that? Not just awareness of the issue and not even the strategy towards it, but I mean, to get to gender pay equity is a cultural achievement. I mean, you've changed the culture to be able to do that. It's not just practices because people find ways around practices. You must have an enormous, overwhelming company-wide commitment to wanting to achieve that. How do you go about doing that, embedding a new set of cultural expectations when you can't physically get together?
Nicki Sprinz: (20:54)
100%, I think you're right. It is cultural commitment. And I think step one is that actually there is huge engagement in the studio. So already grounds up, people in London created Black Lives Matter channels. People came together whilst at a distance at the protest, people shared imagery. We started a ustwo-sponsored library share. So essentially we bought a whole host of books and multiple copies, but people forwarded them on and they might have shared a review or sent something on to the reader. So there's a huge amount of buy-in already. I think actually the challenge for us is, we know we want to do something and we know we want to be better educated. And we know that we ourselves might be part of the problem. How do we go about doing that?
So I think, I feel quite lucky as a leader, knowing that there is a lot of cultural support for us doing better. It's more of the practical question of how do we do that? But I agree with you, ultimately in many ways, finding a successful way to navigate between how you would all come together and have conversations in person, then translating that to this very remote life, it is hard. But we're doing workarounds. We have something called a picnic where we used to meet in a shared space and we'd bring food and people could ask us whatever question matters. So basically, it was a bit like ask the leaders questions. And then once perhaps leaders had responded, people from the studio would pipe up and share their point of view. And we now do that remotely and it works quite well. I wouldn't say it's as good, but it's working.
Charles: (22:32)
Actually, I want to go back to your own list for a second through the lens of the pandemic. I think when this thing showed up and March hit us all like a ton of bricks and our lives changed so fast. I mean, it was days, right? We went from kind of thinking, "Well, it's a thing, but we've got this thing planned next week,” to suddenly shutting it all down and going home or staying home. And then there have been various sort of emotional currents over the last few months as we got used to that. And we were surprised at how well it worked and it was more efficient. And in fact, we were seeing each other through more authentic and honest lenses and wasn't that great. And this was going to change the nature of work. And then summer showed up and summer didn't bring the kind of relief from the pandemic that some people had told us it would. And so another kind of level of depression set in.
There's so many different ebbs and flows of this thing. And it strikes me that at least on some levels, it must have some parallels to the way your illness hit you as a teenager. And I'm just wondering, based on your experience of going through the highs and lows, ups and downs of that process, observing where we are now from a societal standpoint and seeing what comes next, what do you think is the right mindset to get to the other side? This is longer lasting than we thought, there's more work to get to the other end than we thought. We're not really sure what the other end looks like. Can we restore ourselves to some version of what the past looked like? How much of it is going to be different? Based on your personal experience and also your professional experience, how do you think we need to look at what the next period of our lives looks like in order for us to come out the other side in as healthy and as positive a way as possible?
Nicki Sprinz: (24:19)
Wow, I love that you don't ask easy questions. That's a great question. I think one of the first things on my mind is, how do we effectively as a society move from survival to thriving. And I do think somewhere in there is the answer in the sense that, survival is very short term, right? You just lurch from hour to hour, from day to day, maybe if you're lucky from week to week, but it's no longer term than that. And it means that we are frankly, exhausting ourselves because the amount of adrenaline that you end up using constantly sort of being in that fight or flight mode, "Are we going to get through today? How will I get through today? I'm exhausted," is quite difficult. And as you say, then there's been the ups and downs of depression.
I'm hopeful though that one of the things that may come out of this whole experience, and one of the things that we may societally learn from or come together from is sort of a kinder approach to life. Very early on, we saw in the UK and I can only speak to that experience, an amazing sense of community, a real spirit in the way that people who couldn't leave their homes were looked after by neighbors. Coming out and supporting the NHS, but not just by clapping, actually by donating large sums of money, people wanting to volunteer to do things, food bank donations. And so I do wonder if one of the ways that we will come through this in a positive way is actually being able to rely on others, accepting the kind of vulnerable element of ourselves and that human nature to actually want to be a social supportive creature, even in an environment which says social distancing.
And in fact, that's one of my biggest issues with that label is it's physical distancing. It's not social distancing. We can still be there to support each other. And I think that's particularly important because people are lonely. And if I relate it back to my illness, it's a lonely time. And even now I find it quite a lonely existence. We have to constantly find new ways to check in because we can't just turn up on someone's doorstep. So I think that's going to be the cool part.
I think the other piece is entirely what we were talking about earlier. You just have to find a way to balance today with the future, even if you have to change the strategy for what the future looks like. So it might be that today, you say, "I think we're going to be back in the office or studio by this date. I think these kind of clients are going to grow by X% and we're going to make these kind of hiring plans." And maybe you'll have to adapt them, but giving people that sense of certainty and reassurance is an important part of the survival process too, I think.
Charles: (27:14)
What have you learned about yourself over the last few months?
Nicki Sprinz: (27:17)
I always knew I was an extrovert, which often people misinterpret as someone who enjoys being loud at parties, which I don't. But I do get my energy from other people. I love being around other people. And so it's not necessarily a learning, but it is definitely been sort of that sense of understanding has been exacerbated. I find it quite lonely, not being around my team and the people I work with, who I really respect. So that energy, I have to find that energy from somewhere else. So I've learned that digital chats, as lovely as they are, just aren't the same. And I find them incredibly draining.
I think I've also learned that I can be quite focused. So I used to run in my 20s and since having kids, I sort of slightly dropped that brilliant, healthy activity. And lockdown has given me that opportunity to get my fitness back. At the very beginning in the UK guidelines, where you were only allowed to leave the house to exercise once a day. And I absolutely did exercise every single day. That was sort of my moment of freedom. And so I was out there running and I'm sort of really pleased to have got that back on track.
Charles: (28:31)
It does make a huge difference, doesn't it? I've found the same thing. Last question for you. What are you afraid of?
Nicki Sprinz: (28:39)
What am I afraid of? I think at the very beginning, I was very much feeling that burden as a leader, that I was responsible for all these people and their mortgages. And so there was that moment very early on. And all of the leaders in the company were feeling that, are we going to survive this? And are we going to have jobs for our people? I think now what I've learned is that we're quite fortunate in terms of the fact that the pandemic has brought a real urgency to digital and being able to create new digital services and products. And so that has sort of faded in terms of the fear, but it's always there. Am I going to be able to ensure that the people I work with can pay their mortgages? This is sort of a very real fear.
Charles: (29:33)
Thank you so much for taking the time today. I really appreciate your energy and your spirit. I think we need a lot more of it and I'm glad you're around to provide it.
Nicki Sprinz: (29:43)
Thanks so much, Charles. I really enjoyed chatting and thanks for the great questions, too.
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