Hannah Reid | The Room | Punk Rock Media

Who's already in the room. "I didn't necessarily consider myself punk, but misfit definitely resonated." — Hannah Reid, CEO, Community Action Suffolk. “I’m a managed disruptor — so perhaps ‘Business Misfit’ is a good description!” For Hannah Reid, CEO of Community Action Suffolk, The Punk Rock Playbook® for Business Misfits came along at an interesting point in her leadership journey. Chapters within made her challenge the way she thinks about wellbeing and following her instincts. Hannah didn’t follow a conventional route to leadership. Her career has taken her through the private and public sectors and even running pubs before she moved into the charity sector 14 years ago — when she joined Community Action Suffolk. Now CEO of the charity, an infrastructure organisation supporting charities across the region, she has spent the past three years navigating significant change and helping to build strong foundations for the organisation’s future. Hannah has built a new senior leadership team and reshaped the organisation with one overriding ambition: to leave behind an organisation capable of standing firmly on its own. That sometimes requires challenging established thinking. I consider myself a managed disruptor. I come from a commercial background, so I bring a slightly different mindset to the sector. “When I saw the title of the book, I didn’t necessarily consider myself ‘punk’, but ‘misfit’ definitely resonated.” Rethinking the ‘sales’ conversation (Chapter 8) One of the biggest challenges for any charity is income generation, particularly creating unrestricted income that gives the organisation greater freedom. Chapter 8, which explores why leaders shouldn’t simply ‘pitch themselves’, struck a chord with Hannah. She comments: Sales is terminology our sector isn’t always comfortable with, and I wouldn’t describe myself as a salesperson. The book helped me reframe that. It’s about relationships and what you bring to them. She is now putting greater structure around relationship-building and reconsidering what the organisation’s ‘pitch’ should look like. Permission to think differently about wellbeing (Chapter 25) Leadership wellbeing was another powerful theme that came through for Hannah when reading the book. She adds: Working in the sector is currently challenging, and wellbeing is an area that I am really focused on across the workforce. The book has encouraged me to look beyond simply ticking the wellbeing box and think more deeply about emotions, relationships and the difficulty of completely separating the personal from the professional. Most importantly, it reinforced something she has learned throughout her own unconventional career: leadership doesn’t require following somebody else’s path. I knew I couldn’t simply try to fill somebody else’s shoes when I took over as CEO. I own my shoes and I’ll go my own path, because I trust myself. Hannah’s verdict I’m far too engrossed in the book, picking it up every spare chance I get. It has really made me stop and think, particularly around leadership, wellbeing, relationships and how we approach growth. Thank you Stephen Norris — for the white pages. Nothing worse than a beige page!