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Kelly Molson

Kelly Molson is the Co-founder and Managing Director of Rubber Cheese, an award winning web design and development agency with studios in Hertfordshire and Cambridge.

Blogger at kellymolson.co.uk a collection of interviews with leading women agency owners, helping to raise the profile of women in the digital industry.

Kelly recently founded Mob Happy a peer-to-peer network for agency owners, helping to increase the percentage of women agency owners by supporting existing founders on their journey and inspiring up and coming leaders. Structured as a not-for-profit, they invest in running enterprise days and confidence building activities in primary and secondary schools.

When she’s not at work you’ll find her eating her way around Cambridge restaurants with wedding photographer fiancé Lee, or watching the footie at White Hart Lane. She loves a walk in the sun with their mini-dachshund Doris and growing veg in the garden allotment… but not peas. Never peas.

Erica Quessenberry

Erica is a designer of user experience, user interfaces, and cocktails at Studio RedDesigns. She partners with digital agencies and companies all over the world to design practical solutions that align business and user needs to achieve results — from simple websites to complex native mobile applications.

Erica is also co-founder and creative director of Skrift, an online magazine for the Umbraco community.

She has presented at conferences in Europe, Australia and the US on gender diversity in the tech secto

Listen to the episode

Tune in to find out:

 

  • A little about our co-hosts Erica and Kelly.
  • Why Erica and Kelly were interested to take part in this season to talk about diversity.
  • Some of our hopes for this season and the conversations we will have.
  • The role of small agencies in transformation in the hiring process.
  • Some local organisations that are making a difference.
  • Kelly’s non-profit, More Happy and the function it currently serves.
  • The supportive nature of the agencies that Kelly has experienced.
  • Using business and financial reasons to motivate transformation.
  • Conflict within an organisation in the context of diversity.
  • And much more!

[INTRO]
[0:00:05.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome back to Happy Porch Radio. The digital agency podcast
for progressive agency owners and web professionals. Season 4 is an exploration of diversity in
our industry, especially gender diversity. This season your host Barry O’Kane is joined by some
wonderful co-hosts for conversations with agency leaders and diversity and inclusion experts.
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:32.3] BOK: Hello and welcome to another season of Happy Porch Radio. This season is
an exploration of diversity in our industry. We will focus on how leaders and experts are working
to understand diversity and build diverse teams that enable growth of successful and impactful
businesses.
Now, diversity is a huge and complex area, so my hope is that this season will be a useful and
interesting contribution to the conversation. Unlike previous seasons, in Season 4, I will be
joined by some amazing co-hosts. Each co-host will join for a few episodes and hopefully the
three way conversations will make for an informed and an entertaining lesson. What better way
to kick off the season than by meeting Erica and Kelly, two of our season co-hosts.
[0:01:24.7] KM: Hello, my name is Kelly Molson and I’m the cofounder and Managing Director
of Rubber Cheese which is a web design and development agency based in sunny
Hertfordshire. We have been around for 15 years now, we’re celebrating our 15th birthday this
year which is extremely exciting.
We work specifically where the food and drinks sector, visitor to attractions and health care. We
have quite strong niches in those sectors and we build online systems, applications, things like
booking systems or annual pass solutions for museums or visitor centers, that’s kind of our
specialism really. On top of that, I also founded an organization called Mob Happy last year
which is a not-for-profit organization which helps support and increase the number of women
agency owners so that’s something that I’m really excited about.
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© 2018 Happy Porch Radio, an Endzone.io product 2
[0:02:19.8] BOK: Yeah, when I saw Mob Happy and also your personal blog where you
interviewed a whole bunch of founders, women in the industry, I thought that was really cool and
that’s one of the main reasons why I wanted to get you involved in this season.
[0:02:32.0] KM: Thank you. That’s one of the main reasons I’m really interested in being on this
season.
[0:02:38.3] BOK: Excellent. Let’s meet Erica.
[0:02:40.4] EQ: Hello, my name is Erica Quessenberry and I am a solopreneur and at UXUI
realm. I also do front end and I’m a certified Umbraco expert. And I mainly contract with
developers and development agencies that specialize in Umbraco. I’ve been involved in that
community for the last eight or so years. Not a lot of women in that community so It’s become a
passion of mine to see that grow and get more women involved in development.
[0:03:14.7] BOK: Yeah, when I saw you speak at the conference in the Gold Coast in Australia
earlier this year exactly on that topic or this topic. I thought it was really interesting and we’ve
had you on the season four talking about Umbraco so I feel like there’s a really good connection
there and continuation so it’s really cool. That topic and that talk is why I wanted you to be
involved in this season.
[0:03:36.8] EQ: Yes.
[0:03:38.7] BOK: Like I said earlier, I wanted to talk to you both where doing a full season,
you’re both taking part in several different conversations and I wanted to kick start this
conversation by asking you, why did you decide to come and join me and be a cohost?
[0:03:55.9] KM: I guess, when you asked me Barry, I went and listened to a few of the episodes
of your podcast and I really liked the style of them, I liked how kind of conversational and quite
relaxed they were. I’ve been to quite a lot of agency sector events in the past and I’ve always
been quite surprised at how few women have been at the events and I’ve just kind of realized in
my self that I didn’t actually know that many other women agency owners. I decided I was going
to interview as many as I could find.
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© 2018 Happy Porch Radio, an Endzone.io product 3
It’s very lucky, Daniel who runs the agency collective put a – he shared my link on Linkedin and
I was completely inundated with some incredible women who are just really lucky to kind of chat
to and talk to them about what their agency background has been, how they started up, why
they made that decision to kind of grow into an agency and how they felt about kind of the
percentages of women involved in our industry and founders.
You know, the topic about diversity is something that I’m really passionate about and want to
understand more about. That’s what drove me to kind of set up Mob Happy as well. Giving
women agency is a place where they can come together and also support each other at
different stages of your kind of agency story.
[0:05:22.2] EQ: For me, I was asked to speak at an Umbraco conference a few years back and
came up with a topic about diversity on teams and in the workplace and what that meant for the
Umbraco community and the more I researched it, the more passionate I guess I felt about it,
the more I learned about the topic and I think I’ve given three different talks about it at different
Umbraco conferences.
Also, being a part of the community as a minority in that community and just watching it slowly
grow and just finding that passion in educating people and developing empathy for it and then
also empowering women. When women see other women at these events and conferences,
they just – I don’t know, feel like they have more of a sense of place there when they see people
like them. I guess I developed my passion that way and just being outspoken for the Umbraco
community specifically but anyone who wants to talk about it.
I guess, when you asked me to be on this, I was very excited because this is kind of –it’s
become my soapbox, I guess, so to speak.
[0:06:29.8] BOK: Yeah, do you find, actually, I’ve got two questions. The first thing is this
season, I wanted to talk about diversity with the focus on gender diversity but not exclusively.
That’s why we start with both of you which is what I’m really looking forward to, we’ve got some
really exciting people to speak to but is there something, is there like a starting point or an
assumption or something you were looking forward to these interviews which we haven’t yet
recorded.
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© 2018 Happy Porch Radio, an Endzone.io product 4
Is there something, what are your expectations, are there some assumptions, are there some
things you would like to get out of it?
[0:07:01.3] EQ: I would love to see what other people are doing, you know? I don’t feel like I
have a lot of people to talk to about this topic. It is a global issue, not just the UK or the US but
just how other people like what are you doing? What practical things are you doing like can we
stop talking about it and actually do something about it and just take a little bit more action.
[0:07:25.2] KM: Yeah, I completely agree Erica. I think something that you said earlier is
something that I’m really keen to understand how we can improve and it was what you’ve said
about encouraging more women to be developers and getting more people into the industry that
way.
It’s something that we’ve really struggled with as an agency to hire female developers, women
developers. We get very few applicants that are women. I’m really interested to understand how
I can – what I could do to change that and how I could encourage more women to apply even.
There’s also something else that I’m finding quite an interesting topic at the moment and that’s
how can you make your workplace as diverse as possible if you’re not actually located in a
particularly diverse location, which we’re not. That’s an interesting one as well that I would love
to get some thoughts and feedback on.
[0:08:23.2] BOK: Yeah, that’s really interesting. For me, one of the things I mean, the
recruitment thing is a challenge we have with me at my agency as well. I think that’s a really
important topic but I’m also interested in the broader conversation which you touched on there
Kelly. Things like that, building diversity or their strengths within your team when there’s some
form of limitation and then things like training and development and building culture, how do
deal with problems and conflicts and retention and there’s maybe I’m trying to preface this by
saying I’m not expecting a few conversations in a podcast to have any magic solutions or
anything but to be able to maybe contribute to the conversation in some way would be really
cool.
[0:09:12.9] EQ: Yeah, absolutely that. I think just learning from other people as well about how
they’ve tackled those issues. It’s interesting, at my own agency currently, we are actually going
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© 2018 Happy Porch Radio, an Endzone.io product 5
through quite a big change. Very recently, two of our designers left, moved on and went to a
different place but they were both women and actually, we’ve now hired a male designer and
we’ve got anther male developer starting. Our team has always been very equal, 50/50 split
between the two and now actually, it’s not going to be like that at all anymore.
It’s more 80/20. It’s going to change things here and that’s going to be quite interesting as well.
Yeah, a lot’s happening.
[0:09:59.2] KM: That’s interesting that – because I feel like it can go the flip way too and
specifically with designers and maybe that’s because I am more in the design realm myself but I
feel like a lot of designers I know are women. I don’t know if that’s true but hiring a male
designer, I mean, does that bring it back to the other way, you know?
Maybe hiring a male designer and then hiring a female developer does that kind of, are you
crossing lines the other way, you know? Be more equal, I don’t know either because I actually
don’t know what the percentage is -
[0:10:29.9] EQ: That’s the font, yeah.
[0:10:31.6] KM: Another person just break down for designers as men versus women but –
[0:10:35.7] EQ: It’s interesting though because you hire for cultural fit and you hire for skill fit.
For me, that doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman but it obviously is going to
change - it is going to have an effect on the agency so I don’t know, it will be just interesting to
see how that changes things.
[0:10:55.4] BOK: That’s an interesting for me as well. Hiring is where I think this is the clearest,
although I think the topic fits in any decision making process within a company, within the
agency. But if you’re saying we need to be hiring you know, this is our correct tier for hiring and
gender doesn’t matter or diversity doesn’t matter and so on. Is there a broader question around,
do I feel that I should be doing something, you know, above and beyond just looking at the short
term?
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© 2018 Happy Porch Radio, an Endzone.io product 6
I need to fill this role or I need to make this decision to help with this broader thing within the
industry that I think is important. Does that question make sense?
[0:11:32.5] EQ: Yeah, you’re looking at – you mean, you’re looking at it from a long, as a long
term solution rather than you know, okay, we need to hire somebody. So we need to fill this hole
that we have. But how do we look at it, you know, in the long term, you know, looking at five
years from now, we want to hire, you know, two or three female developers, how do we do that,
what could we put in place there.
[0:11:51.7] BOK: Exactly, even with the industry generally, what can we as individuals do or as
individual agencies do to sort of say, you know, one of the problems is when I advertise, I get a
certain demographic of people applying and is that problem purely within the way I advertise or
whatever or within the area. Or is there something I should be doing to help move the industry
forward or is that too big a mountain for a small agency to be trying to contribute.
[0:12:18.8] KM: No, I mean, maybe for one agency to try and do themselves but I mean, as a
community, it’s definitely something that we should be looking at. There are pockets of
associations that are kind of doing things to help with that. There is an organization called
SyncDevelopHER which is no rich based so you know, not too far from Cambridge offices.
But they do a lot to promote and support women developers. It seems that there’s pockets of it
all over the country so I don’t know if there’s a one kind of national thing that would help. I
suppose it’s just trying to find those organizations that you can align yourself with. For instance,
this SyncDevelopHER actually runs the DevelopHER awards every year.
It’s making sure that you are nominating those women and that’s – you know, all kinds of
categories so you know, up and coming talents, you know, kind of junior developers, designers,
et cetera, supporting those kind of events and maybe align in yourself with those as well will
help.
[0:13:25.2] BOK: I guess an extreme example of doing that within an individual - those
organizations by the way are brilliant, there’s several local organizations that I think are doing
really good work in tying that back to the agency but actual things we can do which is what you
both mentioned as you know, something that we could maybe try and extract from this season
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© 2018 Happy Porch Radio, an Endzone.io product 7
of the podcast is conversations about concrete things rather than vague discussions of
problems.
I think there’s a decision making thing like for example, I can decide to almost do a little bit of –
on one extreme, I can sort of almost do positive discrimination, I can say, you know, I actively
want to recruit some demographic that I don’t have on the team at the moment and use that as
one of the criteria as well as you say, skill and culture fit. How important do you think things like
sort of you know, kind of challenging things that maybe aren’t directly feeding into the immediate
bottom line type stuff.
[0:14:21.6] EQ: I think it’s a place to start but I think you could even back it up even more and
look at how you’re advertising I think. Like again, this organization that you mentioned are great
if you can align yourself with them. But even looking at like there’s studies that show that
advertisements are written with very male dominated language. Women are self-selecting out
before they even have a chance to apply.
If we can back up and really look at from that angle and maybe you do set some kind of positive
discrimination roles for your organizations as a way to try to balance.
[0:15:00.1] KM: What you said about the job is really important actually. I think actually with our
last job ad that we put out for a developer. We did run it through, I can’t remember what site it
was called but there was like a gender check that you could run your ad through and which kind
of like looked at the terminal that you use and the words that you used.
It did come out quite biased towards women. Which you know, I was pretty okay with. It still
didn’t have the desired effect. But I think it’s a combination of things, you know, where again, I’m
going to come back to location but where we’re located is, although we’re on the commuter belt
into the London, it’s not a particularly diverse town and I just think that there aren’t - a developer
- finding any developers in our location is actually quite challenging
Finding women developers is even more so. You know, I don’t know the gender checking about
job ad is actually going to make that much difference.
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[0:15:59.4] EQ: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting point because I live between Seattle and
Vancouver BC so it is very hard, we have the same problem here finding developers, they
always want to go to the bigger cities for more money. I think you know, changing – agencies
changing their mindset to be open to remote workers and Barry, I know, your agency is
completely remote and I think that’s brilliant and I have friends in agencies that don’t allow
remote working and I think they’re doing themselves a disservice by eliminating a pool of
applicants that could potentially be great for them.
Just changing that mindset to and bring in a different sort of people into your agencies.
[0:16:39.1] KM: Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it seems crazy to not have that as an option
nowadays where you know, everyone’s so comfortable with homework.
[0:16:49.3] EQ: I know that you know, I’ve been turned down for jobs before because of time
differences. It is definitely a different mindset when you're dealing with remote workers. It comes
with its own set of challenges so just being willing to think outside the box and how you manage
projects or how you manage your employees and how you manage projects and what not to
work around those differences because I think that if you can, you’ll get more benefits out of it
than hardships if you can just make it over the bumps of that process.
[0:17:23.6] BOK: Yeah, I’m glad you said that about the challenges because it is very true, it’s
not a magic wand fix for any problem but it does sort of change and I think, increase the
opportunities as a business.
It does bring its own challenges and it does take extra different kind of work to make that work.
Maybe the core underlying principle of what you're talking about there is looking at decisions
around, for example, flexible working right the way through to remote teams.
As part of – as a way of impacting diversity as well as the other things, the other reason you
might make those decisions. I mean, remote working isn’t the only way to tackle that problem.
Right now, we’re recruiting for a developer and it’s really hard to find even, you know, when I
can say anybody in Europe or – but it’s quite – maybe there’s other things like using Stack
Overflow we use a lot for advertising but I actually, they can be difficult to find female
developers on Stack Overflow.
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© 2018 Happy Porch Radio, an Endzone.io product 9
There’s so many, as you both said, there’s so many different factors and even stepping back to
that other – the thing that I’m really interested in is no matter what situation or what thing we’re
trying to work on is one of the factors in that decision making, being, thinking about this sort of
diversity or inclusion questions which I think are both closely related.
For example, Erica, you talk at a lot of conferences but I’ve heard a lot of people recently saying
that they will pick carefully, the conferences they’ll go to, particularly male speakers that I
respect who saying I’m won’t go to a conference if I think the speaker – if I think the diversity of
the speakers is limited.
You know, or Erica things like Mob Happy like kind of – sorry, Kelly things like Mob Happy
things like you know, that are, we don’t’ need to do those things but you know, but doing the
extra, taking the extra step. Actually, I wanted to talk a little bit more about Mob Happy, Kelly,
maybe you can tell us a little bit more about what – how it came to fruition and exactly what
you’re doing with it.
[0:19:26.1] KM: So, Mob Happy really kind of came off the back of the interview, all these
incredible women. I wanted very much to create something where I could bring them together to
– I mean, it’s peer to peer learning really so the idea of Mob Happy is it’s a small intimate
mastermind groups where women can come along and they can share their challenges or their
successes or anything they want, kind of support and feedback from, in a very kind of safe
environment.
And I will be honest, it was something that I was looking for myself and so I really wanted to
learn from other women agency owners but I actually was quite torn about whether I made it
woman only because I have to be completely honest in that women networking really bugs me.
So I was really conflicted as to whether I make this kind of woman only and the choice that I
made was to state actually that it is women led and it is to support woman agency owners but it
is open to all.
We do have men that come along and it is a really, really good discussion. So it has been
running in London and Cambridge for a year now, really successfully. Like I said, it is really
small groups which means actually the women and the men in that group really get to know
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© 2018 Happy Porch Radio, an Endzone.io product 10
each other really well. They are starting, agencies are starting to work with each other which is
really incredible but my ethos about making it a not for profit was the profits from the
masterminds get driven back into something that happens within local schools in those areas.
So we are just starting to work with an organization called Form the Future, who run enterprise
days in actually secondary schools at the moment but we are going to be running enterprise
days in a primary school in Cambridge and it is to inspire the younger generation to be quite
entrepreneurial, creative but also to take women agency owners into that environment to inspire
young women to be leaders because I think that it is really important to show women as leaders
as in these kind of roles from a really young age so it comes full circle.
[0:21:48.2] BOK: How do you find the energy to do all of that?
[0:21:50.8] EQ: I haven’t got a clue. Personally, actually I had a bit of a tough year last year and
I had some time away from work and when I came back, I needed something really positive to
focus on. The agency is great, we do lots of amazing work but I needed something that I could
put a lot of energy in and to keep myself busy. So that is how I did it really. I did it at a time
where I needed to be busy and I kept myself really busy and now at the moment actually where
it’s been established for quite a while now, there is not as much work that I need to physically
put into it.
It is more of a case of actually I need to look at the PR side really and kind of getting it out and
so more people know about it but we have regular people that come back each month now
which is lovely. So it is not as much work as it originally was.
[0:22:45.9] BOK: What I was wanting to tie that back to is this idea of thinking about diversity
and inclusion in the broader contest of everything that we do. Can you describe the situation
there if you have or you are looking for something to do but you chose this specific thing to work
on and I guess as a problem to solve, is that fair?
[0:23:10.5] EQ: Yeah, I think our industry is and always has been extremely male dominated
and I have never been in a situation where I found that uncomfortable but it doesn’t need to be
that way. So I guess there is a problem. There is something that needs to be solved. I am not
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going to say that I’ve got the answers to it but by involving women in the conversation, we are
going to get a better understanding of how we can support and how we can help.
I guess when I was interviewing the women agency owners I was trying to find out if there were
things that were holding us back from starting agencies or being in these leadership roles but
there are so many different factors to it that there is not one thing that is going to solve all of
those factors you know. Ultimately it comes down to some of us don’t want to press forward into
those roles. They can be highly stressful, agency work can be long hours. It can take you away
from your family.
And it can be quite challenging in itself and so there is lots of things that I think can be helped
whether Mob Happy can be the solution to it. I don’t know, it’s probably a bit of a grand hope for
it.
[0:24:26.1] BOK: But being part of the solution is a fairly, it is an amazingly positive thing, right?
[0:24:29.9] EQ: It is yeah, it really is and it is something that I am really proud off and I am so
glad that I have been able to do it and the feedback we get is amazing actually. We had the
session actually in August where a couple of the women that came along was just really great.
You know they run an extremely successful agency, extremely successful but they were really
grateful of just having two or three hours where they could focus solely on their business and
not be in their business at the same time.
So giving them that kind of space to work in and being surrounded by other women who are
their peers that were having the same challenges as them that we can all help and support each
other and that for me is a huge and positive thing. I think there is a misconception that the
agency world is quite competitive and actually all our founders is incredibly supportive and that
is a really good thing to be a part of.
[0:25:26.1] BOK: One of the things you touched on there was encouraging women to be
leaders or increasing the diversity of the team or the agency as a way of helping people who are
currently under represented or who want to get involved and are struggling to get involved and I
think that’s when we talk about the problem that’s one huge aspect of what in my mind I think of
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as the problem. But I think there is another part which I am equally interested in which is this
idea that diversity of our teams does actually increases the quality of the work that we do.
The creativity and the quality and there’s some really hilarious examples around things or teams
that aren’t diverse that produce products which really feel certain communities or certain maybe
types of user. So I am really interested in this sort of the – and both of those angles and how
they are a compliment and I often feel, maybe this is unfair but I feel that quite often, we are
having a conversation about just one or just the former and without - if you are thinking about
the business decision making process.
Like why should I recruit a more diverse team, is it just a – just is a wrong word but is you know
half of the picture is to try and help make things more equal and fair but also it will actually help
my business and I sometimes feel that’s missed out and it is something I would like to explore a
little bit in this season.
[0:26:53.0] KM: Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. Sorry Erica I interrupted you.
[0:26:57.6] EQ: No that’s all right. I was just going to say it is interesting that you say that it is a
missed on topic because it is something in my talks that I give, it is something that I actually hit
on as an angle to try to get men more involved in the conversation because I feel like if I can
appeal the men sense of like ROI or let’s talk business and then maybe I could create empathy
via that method. So it is interesting to me that you think that’s a missed on thing that’s talked
about.
[0:27:26.5] BOK: Yeah and obviously it’s is entirely my perception of the missed I thing and one
of the things that made me think about that more was that section or when you are talking about
that in your presentation. I don’t know, maybe this is too difficult to question but how like have
we got specific examples of that ROI or how do we make that more concrete?
[0:27:45.5] EQ: That is a very good question. I am sure if you go back, there is research on the
McKenzie Institute? I think it’s McKenzie. They have quite a bit of research on that area, I don’t
know any specifics but for that specifically but I did read an interesting article to pivot just slightly
on that. I think it was about design ethics and there was a hands free soap dispenser installed at
one of the big tech companies that did not recognize colored people hands.
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So when you put your hand in order to get soap it wouldn’t dispense if you were a darker
skinned color. And so it is just little things like that that has a big impact like how many soap
dispensers are out there in the world and if they only work for 50% of the population I mean that
is clearly a huge fail on the companies part because they didn’t do enough testing. They don’t
have a diverse enough team, whatever. And that definitely plays back into ROI because you are
missing out many and you are missing out on your reputation and things like that so -
[0:28:53.2] BOK: Exactly and I mean even if that example is just an example or a story or
whatever. That I think is something that happens all the time almost without noticing, making
decisions, like and even in the broader sense like you put a bunch of very technical people in a
room and they will come up with a very over engineered technical solution to a problem but you
actually need like the user, UX and thinking about from a user’s point of view when we are
talking about their digital products we create and so that same argument I think applies to
almost anything.
If we only have a certain type of people in the room. It is almost impossible to be able to build
products that work for a wide audience or that miss out on the opportunities that you are
describing.
[0:29:44.6] EQ: Yeah, you get a bunch of people who all went to the same school or grew up on
the same neighborhood and they’re all going think, they’ve all been thought to think the same
way. They’ve all been taught the same cultural norms, they would tend to have the same biases
and conscious or obverts and yeah, you are not going to be thinking outside of what you know
in your experiences. So the more people with different types of background and the more
experiences that they’ve had individually, the better.
I think the more broader the thought that goes into – that is not the word that I want to use but
you’ve got a wider range of opinions and ideas that you can help to distill down and refine into
better products for the users.
[0:30:30.6] BOK: So we’ve touched on recruitment, we have touched on leadership a little bit
and we’ve touched on things like importance in wide diversity and the problem and so on and so
I am going to leave and try and touch on even more topics but conflict within a team.
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So when managing a team or running a team of any sort, there is always the potential for
disagreements and conflict and so as an open question to you both, is something like having a
more diverse team going to have any impact on that as a problem or as a challenge for running
a team?
[0:31:08.7] KM: I definitely think so because you are bringing in different backgrounds, different
types of people and I know when a lot of people hire, they go for a cultural fit and I think that is
important but also I think that that helps to biases for who we decided to hire and it does. I think
it brings up a whole new level of problems that I think that teams should be spending additional
time in those types of workshops that help you understand each other and understand your
differences and how to work with your differences and things of that nature to help combat that.
So it is definitely a learning curve. It is not like, “Oh, I am going to hire a diverse team and
everything is going to be awesome and my ROI is going to go up and everybody is just going to
get along,” because I don’t think that’s true. But I think that if you keep an open mind and face
those challenges proactively then that is when you’re going to get to your positive returns for
making that decision to diversify your teams.
[0:32:10.2] BOK: But I think that is a really interesting thing like putting any group of people
together, we’re all human there is going to be disagreements and particularly when we’re
working hard and passionate about something or feel really strongly or get involved I have a
hypothesis that diversity within the team increases the initial challenge of making the
connections like you said Erica of having to consciously work on things like communication and
feedback and dealing with challenges.
But then the follow up to that, the hypothesis that I am exploring would like to explore is once
you get through that the diversity of the team actually makes that stronger rather than as you
said Kelly, a group of people who are all very similar are still going to have part of the same
problems with communication. But once you get over the hurdle of working out how to
communicate and work together and resolve conflicts, you’ve got nothing extra then.
There is no compound effect of that sort of some of the products you know? And then just to
throw another sort of just as a thought experiment into the conversation is that as well as all of
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these other things and I think Kelly this touches on something you were talking before about
recruitment and then the dynamics of a team changing people leave and being able to keep the
importance of or workout how diverse as your team diversity changes, how that impacts on the
company.
On the business and the products and the outfits. I am really interested in your thoughts on that
particularly as you’ve described the changes that just happened with an agency as people come
and go.
[0:33:49.4] KM: It is kind of a work and process at the moment. So the new team members
don’t actually start until the beginning of October. So I guess we don’t have a case for it yet, we
don’t know how that is going to change things. We know we have ways of working in place and
ways that people can communicate with each other and we try to keep that as flexible as
possible but I guess we don’t know how things are going to change and it is quite exciting and it
does make me feel a little bit nervous as well. Just from a people management perspective.
I think it is the biggest challenge that I have in my agency. Obviously our people are the most
important part of the agency without a doubt but it is probably the area that I have had to learn
the most about. So you know, I don’t know, I am excited to see what is going to happen. Maybe
we can talk about it in a few months from now and I will tell you what positive or negative
changes of coming in.
[0:34:53.1] BOK: Yeah, I would love to do that. That would be really interesting in little mini
case study. And yeah, so I just wanted to also say thank you so much to both of you for taking
part in this season. I’m really looking forward to this conversations. Anybody who is listening,
please do send us questions or thoughts and feedback.
I’m really keen to hear our listener’s input into the conversations. Hit us up on twitter, our link’s
on the site and yeah, Erica and Kelly, can you just finish up and we find out a little bit about
where our listeners can find out more about you and maybe leave us with a final thought for
looking forward to the rest of the season.
[0:35:28.7] EQ: If you want to find out more about me or Rubber Cheese, my agency, you can
go to rubbercheese.com, you can actually find my series of interviews with women agency
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owners over on my personal blog which is kellymolson.co.uk. I think there’s about 35 interviews
up there at the moment and a few more coming very soon and if you wanted to check out Mob
Happy, it’s mob-happy.com and you can find out a little bit more there about what we do in to
support women agency owners.
[0:36:02.2] KM: Great, and if you would like to find out more about me, I can be found at
studioreddesigns.com and also, sporadically on Twitter with some random thoughts,
@reddesigns to find out what I’m doing.
[0:36:16.6] BOK: Wonderful, thank you both again and really looking forward to the rest of the
season.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:36:20] BOK: You can get all the links and notes from this episode on happyporchradio.com
where you can also find out how to send us questions, feedback and get involved in the
conversation about this series.
If you enjoy the show, please share with anyone else who might enjoy it too. Thanks for
listening.
[END]