Season 4 is here, and we couldn’t think of a better way to open it than with Katy Dowding, President and CEO of Skanska UK, and currently the only female CEO of a UK tier-one contractor.
Katy didn’t start with a master plan. She found her first job by working through the Yellow Pages, squeezed five days’ work into four, and travelled from Southampton to London for college. Somewhere along the way, she also became a TV quiz show champion, and her colleagues still occasionally spot her on reruns.
In conversation with Zoe at Abbey Road Studios, Katy talks openly about the weight of being first, and what she says to people who think she “doesn’t look like a CEO”. She also shares where her earliest leadership lessons really came from, and the moment she realised that leading like someone else simply wasn’t working.
Honest, funny and full of hard-won wisdom, this is a brilliant start to the season. The episode is out right now.
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