Gina Buckney is a renowned leadership speaker, corporate transformation expert and two-time TEDx Global Speaker. With nearly 20 years of experience, she has held senior roles at BT and Lloyds, leading global teams and multi-million-pound programmes.
Now the founder of Your People Power, Gina helps organisations prioritise wellbeing and emotional intelligence. Her work is backed by studies from Harvard Medical School and the University of California.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Gina shares advice for women in male-dominated industries, discusses workforce challenges, and explains why empathetic leadership is vital for modern business.
What strategies would you recommend to women navigating imposter syndrome and bias in traditionally male-dominated sectors?
I think the best advice that I can give to any young female coming through in a male-dominated environment is to just be yourself.
I remember back to a time when it was one of my first interviews, actually, for a really big bank in the UK, and I’d got to the final stages of the interview. I remember walking into the room and there were nine or ten men in the room, and just me. It was my first real important interview out of university, and these guys were older than me, and it was all men.
You get that feeling of imposter syndrome. If you’ve heard of imposter syndrome, you’re thinking, “What am I doing here?” and you can really start to doubt yourself.
My best advice would be: just focus on your end goal of what you’re trying to achieve, and don’t let those worries and fears and self-doubt creep in. Just be you, because what you might bring to the table that those guys might not is a different flavour or a different style of communication.
Actually, at the end of that interview, I was the only person to get through to the next round. So all those worries of “Am I good enough? Am I old enough?” — some people might have — it’s not just about male and female here, we get worries about everything in life sometimes.
You’ve just got to hold yourself in a centred position to go, “I have value in being here. I’m here for a reason. I’ve got this far for a reason,” and just focus on that.
In light of recent workforce shifts, what emerging risks and structural challenges do you believe business leaders must prepare for in the years ahead?
Okay, that’s a really good question.
I think some of the biggest risks and issues that leaders are going to face are — one that I just mentioned — the fact that the resource pool, the flexible resource pool I should say, is wearing thin for a number of reasons.
One, we’re coming out of a pandemic — let’s pray that that is what’s happening, and we feel it, we all feel it, but we are coming out of it. But we’ve had a lot of changes in society and human nature. People have had time to reset, really re-evaluate what’s important to them.
You’ve had a pool of resource that used to work in the UK that have gone home to their native countries because they’re not able to work here anymore. You’ve got people that have retired — I’ve seen lots of people on my LinkedIn that have now retired because they’ve had a taste of a life where they can rest a little bit and enjoy life, and they’ve gone, “You know what? I’m in a fortunate position, maybe I don’t need to work another five, six years — whatever — I’ll retire now.”
So that’s left a lot of the top layer diminished.
Then you’ve also got the people that are like, “I just want to take a break and have a rest,” which is where I was pre-COVID — actually in a fortunate position to do that because I was burnt out.
The contractor resource and the flexible resource is worn thin. Add IR35 into the mix — I should have mentioned this — and most of those people pre-COVID were employed, so there isn’t that pool anymore.
The power has switched from the employer’s hands, where they could just switch people out, swap people out very quickly, to the employee or the prospective employee to say, “What do I want from an employer now?” or “Do I want to work all these hours? Do I want a better life?”
So employers and leaders really need to recognise this trend, and if they haven’t seen the stats that I talked about, they’ll feel what I’m talking about. They’re gonna feel it and they’re gonna go, “Yes, I recognise that.”
So it’s time to make a change — to really look at wellbeing and the fact that mental health is on the rise. You know, ten years ago it wasn’t spoken about in as much detail, and I know this from personal experience of the people around me that have gone through that suffering.
Now it really is mainstream with social media and everything that we’ve got that brings issues to the forefront. The corporate leaders need to take responsibility to understand that, and to put solutions in place to address it and to help their people.
I would say really, my biggest advice is just to educate yourselves. Become more knowledgeable in these things, and look for other solutions to your problem — because there is always more than one solution to the problem, and if your current solution has stopped working, you have to find other ways.
From a leadership perspective, what behavioural red flags might indicate growing mental health concerns in the workplace, and how can businesses respond early to prevent burnout?
I would say the warning signs for stress-related illness, if you’re a manager or a leader and you’re trying to spot this in your staff, some of the warning signs might be obvious ones — like people are taking days off sick, you know, they’re not coming into work or they’re not showing up for meetings.
I would say that people are maybe a little bit despondent. Sometimes they’re not really in the room — whether that’s a virtual room or physical — because a lot of the office space workers are still virtual at the minute.
So are they paying attention? Are they consuming information in the same way that they used to?
It’s looking at behaviours and saying, “Has anything changed in that person? Do I notice a different behaviour and a different pattern in the way that they’re working and responding?” I would say that’s a really good sign to look for.
Are they speaking to people about their situation? Because that could be one way of understanding, “Is there a problem?”
They might have confided in you. If you and I worked together, you might have confided in me. If you had, then I probably wouldn’t tell anyone — but if you’re a manager, maybe they’re confident in you, maybe you’re being told that there is an issue or they just need some space.
I’d say they are some of the key signs, and I would say productivity is the other key sign. We talked about it when we were talking about the working days lost. People don’t just have to be out of work to show that there’s stress there — they could be in work but not doing their job anymore in terms of being productive and hitting those targets.
There’ll be a reason for that, and as a leader and manager it’s your job to really understand what is the reason for the change in behaviour — but in a way that is approachable and caring and sympathetic, and not just assuming that they’re just being lazy, for example.
So I’d say for me, they are the key warning signs. There are probably many more on, you know, various health sites that you can look up, but I would just say: is there a change in behaviour?
This exclusive interview with Gina Buckney was conducted by Sophia Hayes of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
