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21st January, 2026 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Heather Elkington - achieve more with your marketing by being a better manager

Phil Bray 

Good morning everybody and welcome to the first Yardstick webinar of 2026, I can’t believe we’re there in 2026. I hope everyone’s had a good start to the year, and the year’s about to get even better, because we have a fabulous guest today, Heather, Heather Elkington is our first webinar guest of 2026. Heather, welcome. Thank you for being with us today.

Heather Elkington

Hey everyone. It’s an honour.

Phil Bray  

And Heather is a leadership expert, an author and trainer and founder of Fresh Leadership World, which Heather will tell you more about in a bit. So some of you might be thinking, why have we got a leadership and management expert on a webinar about marketing? So let me enlighten you, in our view, and we’ve said this a lot, the best marketers get things done. There’s another way of putting that, but it’s 10 o’clock in the morning, so I won’t do it. But the best marketers get things done, and that often means they need help from others. That might be team members, advisers, planners, freelancers, hell, external agencies like Yardstick and they also, this might resonate with some people on here, need to deal with potentially people higher up in the organisation who hold the purse strings, and sometimes they hold those pretty tightly. So marketers need both excellent marketing skills and excellent management skills. Everybody on here is going to have excellent marketing skills, but who’s teaching the excellent management skills, which is why Heather is joining us today. So before we dive in, we will get Dan to do his usual housekeeping and safe space conversation, and then Heather, we’re going to go dive straight in with some questions for you. If that’s alright?

Dan Campbell  

Sure, thanks Phil. So yeah, let’s do some housekeeping. So what do we all need to know for today’s session? Well, first of all, looking at a few of the names in the attendees list, we’ve got a number of fresh faces in the crowd. So welcome to your first Yardstick webinar. And of course, the familiar faces among you will know that we encourage as many questions and comments as possible. So get stuck in, absolutely do. Phil is going to lead with his own questions today, but I’ll be picking up plenty of your questions to ask Heather. And of course, our usual safe space rules apply. So challenge us, agree with us, tell us that we’re speaking nonsense, or completely the opposite. You know, really do get stuck in, and you can do that by using the Q and A box or the chat function. So I’ll be monitoring both today, and I’ll read some of the things out at regular intervals. And of course, depending on where we end up, in 60 minutes time, we’ll sweep up as many as we can before we have to wave goodbye. And to assist that effort, our head of client engagement, Abi, will be answering a few of the questions directly in the chat and providing links to any resources we mentioned during the session. And of course, one of the questions we always get is, are you recording this and can I watch it after? And the answer to that is yes and yes. So we’ll get a recording of the session, plus any show notes we’ve got, and now those will arrive in your inbox later today. So I think that’s it for housekeeping. So over to Phil and Heather to get the session started.

Phil Bray  

Thanks, Dan. I’m gonna take the screen share off so everybody can see us right. Heather, I want to start, if that’s okay, by talking about the challenges managing different types of people. So from a marketing perspective, a lot of the people on this call, whether they are marketing managers, execs, etc, I think need to probably manage three distinct groups of people, direct reports, financial advisers in their business who they don’t have direct authority over, if I can put it like that, and then freelancers and agencies. To talk a bit about the different approaches someone should take to managing those three groups, if that’s okay, and why one size fits all doesn’t work.

Heather Elkington 

Yeah. I always think I guess to go back a step and I want to talk about the internal team first. So because having direct reports in one box doesn’t even quite cut it, because I used to manage five different teams, and inside those teams, we had a marketing team, but we also had a dev team. Now, developers are just stereotypically notoriously don’t want to paint them all with the same brush, but generally quite introverted, less willing to get involved with things like marketing, which we can talk about in a sec, about how to get those people involved. But you tend to have even your direct reports, you tend to have different types of people, different personalities. And I just like to take take a step back, because before I even look at things like how to have different approaches to managing different people, I really think it’s important that we all figure out what we value as managers, so as a human being moving through life, who manages people, directly or under indirectly? What do we manage? Now for me, that is things like really clear communication. I value really overly clear communication. I actually had a call with one of my team members yesterday where I was trying to explain to her how I would prefer everyone to over communicate, if possible. And what I mean by that is tell me if you’re doing or if you’re posting something at a certain time and you need me to be in a place at a time, just tell me, constantly communicate even small changes. And it’s sometimes a benefit, sometimes annoying to people. I just have that as a preference. And I’ve had conversations with people in the past where if you don’t want to tell me things throughout the day or throughout day to day, give me a report at the end of the week, saying “this is what I’ve smashed this week. This is what I’ve moved forward, and this is where I’ve got blockers.” And so I know that one of my values as a manager is that high level of communication. It just is. I also value just real honesty, clear transparent honesty. I really hate people holding back. I can take feedback. You can have difficult conversations with me. And so I know that I just value it. I have a value that honesty saves everyone’s time. Just be honest. We can all take it. We’re human beings, and if someone doesn’t like something, you’ve got to say that generally is more on them, and there’s more work to be done. So all of that to say, before I even look at managing different groups of people, just really come to yourself, come back to yourself, and think, and even if you’re not in a direct leadership position, I would do this anyway. “What do I value? Who do I want to show up as? What do I want? What values do I want to show up with day to day?” Then when we can put that on top of these different professionals, I would say I don’t want to use one size fits all, but just be very confident that’s how I’m going to manage everyone. And when a freelancer comes into your remit. You’re working with them. Maybe other departments of the business are working with them. Just communicate those things with them clearly up front and say “look, this is how I love to work. I know that you will have your ways of working too. Let’s talk about them, tell me up front.” Do you know what? I remember saying this to a freelance dev once, and I was like “what is something that businesses do that really annoys you? Like, really” I said. Phil, you were really nice with your language earlier. I’m not very good with holding back swear words. So I was like, “what’s something that businesses do that really pisses you off? Because tell me because I cannot do it, I can work with you so that we can work well, better together.” And I would say, like, before you go into those, what are the methods to working with freelancers? What are the methods to working with managing up, managing to the side, managing people in your team? Just really come back to yourself and think, “what are these things that I value? How do I communicate those with people clearly and likewise, get them to communicate their preferences and stuff back with me?” And I think when you have that really clear understanding of your values, and they will shape and change over time, you’ll realise new things. When you have that really clear understanding, it starts to make problems and decisions feel easier, because in moments real, I guess frustration, if you’re starting to get frustrated with a team member or a freelancer or whatever, you come back to these values, and you go “which value has been shaken? What thing has happened that has shook one of my values?” Maybe it’s that the communications dropped. Maybe it’s that we haven’t spoken for three days, and then they’ve sent me this piece of work. It’s not right. Now they’re telling me I can’t have any more edits, and I’m struggling because I needed to know earlier, and maybe it’s that. So then when you go into that conversation, you know to say “look I’m just struggling a bit because I need more communication. Is this something that we can do, do we need to look at how we work together?” Instead of just it ending in an argument of “I’m right and you’re wrong.” So that’s how I always, always answer the question of, “what are the different approaches to working with different people?” I just come back to myself and think I need to find what I value as a leader and make sure everyone’s really aware of that. Yeah, because I do think at the end of the day, we’re all human beings, all of us, all of us have egos. All of us think we’re right about everything. All of us have certain opinions and emotional complexity and different upbringings and traumas we bring into the workplace with us. And all of us are just trying to get by and do our best. And I think when we don’t know those values, that’s when arguments can begin. Pettiness can start like it can just perpetuate and get worse and worse, because we don’t know what value has been violated. And when we when we do know that, it’s so much easier to broach a really great conversation with someone and something that I love to say, I guess it’s a good time to bring it up here is I have this kind of like hack at the beginning of a conversation that helps any difficult conversation feel a little bit simpler for both parties. And that’s to say, if I’ve got, if I’ve got a broach something difficult, and it can be with a freelancer, anyone senior, anyone I will say, “I need you to know before I tell you this, or before we go into this, that this is not me versus you, it’s us versus the problem”. And I’ll say that really clearly just to outline this, I guess, foundation to say, it’s so easy for us human beings to have someone say something to us, and immediately we get our heckles up and we’re like, “what? I’m right, this is my opinion.” And immediately we want to fight to protect this big, juicy ego that we’ve got, but if you say something like that, it just immediately helps to lower all of that and go “look, I’m not coming at you. I’m coming at the problem, and we both need to figure out how to fix this together.” So that was a big old way of saying I do sometimes believe in the one size fits all approach, but only if you’re so clear on what those values are, and you’re not just operating from a place of defensiveness. I love that Harry, Harry in the chat. Just said, “on a side, my partner and I use that tactic” exactly the same in these kinds of conversations, you know they extend much further than work, friends, family. And I think when you start to realise there’s a really great book that I recommend to everyone, it’s called “Ego is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday, and he goes into lots of like stoic philosophy about essentially human beings. We’re all just dictated by our ego. Every day, every decision, every conversation, is just our ego trying to find ways to make us look good, put us at the front, make us seem right. But when we can start to undo some of that and also spot when it’s happening in other people, you can just have better relationships with the world, with your life, with other people and yeah. So yeah, definitely with partners as well.

Phil Bray  

Thanks, Heather. I think that line Dan might have clocked this. Honesty saves everyone time. We did a webinar with Joe Glover late last year. No, late 2024 now, I think. And he came up with a wonderful line, what was it Dan? “Clarity is kindness.” And I think that “honesty saves everyone’s time” is now up on the same level as Joe’s quote on the pantheon of Yardstick webinar quotes, that’s fabulous. I think a lot of people are going to take that away with them. By the way, what was the one thing that businesses could do to developers that pissed them off? What did the developer say to that question? Can you remember?

Heather Elkington  

There was a long list. I think to be honest most of it, and I think you guys if you work with freelancers, or, I don’t even know, maybe some of you are freelancers and have worked this way, it comes back to ego. It comes back to everyone thinking they’re right. And I’m actually in lots of scenarios a freelancer, even though I have a team and a business I will come into businesses and try and do training. I do social media videos for different brands, and to them I am kind of like the freelancer, and not much pisses me off, like there is really not much anymore that can irk me. But where the difficulties lie is just lack of communication. It really is. It’s like not understanding both parties, having this version of what is right. And so a developer might think, “I’m going to charge you five grand to build a V1 of an app.” And in their head, they’re thinking, “it’s going to take me this many weeks. There might be some small tweaks and then we get to the end.” What the person on the other side is thinking is “V1 I want it to be like an MVP, a minimum viable product. I want it ready to go to market. I want to tweak it 10 times, change the brand and change the logo, change the domains”. And it’s just that, like real lack of clear communication, that then you get a month in and the expectations on both sides are completely different. Everyone’s arguing, annoyed, the relationship’s really tainted. And it’s interesting, because the work that I used to do, I used to work for a business called Go Proposal. This is the business that we sold into Sage when I was the ops director, and then eventually became the ops director in Sage. And what we did, I don’t talk about this very often, but what we did at Go Proposal is we had a pricing and proposal software for accountants. So a lot of you guys may resonate with this in that when an accountancy business prices their work to a client, the client on the other side of that work because the clients don’t have a huge understanding of accountancy services, to them it’s just this mythical service. It’s seen as kind of like compliance. It’s not very sexy. It’s not the first thing we want to invest in, but we have to because it literally is the law. And so we would work with these accountancy firms to make sure that when they were pricing and selling their services to the client, they would really explain the importance of these services, why financial services were essentially the lifeblood of a business, and try to change their mind from “it’s just a compliance bookkeeping thing” to actually healthy finances will make or break your business, and we can help you do that. And so we used to have, again in the financial services industry you’ll have this a lot, you have scope creep which is you price a client, you probably have it in marketing agencies as well, you price a client to do a piece of work. A year goes by, and before you know it, you’re actually doing three times the amount of work that you originally priced them for, and they’re still paying the same amount of money. And it all comes down to that not crazily clear communication. And so again, a long way of answering. But the devs would say just scope creep the work, just becoming something that they originally didn’t agree to. But actually, we have to take accountability for just over communicating to make sure that they know exactly what they were signing up for. 

Phil Bray  

Yeah and that’s where I want to go next in terms of clear communication. So six years ago, we didn’t probably know it at that point, but the world was about to change. And March, everybody got sent home, and a lot of businesses have never returned to that physical office space, or may have only returned part time. So we’ve got that challenge of managing people remotely. What are the, I don’t know, the three biggest challenges about managing people remotely? And then how do we solve them?

Heather Elkington

Yeah, I think one of the huge problems, and to get a little bit psychological now, is that we think we have more control if we can physically see people sat in a desk, at a desk, the work being done. We’re stood over the shoulder. We can see them into the office at 8:45, we can see them leave at 5:15, we believe that that gives us a heightened level of control, and therefore the result will be better. There was this great study done by a lady called Ellen Langer, in the 90s. And it was a study done on human beings with a dice, a die, and you would roll the dice. She had two control groups, and she said to each group, “what do you think your chances are of rolling at some point two sixes?” And she would say that to both groups. But the difference between these two control groups was that one group rolled the dice themselves, so they had control over rolling the dice. The other group, someone else rolled the dice for them. So in reality, there’s absolutely no change in the probability of who’s going to get a double six. But the people who had control over rolling their own dice, voted higher and said “actually, I’ve got a higher chance. I’ve got more confidence that I’m going to roll a double six than someone else is going to roll a double six for me.” And what she talks about in this study is, she calls it the illusion of control. We all think that if we have control over something, even if the scientific probability doesn’t change, we think that we can have a better outcome if we control it. And when I read about that, it really helped me to explain why we think people will work better in an office when we know all the stats that show us that people actually get more done. I remember working in an office for the first six years or seven years of my career. It was an office five days a week no questions, like working from home you were seen as lazy. You just wouldn’t do it. We actually could work from home, but no one did, because you thought it looked really bad. And I remember then we went into Covid and but even when I was in the office, I would still have days where I got nothing done, because if I was bored or I couldn’t be bothered, or if I was just feeling down, if I wasn’t feeling inspired, maybe I was having a bad day. I still had days where I was really unproductive, and I think that’s just part of the human psyche, like we cannot expect everyone to be 100% productive, all the time. And so now I kind of just accept that, the team is going to work from home. We work two days a week in the office. We have an office. I love the office. We do two days a week in the office, three days working from home. And it’s weird even for me, like, sometimes I see people are not online on Slack, and I’m like, “wonder what they’re doing, they should be at the desk”, and then I have to really get myself back to but “what does it matter?” Actually, if a person in any given day is only going to really get three solid, great hours of work done, and then they’re going to tick off some tasks, they’re going to do some emails, but that’s enough. If everyone got three really productive hours and some meetings and some emails done in a day, that would be enough. And when you start to accept that which I now have and still convince myself to accept as well, every day, you just let go of some of these things. And I think I really benefited after the pandemic, when I could work from home, because it meant I could do my washing in the middle of the day, and I could take a bit more time to make myself a healthy lunch, and I didn’t have to waste two hours commuting to and from work, and I did all of that, but I was still incredibly hard working, incredibly productive. Got amazing results for the business. And I think because I was proof of that myself, got to see that. Now, that is not to say that some people don’t take the piss, because they do, and I think again, it’s all about clear communication. It’s all about expectations. I like to be really outcome focused, so making sure that every single member of my team has a weekly, let’s take Tisha for example. She’s our social media executive, so once a week she sends me on a Friday morning all of her content that she’s edited, produced her ideas, and she sends it to me to essentially get feedback, to get final approvals, to get feedback on her idea, to say, “I’ve got this idea. Do you want to do it? Yes or no, here’s what I need from you.” And she just sends me that in a message once a week, either Thursday evening or Friday morning, outside of that, as long as she sends me that I kind of don’t care, if she wants to take a day doing whatever she wants to do, and then she wants to, because if she gets that done, that’s more than enough. And then on a Monday morning, the only other checking point that we have is we have a team weekly review where we check in on metrics. So she’ll report her metrics to me. I then ask three questions which are “where are we? Why are we there? And what are we doing about it?” So they’re my three questions for tracking data within the team, and as long as those two touch points are fulfilled and fulfilled well, who cares? Do you know what I mean? Who cares? What else they do, and it’s because they have that clear so to go back to your question, the reason I think these things fall down is people don’t have that clear accountability, clear place to report, clear success measures, and if you have those for your team, as long as those outcomes, and those outcomes are truly what makes them successful, as long as you have that. It’s kind of like spend the week how you want.

Phil Bray  

And talking about outcomes. How does that well, outcomes and remote working, how does that lead, then, into meetings? Because everybody on this call will spend X number of minutes and hours a week in meetings. How do you run really effective meetings like this? And how do you make sure that those meetings and the good intentions of those meetings actually turn into actions? And going back to what I said at the start of the webinar about getting stuff done. 

Heather Elkington  

Yeah so I guess the the first step with this is to really move from being an, I’m just going to make this term up now, but being like an unconscious meeting acceptor and attender, so someone who just you turn up you say yes, you’re just constantly in the washy flow of coming to the meeting and snap yourself into an intentional time spender. And this is what I like to think every time I get a request for my time, whether it’s a meeting, a webinar, a catch up, an intro or whatever it is. Instead of just you going, “yeah court” and just really unintentionally saying yes to everything, just put it through a filter of, “is this truly worth my time? Is it valuable to me? Is it valuable to the business?” And if the answer is no, and be really honest with yourself, if the answer is no, say no and push back. Something that’s really important to note here is that people respect more. I learned this the hard way. People respect you so much more when you say no, when you respect your own time and your own boundaries, because there’s nothing worse than being the person inside a business, and I say I’ve learned this hard way, because I was this person who and when you’re in corporate, especially like when I was in Sage, because there’s so many meetings, just so so many, and you may have this inside any business that you work in when you become the person who’s just the yes person, “yes, I’ll go to that meeting. Yes, I’ll do this. Yes, I’ll do that task. Yes, I’ll get it in for tomorrow.” You’re essentially saying over and over again, “my time isn’t valuable. Take it. Take it. I’ll come to whatever you tell me to come to.” And even when you push back on those things, even when it’s to your seniors, they will ultimately respect you more. It has to be done properly, with good communication to explain the goals and why it’s important, etc, but they will respect you more. And so just become someone who only says yes to meetings intentionally. And then when you do, I guess if you do that honestly, you’ll filter out 50 to 75% I would say, of the crap anyway. And I’m someone now who I actually to say “I run a business and have a team and do workshops and do webinars, I actually have a lot of time to work on the business.” I don’t spend a lot of time in meetings, because I forcefully push these things away and only say yes to the opportunities that it’s like a “hell yes”, it’s a no it’s or it’s a hell yes. And if it’s not a hell yes, it’s hell no. And so become really intentional when you’re in the session. So let’s say those team review metric sessions. I guess a tip I’ve already touched on, but as the manager as the person in that meeting, you get your team to report to you. So as the manager, you shouldn’t be bringing the data. Your team should be bringing the data to you. That’s what direct report means. They report to you. So you define what it is you want to see. Your team reports the data to you. So every week I show up and the data’s there, waiting ready for me to look at. Sometimes I look at it before. Sometimes I just look at it when I get into the session. And then the three questions that I ask. And side note is, you should ask more than you speak a lot more in these sessions. As a manager, I try to speak very rarely in those review meetings, I just ask questions. The questions that I ask are, “why are we here? What’s the data?” Is the first question, and that’s literally just them talking through the numbers, and getting a bit passionate about, why the number is what it is, how they found it, etc. Next is, “why are we there?” So this is just the reasons. Give me the reasons. This is where you might bring in the economy, or “we tried this thing, or another client did this, or it didn’t quite work “etc. So you can just get blamey, whatever you want, what’s the reason. Then the next bit is the accountability, and this is the really important part that most managers and team leaders miss, is the question “what are we doing about it?” So you miss a target, “okay what are we doing about it? You exceed a target. What are we doing about it? How are we going to make sure that we do more of this? How are we going to continue this upward trend?” And that question, “what are we doing about it?” really helps to just give that accountability back to your team to say, “okay we’ve had a shitty week or shitty month. What are we doing, what are we trying, what are we experimenting with, what are we testing?” And I think just get in meetings in general, get so clear on what people are reporting into you, and what are the questions you’re going to ask them? And then I would say as well get the time down. Most meetings do not need to be an hour. 45 minutes is generally a maximum for me for a meeting, if not ideally 20 to 30 minutes. And also another meeting tip is, no meetings before 11am generally, that was my rule when I was at Sage because the beginning of your day will decide what your day is going to look like. And for me, and I think scientifically, for most people, we are the most productive in those first few hours, we have the most brain capacity. We’ve not made as many decisions yet. Shits not hit the fan yet. We have this space. We have this time. And so just try to force that couple of hours in the morning and try not to just jump straight into emails and get like wished through the day. Force that couple of hours, people can wait and emails aren’t urgent. You don’t need to reply to them straight away. Try to just force those two hours every day to do working on work. What is that big project that you’ve been meaning to start? That big task, that bit of research, that podcast you’ve wanted to listen to, that YouTube video, that webinar. I would say, this is a really good thing to do at the start of a day, learning levelling up the things that usually you don’t get time to do because you’ve got 100 emails and clients wanting things, and seniors wanting things.

Phil Bray  

Talking of learning and levelling up, let’s have a quick chat about how you can help people do that Heather, if that’s okay? And I am just going to try and share my screen. I’m probably making a mess of this. It’s the first time I’ve done it this year. Give me a second and Dan, you can talk me through whether I’m going to get this right or not.

Dan Campbell 

I’ve got complete faith, Phil, I think you’ll do it. I’m coming into 2026 very optimistic. 

Phil Bray

What can you see now Dan?

Dan Campbell

Your desktop. 

Phil Bray

Can you see the PowerPoint? 

Dan Campbell 

No. My optimism was clearly misplaced. 

Phil Bray

Can you see the PowerPoint? 

Dan Campbell

Now there we go, yeah, put into presenter mode. Flick the screens between. There we go. Well done Phil. 

Phil Bray  

Heather, levelling up, talk to us about how you can help people do that.

Heather Elkington 

Thanks, guys. Quick ad break. I always like to, I feel like, in the UK, we’re not very good at selling or being sold to so when I do this, I always like to say to people, if selling makes you uncomfortable, clock out for three minutes. Because I don’t like to make people uncomfortable. So can we just go back one slide? Is there a way you can go back?

Phil Bray  

Testing me now, that’s good.

Heather Elkington  

Here we go. So hey guys, so I have built a six week boot camp called Fresh Start. Now, over 500 new managers have been through this, and it’s essentially how we level up new managers into high performing leaders. So it’s a six week boot camp. We have inside that six weeks we run, we have pre-recorded training modules, but we also have a community of brand new managers who all join us to level up for those six weeks. We have a Slack community. We run live Q and A’s twice a week. We run the live Q and A’s, and we go through six really powerful modules that all new managers need to learn. So starting off with things like imposter syndrome, lack of confidence, emotional complexity around managing friends, managing people older than us, all the stuff that like we don’t really ever get told in leadership, and it’s taught by me, and so I tend to talk through all the times that I have failed and messed it up really badly, and then kind of in the second half of my career to date, how I’ve really switched that around, and I use it to be a really confident leader. So modules we start with mindset. We look, we go into really solid delegation, difficult conversations, performance management, what to do when you think you’ve got to fire someone. One of the most difficult conversations. We look at accountability, how to get your team engaged, really caring about what they do, all the stuff around meetings, everything is in there in huge, huge, huge depth. So we kick off. We only run this three times a year, and we are opening up again on the 17th February, so in about three and a half weeks time, we only have 150 spaces. Now, all I need you to do right now, if you’re interested in this, is to get on the wait list. So if we just go to the next slide, please, is to get on the wait list. So if you scan that link or Abi, thanks, Abi has put it in the chat, you can just learn more. Join our wait list, and I will help you with everything from this. I’ll send you all the information that you need on how you can get involved, what the costing is all that jazz. This is kind of our signature part of the business that we run for Fresh Leadership World. It’s the way that, you know, I run workshops for huge corporate, global brands, you know, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Express, Sage as well, The Ministry of Defence we’ve even done lots of workshops with last year. And this is really as a way to get that information in an accessible way online to small and medium sized businesses that isn’t kind of like a big in person workshop. So it’d be an honour to have you, some of you join us, but just scan that QR code to find out more. Thank you so much.

Phil Bray  

Thanks, Heather and to the couple of Yardstick managers that are on this call, the answer is yes. And let’s, I want to go into a minute, talking about how we influence people’s behaviour when they’re not direct report to us, and a bit about the gender and age gap and that sort of stuff. But Dan, let’s do a bit of stuff from Lily and Robin, if that’s okay?

Dan Campbell  

Yeah, sure thing. So we had a question, alright, and this was Heather, when you were talking about over communication. And Lily says, “as I am a lower down intern, what would you do to help managers better? As I sometimes fear too many emails communication can be annoying”

Heather Elkington 

Okay, so when I think about communicating with seniors, I think this is something that really helped me in the last couple of years working at Sage and just building respect and being seen as a trusted, respected leader inside a workplace. And when I say leader, by the way guys, you don’t have to be in a management position to be a leader, but if you want to be seen as someone who is a leader and can very much go for those leadership positions when they come up, what I would do when I speak to seniors, a really big shift that I always make, is try not to focus on what you want and your goals and your communication, and really think about what is the thing that they want more than anything else. And usually every senior, you can either ask the minute in conversation, so ask something like “if you had one thing that I could help you achieve this year, what would that one thing be like, if I could just delight you in every way? What would that one thing be?” Or even ask them “what are your goals for 2026 and what are the business goals for 2026?” And when you know those things, you can essentially sell your authority to them, because it means every time you communicate with them, whether it’s on an email, in a passing comment on Slack, whatever you can tie your wins, your requests, your need for support. Anchor it to those goals. So for example, let’s say you need some information, some financial information, from a senior. Instead of going to them and saying “hey, can you pull me this report? I need you to do it externally. You’ve got access blah, blah, blah.” You would just start by explaining “hey, I’m working on this project for us to achieve X that is their goal. And in order to smash it out the park, get it done really well, I need these numbers, I can’t access it. Can you pull it for me?” And just by connecting, it feels so small. It feels like such a small change. But just by connecting it to those goals, you do a few things. Firstly, you get them listening, so you get them more likely to listen and care about what you’ve got to say. Secondly, you show them, over and over again, that you care about what they care about. They know that you’re business orientated. They know you’re thinking about the business outcomes. And not just, “can you pull me this report to do this thing?” they know that you have got your eyes on the prize in the same way that they have. So that’s a shift that I made a good few years ago that I think really helps level me up in terms of respect. What I would say, if you say you’ve got five things you need from them, write a bit of a list. So instead of just firing it all off to them as it comes to your head, write a bit of a list. So I used to have, the founder of Go proposal was someone who he didn’t come in very often. He was based in Doncaster. I was in Manchester with the team, like running the team inside the office, and he didn’t come in very often. And he probably came in maybe once a month, sometimes even less. And I would only catch him on the phone maybe a couple of times a week. So I had to get into a really good habit of and he wasn’t on Slack. He didn’t do that. It wasn’t on Slack. Was barely on emails. Was a very visionary, incredible guy, but hard to pin down and get information off. So I had to get into a really good habit of just every time I needed something off him, I would just write it on a list, so that the next time I got him on a phone, the next time I was with him, I was like, “right, sit down. I need to ask you these six questions. I just need your information. I need your vision. I need your thoughts. I need your answers.” And I got into a really good habit of it. And so then when I moved into Sage and had some more, some different bosses, all who were equally as great. It meant that instead of just kind of pinging these things off all the time and sort of seeming as though I wasn’t in control of my own communication, I would just either say, if I have a weekly one on one, not many people do, but like a fortnightly one on one, or a monthly one on one, or just a list that I could say to my boss “can I grab you for 20 minutes at some point this week? I’ve got a list of questions. I’ll be quick. It helps me achieve X, Y and Z.” And again, it just shows them you respect their time. You respect your own time. You are thinking strategically. You’re not just firing things off. You’re not kind of coming across as someone who is almost I would say, I’d say it’s a bit of emotional unintelligence, and just go “can you give me this? Can you send me this? Can you send me this?” So as an intern they’re the things that I would be thinking about if you were more junior, just strategically, how we speak to people, some advice I got a long, long time ago that has never left my brain was “sell or be sold to.” So we’re always either selling or being sold to. And when I think about communicating with anyone, especially seniors, I’m always selling myself. Think you’re always selling you. And when you get that in your head and you just rethink those slack messages, rethink those emails and think, “am I selling myself well here, or am I selling myself as someone who is just reactive, not in control?” Yeah. And so just think about that every bit of communication is like a knock of trust or distrust, and really just focus on it.

Phil Bray  

Nice. Where I want to go next is more about influence than management. So there are a bunch of people on this call. Some of them are business owners, some of the marketing execs, some of the marketing managers, and to achieve their objectives. They need other people, financial advisers and planners in their businesses, to do certain things on a regular basis, for example, and people on the call here and know that I bang on about these things all the time, but things like recording new inquiries that come into a business, asking clients for reviews on Google and VouchedFor. The business owner, marketing executive, marketing manager can’t do that, but they’ve got to influence advisers to get them to do it. What are your tips for getting people to be able to influence advisers, in this case where they don’t directly manage them? And also my sub question there, how do you get them to do it when there’s maybe an age gap or a gender gap as well? And this comes back to maybe Lily’s question.

Heather Elkington 

So it kind of is going to be a similar answer to the one that I just gave, but there’s really a lot of you on this. Have you heard of Simon Sinek? Really great leadership thinker, organisational culture thinker. So Simon Sinek really propelled into fame, organisational fame, with his TED talk he did about 15 years ago called “Start With Why”. It’s still up on YouTube now. It’s an incredible talk. I think it’s the second most watched TED talk of all time. It’s awesome. I would highly recommend you go watch it. And he talks about how, in order to get people to buy into your ideas, we tend to just again, it goes back to that communication of explaining the purpose and the goal at the beginning. Most of us think that just by asking, we shall receive, we deserve to receive. So for example, in your case, “can you get a testimonial from this client?” We think that that’s enough for some for the person on the other end to go, “yeah, leave it with me. I’ll go get it.” The breakdown there in communication is that the person, if that person we’ve asked to get the testimonial, the adviser isn’t rewarded or measured or cares in any way about these testimonials. Why would they? The truth is, why would they? Why would they, unless they find it in the goodness of the heart, why would they? And so it’s then our job to, again, sell the why to them. And it’s really easy at its core. Its simplest version is starting with why. So starting your communication with why something’s important. And I use this a lot, we do this in Fresh Start. I teach everyone this in Fresh Start. With delegation, it’s kind of a way of delegation, in that you have to start with the purpose. If you try to delegate a task to someone and you just say, “can you run me this report by Friday?” Don’t get me wrong, if they’re your direct report, they probably will run the report by Friday, but what you do is you miss out on a massive opportunity for them to use their expertise, use their skills, get passionate about this thing because you haven’t explained to them the purpose. So if, instead of “can you run this report by Friday?” you say “we are running a project where we want to find out who our most influential clients are across the world. Because we want to send them some PR boxes. We want to really impress them, get them excited, so that they come back, they’re repeat customers, and then they advocate for us. In order to do that, I need this data. Can you run me this report? And if so, when do you think you can get it to me?” Yes, it takes a minute longer, but the results you will get from something like that not and part of it is just because you aren’t insulting their intelligence like you’re bringing them in. I think a lot of those as managers. And again, it’s ego. We think that, I don’t know why, but we think that people are stupid. We think that people don’t know that they don’t already know, that a business is doing well, or a business is failing, and we hide things from them. And it’s like, don’t insult people’s intelligence like that. Be transparent, tell them as much as you can about the thing, and therefore they have all the information at hand. Because they might actually go, “do you know what you need? You don’t need that report. That’ll help. But actually, I’ve got a piece of software where we track this already, and I can get you a heat map, and I can get you their addresses.” If you’ve just said, “can you pull me this report by Friday?” You’re going to miss out on all that expertise and opportunity. And so when it comes to influence and trying to get people to do things that is outside of their remit, you have to start with why you have to communicate the purpose you have to. It’s kind of how inspiration works, like inspiring someone. And again, we go into this in fresh stocks. It’s a really powerful management technique. Inspiring someone is science. We all think that to be inspiring, you have to have this bubbly personality, be super confident, be on a stage, be motivational. Have this crazy story to tell. But inspiration is just we feel inspired when we feel connected to something bigger than us. So we’re connected to whether it’s a mission or a journey or whatever, that’s far bigger than the normal four walls that we sit in. And we’re like “oh my god, I’m a part of something amazing. I’m a part of something big. And I can do this, and I can go” and so as managers, even if we don’t feel super confident and excitable and we don’t feel as though we’re that inspiring archetype. You can still spark inspiration in people by just connecting what they’re doing to something bigger. And if all you’re doing is saying, “can you run me this report? Can you get me a testimonial? Can you get me a review?” You’re not inspiring anyone. If you take a bit of extra time to really, explain the transparency, the feeling, the method behind something, why it’s so important, how they can get involved, why them doing it is such an important part of the business, what it brings to the business, I always think a great way you can do it is, we used to do something called a stakeholder report. So most businesses will give their team some sort of information. So maybe it’s like their data, or whatever, most businesses hide financial data. They hide the P and L. They hide, some of it we can’t show them, but they’ll hide it for whatever reason. Maybe they’re embarrassed to show their team the business the profits, or embarrassed to show how much they’ve spent on something, or how much they spend on salaries, whatever. Honestly, your team kind of already know, like they don’t know what the lines are in the P and L, of course, but they already know if the business is doing really well. So don’t insult them. Just show them, tell them, get them excited. Like say, “this is your impact on the business. This is how what you do day to day impacts a business. This is the impact you’re having. Look at these incredible profits that we’ve made because of your input”, and I think there’s so much we can do. So go watch “Start With Why” on YouTube, if you haven’t already, it’s so short it’s like 15 minutes long. He’s also got a whole book that would probably say you don’t need to read. Just watch the YouTube. And it’s that that’s for me, that’s how I inspire, that’s how I influence. It’s to just not insult anyone’s intelligence. That’s what I think. Everyone is so smart. None of us are above anyone. Every single person listening, every single person in this hotel, I mean, in every business, is so incredibly smart because we are human beings. We’re emotionally intelligent, we’re academically intelligent, all of it. And just bring that out of people like show them that they are connected to something bigger. And I think so many managers fail because they’re so focused on this ego of “I have to be the best. I have to know the answers. I have to be the one talking the most and giving all the you know”, I don’t know whatever answering all the questions. When it’s the opposite, it’s like you become a leader when you can spark inspiration in someone else, when you can say “actually, you’re intelligent, you are clever, you are exceptional. And I just want to show you that. I just want you to know that, and therefore we need to do these things, and you’re the right person to do it.”

Phil Bray 

Yeah, we’re all trying to get better at prompting. AI, sounds like we need to get better at prompting humans and explaining. I’m really keen that everyone gets their questions answered today. So if anybody’s got any questions, pop them in the chat. Dan, you’ve got three that came in before the session today. So can you go to those? Dan, and then if anybody’s got any other questions they want Heather to answer in the last 11 minutes that we’ve got.

Dan Campbell

I mean, the first one was answered with Lily’s question. So let’s go to this one. So Heather, “what’s your approach when a senior stakeholder fundamentally disagrees with your marketing direction. How do you push back without alienating them?”

Heather Elkington 

I guess it depends, you would have to, I would say, because this happens a lot. It happened at Sage, it was a normal thing. And do you know what the problem with marketing is? Because I was not a director. I was a marketing manager. And the thing that always used to frustrate me is marketing is unique in that your work is on show for everyone in the business to comment on. It’s the only function of the business that everything you do everyone gets to see, and so everyone has an opinion on it, whether you like it or not, and it can be really frustrating at times. And so get good at communicating the why, get good at communicating the intention behind stuff. But I would say, it is hard like testing and experimentation, try and sell them on that, instead of selling them on your idea. So I would try to sell this senior leader on just the value of testing new things, experimenting with new things, trying new things, instead of just selling your idea. And could we bread crumb it like? Could we do parts of it and test that first and see how it goes? Because it’s difficult, and we’re going to get everyone’s opinion, but try and sell them on the test in an experimentation piece.

Dan Campbell 

That’s brilliant. Interesting question in from Keith, who says, “if we have time, I’d be interested to hear your view from a self confessed over sharer, how do you balance as a leader, walking that balance between giving too much of yourself and being too business like, I’ve always heard on the side of being as honest as possible, and it’s generally worked well. But I’m aware that with a brand new team, for example, we started two months ago, this might not be the best approach”

Heather Elkington 

Keith, I’ve made my entire career off being an overshare. There is not much. I wish I had a good answer for you, but honestly, I have always been the person in the office. And don’t get me wrong, there has to be a layer of emotional intelligence, so I’m not necessarily going to bring my problems to people, or sometimes I get too over excited, and I try to scream that a bit, but I am just an over-sharer by nature. And I always think that it was one of the gifts, I think that I was whether we were born with it, or my parents gave me, I have no problem being authentic. I have no problem being embarrassed. I have no problem being ashamed. I’m not ashamed of many things. And I think that not being ashamed of just like looking a bit silly and sharing things about myself really did actually get me far and now in the line of work that I do now, most of the time, people book me in to do training consultancy because of that trait, because I literally had a call with the team at Aviva this morning, obviously, huge organisation, and the guy who was bringing me in said, “the reason we really like you is because every other leadership training we’ve ever had is just really boring and theoretical, and yours isn’t. It’s really energetic and a bit silly and fun and that’s how you get people engaged and bring them on the journey.” And the reason it’s just because I share my story, I share myself, I share my mistakes, and that’s how other people learn from me. And so I think the barrier you have to put up is just that that level of emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence, again, is just a skill. It just means being aware of your emotions and knowing how to regulate them, essentially, so that if you get angry or excited or sad or whatever, you’re not just kind of spewing them all over people. So learn that skill of emotional intelligence to know when not to kind of harm others with our emotions. Other than that, I don’t hold much back, so I’m probably the wrong person to ask if you want to not be an over-sharer.

Dan Campbell 

And I mean Tina’s comments saying that “they’re reframing over sharing as authenticity is probably quite out”, doesn’t it? There we go. So we’ll go for one last question. And this is a question that we were asked before the session. It was sent in previously, but it also covers Harry’s question that they’ve just asked. And this is, “how do you persuade more seasoned financial advisers to engage with marketing when they don’t think it necessary?”

Heather Elkington 

You know what a hard truth that I had to learn is, I’m guessing you are talking about people inside the business who like marketing in the sense of getting involved in videos or campaigns or whatever it isn’t natural. They don’t want to get involved. It’s not natural to them. I spent a long time getting frustrated at people not wanting to get involved, and in the end, the conclusion that I came to was I just have to accept that some people aren’t going to get involved and stop trying to die on a hill that I’m never going to win the battle of. And so what I ended up doing when I was in that position, because, it was the devs, they didn’t want to get involved. We had certain people who’ve been in the business a long time who didn’t want to get involved. They felt like it was just not important for them. I did a poll and said to people, look, we want to put people, “is Heather another Yorkshire lass?” Yes, yes I am from Doncaster, if we want to put people and do a poll and say to people “who wants to get involved in this?” And explain the benefits, start with why. Explain how it could be really beneficial for their career. It’s really beneficial for the business. It gets them seen. Explain that and say, “do you want to get involved?” Because you will find people in corners of the business who you didn’t know wanted to be involved. We had devs come forward who got really excited by it, and then we had other people who were like, “I know all the benefits. I know the why, I know the purpose. I don’t want to get involved.” And if that’s the case, I’m afraid there is not much we can do about it. So have that clear communication with them again. Figure out, explain the why. Be really clear who wants to get involved? Because this year 2026, there are so many exciting opportunities for marketing. But I keep asking, and people keep pushing back. So “I’m doing this once “do you want to get involved or not? If you do, I’m going to bring you on for the journey. If you don’t, then fine, that’s okay, but I need to know right now.” And you can change your mind if halfway in you don’t like it, you can change your mind. But that’s probably what I would do, because trying to get everyone involved in videos and marketing stuff and case studies stories, is about you can’t win every battle again. Learn the hard way.

Phil Bray 

One last question for me. Feel free to take the fifth on this, “Radical Candor” the book. Where do you stand on that?

Heather Elkington  

Yeah, it’s great. What, I feel like there’s a what, what’s behind the question? 

Phil Bray  

There’s been a bit of pushback. No, I love it. I think it’s a great back. But there’s been a bit of pushback, I think, maybe from people who have seen the title of it and not actually delved into, actually the concepts that are promoted in the book. And I read the forward or the introduction of the second edition, and there’d been quite a lot of pushback, thinking he was using a sketch on Saturday Night Live about it in the US. That didn’t send it down particularly well. But just as you’re the expert, I thought I’d ask about Radical Candor, because it’s a book I’ve read.

Heather Elkington

It’s fabulous, and so Kim Scott is, I call it kind of a friend I speak to occasionally, and she did not the foreword, the accreditation for my book. So her name’s on the front of my book. There you go, so if you go down on the bottom there “radical wisdom to unlock leadership success” from Kim Scott. So if there’s one part from Radical Candor that I love above everything else, it’s the ruinous empathy part of the matrix. So for anyone who’s not read it or hasn’t read it in a while, Kim has a matrix where she explains different places that we fall into when we don’t want to have these tough conversations. And the bit that was the massive light bulb moment for me in my whole career in life, was ruinous empathy. And when she explained that most of us care so much about other people, we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Of course, we don’t. We don’t want to make someone feel bad. We don’t want to point something out that’s awkward. And so we we kind of use the excuse of empathy and say, “I’m just going to be empathetic. I don’t want to bring up this thing that they’re struggling with.” But it ends up being ruinous, because essentially, you’re stealing this learning opportunity away from them. And for me, that was, like the big moment of Radical Candor that I was like “shit. I need to start leaning into this truthful conversation.” It’s a trap. Yeah, sounds about right. I will check that out.

Phil Bray 

I’m gonna try this whole screen sharing thing again, see if I can get this to work. Abi, would you talk about our next webinar if that’s okay?

Abi Robinson 

Thank you kindly. Thank you, Heather, that was wonderful. It’s no secret within Yardstick that our ops director is probably your biggest cheerleader, and I’m sure she’ll be watching this back if she’s not here. And I’m sure you’ve got many more fans now as a result of this. So owe you a bev from Rum Rooms in Donny if you’re ever around

Heather Elkington  

As if! I didn’t know you guys were that local.

Abi Robinson  

No, it’s only me. I’m invading the Midlands with my Rotherham tones. There you go. But yes, next month’s webinar, we have got more amazing guests lined up, but we can’t not have a month that we dedicate to AI. And as Heather said earlier, there are a lot of exciting things happening in marketing in 2026 and AI is very much on that list. Can you see the stat on the screen? I don’t need to read it to you. That trend is only going in one direction. So next month, we want to talk to you about how to take advantage of that opportunity, to understand how consumers are using AI to find an adviser or a planner, and to discover seven things, practical things that you can do to help AI recommend you. So 25th February, 10am as usual, you can scan the QR code, but I will put a link in the follow up email this afternoon, plus the link of course to Heather’s Fresh Start course. And yeah, we hope to see that.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, and there’s the link for Heather’s Fresh Start course again, Heather. Thank you so much for today. It’s been a wonderful hour. I think I’ve never taken so many notes in a webinar. So thank you very much for sharing your time with us today. I know it’s the end of the day where you are, so I really appreciate that. Sure everybody else does as well. Go click that get on Heather’s wait list for the Yardstick people, absolutely we can do it. And. And Dan, Abi, thank you guys. And one last thank you again, Heather, really appreciate your time today.

Heather Elkington 

Thank you so much. Honestly, I love, love, love doing this stuff. So it’s been an honour to be here. Thank you so much everyone. 

Phil Bray

Cheers, everybody. Bye, bye.