We Are Power Podcast
The We Are Power podcast is the podcast for your career and your life. A weekly podcast with listeners in over 60 countries worldwide where you'll hear personal life stories, top-notch industry advice, and key leadership insight from amazing role models. The podcast not only aids your personal and professional development but also delves deep into conversations around Gender Equality and Social Mobility. Each week the We Are Power Podcast will bring you a new interview from a leader within the 100,000-strong We Are Power community, hosted by Simone Roche MBE.
We Are Power Podcast
Balancing Purpose and Profit with Gill Hunter
Ever wondered what it takes to balance purpose and profit? Gill Hunter takes us behind the scenes of Square One Law's two-year journey to achieve B Corp certification.
She shares candid insights into building an inclusive workplace, why cultural change is crucial for any organisation.
Discover how she and her team are not just aiming for financial success, but also making a positive impact on people and the planet.
Listen to Learn:
- What winning at the 2024 Northern Power Women Awards meant to Gill
- How Square One Law became a B-Corp
- The hurdles women face in the legal profession
- The importance of recognising unsung heroes
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Hello and welcome to the we Are Power podcast Northern Power Women podcast. For your career and your life, no matter what business you're in. Hello and welcome to the we Are Power podcast. This is the podcast where we get to chat to some fantastic role models, hear their great stories, their top tips, their guidance. We're always looking, I always feel like I'm looking for the tote bag moment, the moment where someone gives me that one, that lovely nugget that you like, that should be on a t-shirt, should be on a postcard, should be on a tote bag, and so we're always looking for that. We want to be able to pass that on to you, whether it's for your career, your life, whatever your adventures on. That was what this podcast is about, and this season that we're in is all about revisiting, uh, back, way back to march 2024 and the northern Power Women Awards the eighth year of the awards and we'd like to go back and find out what people have been up to. What did it feel like, where did the time go and what it has meant to them. And I'm delighted this week that we are welcoming our SME 2024 winner, square One Law.
Speaker 1:And here we have the managing partner, jill Hunter. Jill, how are you? I'm good. Thanks, savoy, it's good to talk to you. Oh, and it just seems such a long time ago, doesn't it, since we were in that, in that, in that room in in manchester back in march. Um, what would you? I know we we did a winner's podcast and we always to ask people what, what were the three words that it meant to them? What's the three words that resonate with you about that winning that award? Oh, three words.
Speaker 2:That's a tough one. So I think, recognition, you know, recognition that actually we do what we say. We do because, particularly in my industry, know, in legal, everybody says the same stuff, um, but there's very few people who actually do it. Particularly around gender equality, people say, oh yes, everybody's welcome, everybody's included, and that's not true. So I think for us it's recognition, um celebration, because, um, it's been. We, we've undertaken a very intensive cultural change program over the last two years and across the business, everybody has been involved in that. So it's a real celebration, not just for me but for the whole team.
Speaker 2:And then I think opportunity is the other one on. So, you know, the opportunity to build on that and the opportunity to, you know, attract new people who are, you know, young women, who are thinking, oh, is this professional really for me? Um, I met a young girl just recently who I'm sort of mentoring, and she's at university and her university lecturer told her to abandon her aspirations of being in law because she was a woman, she wouldn't get anywhere. Oh, my life, this is 2024 and we've still got people, male lecturer, saying things like that to young women. So you know, for me it's the opportunity to go. No, there are. There are places where you will. You will fit in. There are places where there will be just the same opportunities for you, no matter what your gender is.
Speaker 1:And you just talked about having a massive transformation cultural project going on. I think that's what we need in organisations is our whether it be our big global businesses, our SMEs and our micro to really kind of build those businesses with culture at the heart. And that's I feel like I've known you for a while, you know, since I remember way back sat in a I think it was the Malmaison in Newcastle all those years ago and we had a great round table with the wonderful. We had Professor Jane Turner, the late Professor Jane Turner, there, and I know there was a passion around that table around culture. And how do we shift that? How do we shift and how do we extinct that dinosaur behavior? What are your big learnings about kind of this, the culture project?
Speaker 2:there are lots of misconceptions, I think, around around what you need to do for cultural change. You don't need huge resource. We, we are not. You know where. My business has 70 people in it and we do not have a head of hr. We do not have a head of HR. We do not have a cultural change director. We do not have it. You don't need that. You don't need a huge amount of money um to do it, and it does have real business benefits.
Speaker 2:Um, what you need is is the desire and the will to want to do it and to do it for the right reasons. Um, you know my passion for it comes from my own experience as a junior lawyer, coming through and feeling like a you know I hate using the expression but a square peg in a round hole, you know, not knowing where I fitted in, not worrying that I wouldn't have opportunities, not just because I was a woman, but because of my background, my sexuality, all of these sorts of things, and I just you know the team here really determined that we would create somewhere different, and that's what you need. I also am involved with the West End Women and Girls Centre, which is a brilliant centre in the North East that supports women and girls from very deprived backgrounds and they have no resource backgrounds and they have no resource. Look at what these people here are achieving with absolutely nothing, because they all have a common purpose, common will, and they're doing it for absolutely the right reasons. Sorry, that's a really long answer to your question.
Speaker 1:No, but I think the takeaway from that is it like you say, it doesn't have to have huge resource and huge money, it's all about will. Isn isn't it all willing and a good old cracking northern like cracking on, isn't it? I suppose it is at the heart of it and I know we've really been sort of so keen to sort of spread the love of northern power women across from one side of the pennines to the other, and I'm always really sort of buoyed by the enthusiasm of which the awards and the wider community are met from the North East. So it was great. I think we had a record number of North East winners and commended and future list game changer list this year. Is it important to be part of a sort of a bigger community like this? That feels like a loaded question, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:You know, I think it can be. Particularly if you're a woman leader in business, it can be quite a lonely place. I'm very lucky that, you know, my entire senior management team are women, so I have my little community here. But it's really good to connect with other women leaders who are also passionate about the same things that you're passionate about and share ideas. And that's why I've got involved with the mentoring program, not just because I think I can bestow knowledge upon people, but it's really a sort of two-way process and I'm learning from somebody who has completely different experiences than me, different outlook on life, different perspectives, but we have a common desire to create good places of work for all people.
Speaker 2:And I think some of the cultural stuff you know people get hung up on initiatives and things. At the end of the day, it's about treating people well and it's about being fair and it's about, yes, you can still make difficult decisions, but you can do it with kindness and you can do it with respect. So I think it's really good just to have that ability to come together and share experiences and share challenges and get support, and that's the benefit that I think Northern Power Women has for me. You know, the WhatsApp group is something that you can just jump onto and stick a request on. Has anybody got this? And it's all sorts of random stuff, isn't it From you know? Does anybody know where I can get some brilliant period pants?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, it's like Swap Shop. Do you know Swap Shop of its day? Some of our listeners probably won't, and that's probably me showing myself on peer, but it is that I always think, if we don't know, we know a woman or man who can is always my. And those WhatsApp groups that we talk about, because it was always like let's, let's, have more seats at these tables and then during the, the pandemic, we sort of we we took these conversations into each of the regions and, um, I did a thing about 24, 28 of them's a lot and it was brilliant, because every single region has is led by obviously different people, different cultures, different requirements, different passions, and it was really, it was fabulous, fascinating as to what we could do and what we could enable and, uh.
Speaker 1:So it was only a few weeks ago that I know I dropped uh, because we always love to the celebration all year round, not just for the awards and the fact that I'd seen that you had posted that square one law has become a b corp, uh, which is a flipping big deal, isn't it? It's something that I look at in awe and think like, for just years and years I've gone, that is just something I would aspire to do for our business, but it seems terrifying For those who aren't aware. Can you summarize B Corp and then we'll go into how you made it happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So B Corp is a movement that originally came from the US and what it's about is about wanting to have a better, more ethical business where you balance purpose and profit. So we talk about people, planet and profit all having equal importance in the business. So it's an external accreditation, but it's not, like you know, one of these where you fill out a form but you tick some boxes and then you get accreditation or you just put a few policies in place and you're sorted. It's quite a rigorous process, so it has real meaning. And the other thing it does is it provides you with a framework.
Speaker 2:So I think it's quite daunting sometimes if you are going into a cultural change. You know. You know you want to be different, you know you want to do something differently, you want to improve your business, particularly from an ethical point of view. Where do you start? So you know there's the environment, there's your people, there's your customers, there's your governance, there's all of these things, and B Corps provides a framework for that. So you don't even if you don't want to go through the whole bcops journey you can use their assessment tool to assess your business and see how it would stack up, and it gives you a framework and you go oh actually, I know a handful about that, we need to, we need to look at that. Um, oh no, I don't know about that part of my business. We need to do some work on that. So I think you know, whether you go through the process or not, it's a really good framework for people to use if you want to be a better business.
Speaker 1:I love that, and how long did it take.
Speaker 2:Well, it takes as long as you, not as long as you want it to, but you know it can be. It can be done quite rapidly. But we did it over two years because what I wanted to do was not to do it from a box ticking point of view, not to just get the accreditation. I wanted it to be embedded in the business um. One of the things, one of the requirements, is that you change your constitution so you acknowledge within your constitution formally that you will um consider the interests of all of your stakeholders, whether it's customers, suppliers, the community. That you will consider the interests of all of your stakeholders, whether it's customers, suppliers, the community that you operate in, your people, your shareholders if you've got them, you will consider all of their interests when you make decisions. And you have to change your constitution to do that and a lot of people leave that right to the end. What was the first thing we did? Was we changed that. We made the commitment and said, right, we're going to do this. So it's got to be part of our constitution from the start. Whether or not we get the accreditation is separate. Because we think it's important, we did that. So that happened two years ago, and then we made sure that we made the changes that we needed along the way so that we knew that by the time we were submitting, we had all the evidence to support that yes, we do do all of these things and we do them properly and not just for the sake of it and to get an accreditation. So we took two years to do it.
Speaker 2:The actual assessment process once you submit, you get allocated an assessor who sort of takes you through the initial stages and just just sort of sense check some of the questions that you've answered. Because there's a lot of questions to answer and some of them are quite in detail and very you have to think hard about how you answer them. They're not easy questions. And so you have an assessor who helps you through that initial stage and that's two or three months. And then you move on to verification, which is where you're asked for evidence on not every single question but a lot of the questions, and the evidence is usually over a five-year period. So there's a lot of information that you have to pull together. And then, once you go through that final point is you have an interview. Um, so you're interviewed by an assessor to just to make, just to make sure that you are genuine and it's not just information that you've pulled together for the purposes of b corps and it doesn't actually form part of the business. Um, and then, once you're fully verified, you sign an agreement.
Speaker 2:There's quite a big disclosure process as well, so you have to look at your customer base, because there are a number of controversial industries that you can't be involved in. Some of them are obvious ones, like you know the production of pornography and things like that, but also tobacco industry, gambling. There's quite a lot of industries that you have to be very careful of and you have to make an assessment. So we brought in an ethical client policy. So every time we get a new customer, we assess whether they are somebody who we want to work with, who we should work with. So it does make fundamental change to your business.
Speaker 1:It's not something to go in from a lighthearted point of view and think, well, this will be good to put on our website yeah, I was going to say because that's that's what I'm always fascinated, because I know how robust it is and how how it appears to be, and and the people I know who've gone through other businesses that I know been successful. Um, have you already felt a change within sort of the, the approach, either your existing clients or your new clients, or even your actual teams, your colleagues?
Speaker 2:Yes, I think we've just recently been accredited Everybody. We kept them up to date with the journey. But internally, what we're doing now is we're running sessions with people, because this isn't the end of the journey. This is the start of improvement. So one of the really good things you get when you get your accreditation is an improvement suggestion areas that you can improve. So it's never done right, it's never done, never done, and you're accredited every three years. So we're just doing workshops with our people at the moment about what each of those areas where we need to improve so we can get ideas from the business as to how we can do it in terms of customers and clients and things.
Speaker 2:In terms of customers and clients and things, we've already become part of a community as a B Corp.
Speaker 2:There are social events, there's a conference, there's all of that sort of stuff. So again, it's that community thing where you're meeting like-minded people and we're finding people that we want to work with and people want to work with us. So it's great from that point of view as well. You are part of a meaningful community and I think you know, as I said earlier, there are so many people who say they are doing good stuff, but actually the reality is they're not. I mean, law firms are a brilliant example of that. They all think they've got amazing cultures and when you scratch the surface, they haven't really. So, having that external validation, I think for customers and the prospective people who might want to work with us, they can look and think well, actually here are some people aren't just saying it, they're obviously doing it as well, and I think there's an increasing number of businesses who are just, you know, want to deal with other businesses, who are ethical businesses as well, yeah, it becomes a whole other community, doesn't it?
Speaker 1:a whole other sort of connectivity. Now I have a question for you from as part of this, our trophy holder season. If you like, we're talking. We're asking every single one of our winners and commended to ask another question of our next guest. Okay, so Chloe? Chloe Fletcher, who's our commended mentor of the year, has a question for you, which is who is the person that has changed your life? Oh crikey, it's a big question, isn't it? I thought it was easy. When it went down, I'm like it's actually quite a meaty one it's changed my life.
Speaker 2:Um, I'm gonna say something that's really cliched and really obvious. But my dad so I grew up and I know everybody does this sort of you know grew up in a very working class background first to go to university. In my family, all of that sort of stuff there was, um, but my dad, who left school when he was 14, was an engineer but had this real curiosity and thirst for learning, which he's 86, he's still alive now. He's 86, he still has that Comes on a Sunday and we have a massive discussion about all sorts of things every Sunday. He's the most intelligent man I've ever met, with the least qualifications, I've ever met with the least qualifications, and he really, you know, for me as a young girl growing up in the seventies and eighties, he gave me the confidence and the curiosity to think that I didn't have anything to hold me back and he has always been my biggest cheerleader and he supported me through some pretty tough stuff In life I've had quite a few challenges from all sorts of different perspectives.
Speaker 2:He's always been there and I know people say, well, that's what your dad should be like. But you know this is we're talking about a pit village in the north of England where a lot of my friends' dads were just waiting for their daughters to get married and have a baby or go and work in an admin job and they had very little aspiration for them and my dad never did that. He was really. He instilled in me about you know, you need to do better, you need to do. He kept saying to me do better than I've done. You can do better than I've done. Don't stop there, go and do more. Go and do more. And and I think one of the most rewarding things now is he is just so. He's so, he's so pleased that with the things that we're doing and he's, you know that's to me that's just great. So I know it's a bit cliche, but I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now if it wasn't for the encouragement and support that I've had from him from a very, very early age.
Speaker 1:And that clearly, jill, is what motivates you to give back and to support as well. I think when you've had that in your life, that person or those people or those around it makes you want to go. You know what I'm going to pay this forward, I'm going to and I know she says going to very cheesily leaping it. Back to the awards, but I know you will be putting nominations in for this year's Northern Powering Awards and you said something earlier about the b corp and how you've got to. You know, sort of consider the, the, the constitutional arrangement with your colleagues, your, your, uh, your stakeholders, your supply chain, everything that goes with it. I'm one of the best.
Speaker 1:I think it's the very first year. I was talking to um, a guy from a big professional services company in yorkshire, and he took a tack at it that he had no real sort of connectivity. He wasn't the sponsor of the gender network or anything like that, but his approach was right. I'm going to break it down and I'm going to do so. Many stakeholders, so many people that are related to our business through community, some of our key to like a team, and then individuals, but not the obvious ones. I want to pick out the ones that may never get that nomination. They may never get that. And he did it from almost like a perspective of your dad, like you just talked. He did it with that at the heart and I think I've always that's always resonated with me. I think sometimes it's easy to think sort of within and you're immediate. I feel like I'm going back to election year now. What way will you be voting? What way will what sort of what would you say to anyone considering nominating out there?
Speaker 2:I'd say yeah, I think that's a really good approach. Actually, you know, don't underestimate the feeling that somebody will get if they know that you think so much of them that you're publicly willing to nominate them and say this person's done a really good job. And we run an internal sort of tears for peers, we call it, where people nominate people within the business who've done a really good job or done so. They people are so excited and chuffed when they get that sort of nomination.
Speaker 2:Well, this is like on a grander scale, isn't it? This is like you know, it's not just within the firm. We're saying you know, you're such a superstar that we want to shout about it on a national basis or a northern basis, but you know, it gets national attention. So I think it's look at the people in your business who need a boost, who are doing a really good job and perhaps are just a little bit under the radar. The unsung heroes. I love it. I mean, I love it when awards ceremonies have an unsung heroes bit, because I think sometimes the people that are the face of the business are not the people who are making things happen, and it's really important that the people that are actually making things happen get the recognition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not every superhero wears a cape. Right? Where is the trophy Jill? Where is it? It's in our reception.
Speaker 2:So we have a customer reception and we have a display and it's in the middle because it's a nice short one. So it's, you know, it looks good.
Speaker 1:Very beautiful and handcrafted. Oh, thank you. Thank you, jill. Thank you so much and I know thank you to chloe for your question. Jill is going to be giving me a question.
Speaker 1:Uh, as we exit the today's podcast, for me to pass on to our next trophy holder, jill, thank you so much. Congratulations on being our SME winner for 2024 with Square One Law. Thank you, massive congratulations on the B Corp. I've got kind of B Corp envy, but alsoa brick wall is not really sure where to go. But I love the idea. Not love the idea. I think there's my direction.
Speaker 1:My takeaway is I need to go look at that framework. But thank you so much. Never a look at that framework, um, but thank you so much. Uh, never, ever, have your aspiration dimmed, ever. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. You're welcome, lovely to speak to you and thank you all of you for joining us on the podcast. We love your comments, we love you joining in the conversation on all of the socials on twitter, instagram, on tiktok we are we are power, underscore net. And on facebook and LinkedIn we are power. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. My name is Simone. This is the we Are Power podcast. What goes on media production?
