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FollowPodcast: Leading Professionals
Laura talks to senior leaders from some of the world’s most successful professional organisations about the crucial issues they are currently facing.
She sets out to reveal and explain the complex, messy, and surprisingly emotional challenges of leading professionals, and to identify key learning for all professionals.
Each episode reveals the realities that lie beneath the ‘professional’ veneer these highly successful organisations, and their leaders, present to the outside world.
If you are a professional in a leadership role – or if you simply want to understand your work and your organisation better – then you have come to the right place.
Be ready to explore new ideas, challenge your assumptions, and learn to see your world a little differently.
Launching 22 September 2025.
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Ep 0 - Welcome to Leading Professionals
Laura introduces topics and guests from upcoming episodes.
Ep 1 - Leading in uncertain times: How to respond to geopolitical change and AI disruption
Guest: Fabien Curto Millet, Chief Economist of Google
Fabien joins Laura to discuss how he and his team of economists anticipate, analyse, and understand the changes with which Google must contend. How does he lead his team of professionals, and manage himself, during these uncertain times?
Ep 2 - Doing the right thing: How to take ethically tough decisions
Guest: Georgia Dawson, Senior Partner of Freshfields
In a complex commercial, social, and political environment, how do you balance the competing interests of multiple stakeholders? Laura and Georgia explore: what is the right thing? How do you decide and how do you make sure you do it?
Ep 3 - Electing leaders: How to choose your leaders and how to get elected
Guest: Michael Ensser, Chair of Egon Zehnder
Laura asks Michael: Why does a world leading firm of leadership consultants choose to elect their senior leaders, and how do their elections actually work? What really goes on behind the scenes of professional service firms’ carefully stage-managed leadership elections?
Ep 4 - Considering the future: How AI and private equity will change professionals' work
Guest: Michael Izza CBE, CEO (former) of ICAEW
Focusing on the interrelated changes of Gen AI and PE ownership, Laura and Michael explore: What is already happening and what changes lie ahead? After almost 20 years leading the ICAEW, Michael offers a uniquely long-term and global perspective.
Ep 5 - Becoming "professional": How to look, sound, act and feel like a professional
Guest: Paul Lewis, Firmwide Managing Partner of Linklaters
If you do not fit the conventional image of an elite professional, how do you persuade others that you are, and how do you learn to feel like one? Paul and Laura discuss his own very personal experiences and what he is doing at his firm to encourage social mobility.
Ep 6 - Leading complex change: Breaking through practical barriers and political resistance
Guest: Dame Emily Lawson, formerly COO, NHS England & Head of Number 10's Delivery Unit
How do you avoid being overwhelmed by complexity or discouraged by failure? How do you bring the right team together and deal with covert resistance? Emily talks to Laura about her experience of leading the COVID-19 vaccine programme and working in Number 10.