This week we feature invisible mentor Pauline Crawford. Founder and Chief Executive at Corporate Heart.
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Interviewee Name: Pauline Crawford
Company Name: Corporate Heart
Website: http://www.corporate-heart.co.uk/
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Pauline Crawford: I’m an entrepreneur and what I’d like to call a thought leader because I work in the field of developing people to be resoundingly different. My thought leadership is around men and women and how we work in a new way. But I’m also a mother and grandmother and that’s also an important part of being an entrepreneur especially for a woman in today’s world. I thought I’d call myself a business psychologist and emotional economist. I’m very interested in how our behaviours and emotions affect how we work in the world.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Pauline Crawford: It’s always different. I’m a Gemini and a woman and I like variety in my life so I think what I like about being an entrepreneur is that you can work every hour of the day or you can take time off. I spend a lot of time meeting with clients, talking on the phone, and then also taking time out for myself. I’ve just started meditating, and going back to writing my book so I’ve set for myself a slightly different day. I think it’s already an important part of doing what I do to have that variety.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Pauline Crawford: I really love life and love to smile a lot. It’s not much good smiling with yourself so it’s about being with people. People really motivate me so on a typical day I make sure I get on the phone with a close friend, and I will go out and be with people. The other thing that motivates me is the possibility of changing things in the world that will impact my own children and grandchildren. So that’s something that always keeps me going – that kind of goal, that kind of vision.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Pauline Crawford: It’s a very interesting question because sometimes I think I could have done some things quicker, earlier if I’d started in a different way. But everything I’ve learned is part of where I am now. I wouldn’t do any thing differently. I think I would have enjoyed being more aware earlier in my life – the psychology of people helped me a lot but I wouldn’t actually change my life in the sense that I’ve had two parts of my life. One part which was very much being a mom who was involved in the community doing things and the other half being on this entrepreneurial track, and both have actually fed into each other so I think that’s good.
Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?
Pauline Crawford: The biggest discovery I’ve made over the last year is that one can do extraordinary things at any age. I made a decision last year to change my life a lot even though I was quite happy with where it was. I decided I would try things in a different way, so I sold up, I moved house, I didn’t buy another house, I got rid of everything. I wanted to see what it was like to let go of everything and start afresh in my life. But it was interesting having a different perspective, I saw my life in business and it’s moved me to a new part of my life which is looking towards becoming a TV Chat Show Host, which is going to be fantastic.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Pauline Crawford:
- My own resistance to change and I’ve just said I’ve countered that quite a bit last year by making specific changes in my life, but there is always a threat when you run your own business, that your resistance to it is high. You suddenly have one day when you think I can’t do this another day when it’s fine.
- Because I’m a thought leader, one of the threats is the fact that the world of business is quite fixed and fearful of change, and I’m in the business of encouraging people to change the way they do things.
- Being a pioneer and putting forward a slightly different view on life, you can be shut out quite a bit. Pioneers have arrows thrown at their backs. I handle that by believing in what I believe in. I do believe that we all have the potential to be much more than we are at the moment and that’s in my field of excellence which is looking at gender – men and women – that we could certainly live and work and behave in better ways than we do.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Pauline Crawford: Where it’s different is that it’s really focused on challenging my clients to have a different sense of who they are, and step outside the traditional norms. That’s not just for change sake, it’s because I think we do need change. People want things to change, but no change comes without being able to look within. Even if I work individual leaders or with leadership teams which I often do, they want to be in a better place, they want to work better, but they sometimes are not prepared to look inside and see what the elephant in the room is. So what I do which is unique is to mix personal evolution with learning business acumen. So the business part of it is very important as is how you do things, and there is a call for a lot of it in my work which is about being authentic and your natural self, which sometimes isn’t something that men and women in business, especially men have looked at. Men have a very separate view about business whereas with more and more women in the workplace businesses have to look at the personal side of life, the relationship side of life, and the service side of life.
I have a left and right brain mix. I’m a mathematician and an artist. I mix together frameworks, tools and techniques with whole body experience and get my clients to step into the space of a conversation about how they would like things to be, how they see the world that impinges on people in the room. The work is very much a mixture of left and right brain of hard-nosed exercises and living experiences.
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Pauline Crawford: I think my major challenge in my life was leaving my marriage, which did have an impact on my whole life because I had been married for 30 years. As I said before I have two halves of my life and I realized that the relationship had worn out of its purpose and energy and even though family values were really high – I had two kids, they were grown up by then. It was a tough decision but I knew I had to release in order to expand, and I’m proud that I did that with a reasonable sense of harmony. My children were fine about it, and after a period of time, my ex is a friend of mine now. Sometimes people stay in relationships, which are not good for them because they think they are going to hurt other people. That happens in all parts of life. I think that was my major challenge and my greatest success is doing it in a reasonable amount of harmony, and also staying friends.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Pauline Crawford: My biggest break was falling out with an employer. In the middle of being an entrepreneur, I had a period of a year where for various reasons after the break-up of my marriage, I went to work for somebody, and I thought this was what I would do, and obviously my entrepreneurial spirit was dying to get out. The guy I worked for was very traditional, and it was a big break for me because when we parted company, I set up Corporate Heart which was my consultancy, and it was based on the fact that we had fallen out and we were in a wonderful place. He paid me lots of money and I had a beautiful office but I wasn’t happy.
I looked around big organizations and thought what is it that’s not happening in business that creates broken corporate hearts. The Corporate Heart was born out of that break with him, and really that’s been the start of my career as a thought leader, and as a change maker because it made me think about who and what I was and wanted to do.
I think the other big break, when I thought about it, was actually Lehman Brothers collapsing. Again it might sound strange, but when Lehman Brothers collapsed, and the whole issue about women in business came to the fore, it gave me the opportunity to stand in the limelight with this subject matter, which is how do men and women work together to run major businesses. And that’s an arena that I work a lot in now. My two biggest breaks came from things that went wrong.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Pauline Crawford: During the period when I set up Corporate Heart, I was very much focused on how businesses work in a way that’s highly productive, highly profitable but honours human beings. The behaviour of human beings is very important. In 2005, I decided that I would air this debate. I would air this conversation, so I ran four quarterly debates through that year and they were all about wellness in the community, and business, and I invested a lot of money in these debates. They were very well attended, I had fantastic speakers, I had people from government, academics, and industrial leaders. I had a really good audience and everybody enjoyed the conversation, and everybody was saying, “Yes, yes we want change.”
And the reason I call it my biggest failure is that though it was a success for the people who attended, I got no business out of it. Apart from one or two conference speaking, I didn’t get the big business that I thought would happen. What I learned was that even though everybody loved the message, and they really wanted it to change, they weren’t ready to take it on board. The world wasn’t broken enough for them to invest in people in their own businesses to make it work in a healthy way. I wanted to help them do it. I found at the end of the year, I was client deflated – even though the events themselves were quite successful – because I expected my investment to return in contracts. Again I learned out of it because I went around it and broke down my offering in terms of small programs and started selling the program piecemeal rather than the whole transformation process and that worked much better.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Pauline Crawford: The toughest decisions have been about leaving relationships when you know that they are not working right. Leaving my husband was a life decision. I also left a couple of business partners after a period of six years. In one instance, it was with a woman, and we had worked fantastically well for five years, but for whatever reason, in the sixth year we had different viewpoints on where we wanted to go with the business. Those are tough decisions, because in the businesses that I am in, you become friends with whoever you’re working with, and leaving any relationship, needs to be done in a way that’s mutually understood. In both situations it’s often challenging. With my husband who is now my ex, I did it in a way to the best of my ability that was harmonious. I wouldn’t say that it was always achieved in both cases, but I think leaving relationships at the right point, and not continue to live and work with people who are draining you is a very big part of my philosophy because you do not serve them in good purpose by staying.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Pauline Crawford: In a way this is like three parts in my life.
- One of the biggest events is my fortune to be born into a very gregarious, loving family, but one that encouraged me to be independent. Though I had the safety of a fantastically loving family, and a big family, we were encouraged to be independent. When I left to attend university, it was a great lesson to me that I could be independent and still be part of my family community.
- The second event was marrying and having kids. Though I wouldn’t say I’m an earth mother type of mom, actually going through the process of marrying and having kids had a huge effect on my own life, in terms of understanding myself, the commitment and responsibility you have to other bodies and understanding how that all comes together.
- The third was not so much getting into business, I kind of fell into that, but actually becoming a stage performer, which happened by accident. I was invited to do something very early on in my business life where I ended up on a stage in front of an audience of about 60, and I thought, “Wow, I really enjoy this.” I discovered that that kind of performance as well as my one-to-one and my team work which I love, was actually being on a stage was the most exciting thing, and I wanted to do more of that. So I think a happy accident was a turning point in my life because prior to that I had never dreamed that I would ever be on a stage.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Pauline Crawford: This is a follow-up to that stage performance. I was invited to do a performance, and this was in front of a major bank, Barclays Bank in the UK. What I really liked about it, and why it was important to me, was I was invited to design the whole program, the set, and the questions. I was interviewing some top women but also presenting my key subject, and doing question and answer. The whole event was not my performance, but the design, delivery and filming of it. And it really confirmed to me that this is something that I really want to do in a bigger way on national and international stages. So for me, that was a really great accomplishment. We had about 240 people in attendance, half of which were somewhere around the world listening in, and half was in the room. I was in total control, so I was very proud of that. I got a resounding round of applause at the end.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Pauline Crawford: Mentors have influenced me face-to-face and through books, but always in conversation and wise words and actions. It’s sometimes from my family as well. My father and mother were very sociable people – there was always a lot of conversations. My father always seemed to know everything and was an amazing mentor to me. Sadly he is not with me now, but he would always know the answer to everything. And in later years, my mother likewise, and after my father died I got to know her more, and she was very intelligent and interested in people. And in her nineties, she would talk about politics or social issues and I think they were leading the way.
Other mentors are people in the public arena such as Oprah Winfrey, Nelson Mandela, and the Dalia Lama, people I find inspiring because they are saying things that I’m interested in. I also have personal mentors who are quite spiritual people in my life and they can be any age. I find it’s really important to keep those conversations going more and more, that’s why I think your site is wonderful.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Pauline Crawford: I think the key message is around love and compassion and being universal in your view of the world – that everyone has something that is of value, as well as one’s self. The key message is to be a giver and receiver and to take everybody for who they are.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Pauline Crawford: My advice is that everything you need to know is already within you. It’s our life’s journey to uncover our life gifts and to give them back to the world, and when you feel fear, to know it’s only a gift to look inside for another key. That would be my message to people, and only if we would do that in the world, we would get a lot further.
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