From a humble start, Jenny Garrett has gained an OBE, and founded both the UK’s first BAME executive coaching directory, as well as Rocking Ur Teens, a social enterprise guiding disadvantaged teens to successful futures. And she’s only just getting started.The ‘queen of the killer question’ talks to Liz Hall.
Coach, diversity and inclusion champion, trainer, author and entrepreneur Jenny Garrett’s “very humble beginnings” haven’t held her back, thanks in part to family members who’ve inspired her to work hard and to believe she can do anything.
Garrett’s achievements include running a successful coaching and leadership development business, being awarded an OBE, and launching the UK’s first-ever BAME Executive Coaching Directory. She’s also published books including Rocking your Role: The ‘how to’ guide to success for female breadwinners (Ecademy Press, 2012) and Equality vs Equity: Tackling issues of Race in the workplace (Emerald Publishing, 2023), shortlisted for the Business Book Awards (the results will be announced in September). The latter is a topic Garrett is invited to contribute on frequently, including on 14 November at Coaching at Work’s annual conference.
Garrett started off in social housing and remembers “when I was very young [having] a choice between a burger or fries. I couldn’t have both. That tells you that it was pretty tough.
“So it was amazing to even be nominated for an OBE (in 2021 for services to Entrepreneurship and Women in Business). And when I received the email, I didn’t quite believe it. For someone from very humble beginnings to achieve something like this feels quite amazing.
“I feel very honoured and I often think, ‘Gosh, little Jenny from the block with an OBE. How did that happen? Maybe I’m still not completely owning it, but it’s definitely the thing that’s made my mum proud of me.”
Attending the OBE awards reception with family members “was really moving, but it also showed me that they’d done their research. I’d coached a homeless woman with children, which I hadn’t really spoken to anyone about, but which was one of the things they quoted. They talked about the various things I’d done that aren’t part of my job but because I saw a need…It was really lovely to hear a snippet of my life story and the fact that I touched these lives.”
Garrett’s early upbringing may have been tough economically, “but it wasn’t devoid of love, care and fun. We didn’t have a lot, but my mum would do things like buy packets of raffle tickets, and we’d have a raffle at home, or a game of bingo. She’d be creative with the things that we did together, which was really nice.”
Her father and grandparents have also inspired her: “My grandmother was in her twenties when she came with my grandfather to England from the Caribbean with nothing. They managed to secure roles, buy and sell a house, then build houses in St Lucia.”
When Garrett became a teenager, her mother, who’d been working as a secretary, studied to become a teacher.
“My brother and I found seeing her study incredibly inspiring. Many don’t see their parent as a student, they don’t see what’s involved, the sacrifice, late nights, working hard, struggling. Seeing that fuelled my love of learning and showed me that [studying is] doable and that you can pivot, you can change so you don’t have to be doing the same thing that you’ve always done.
“My mum, who had me very young, always made me believe I could do anything. She just wanted the best for myself and my brother, so it really was that sense of, ‘if you want it and you’re willing to work hard for it, you can do it, doesn’t matter your start in life’.”
Although she describes her mother as a single parent, her father has also always been in her life – it’s from him, she believes, she got her “very strong work ethic”.
Career achievements
Garrett set up Reflexion Associates in 2006 to promote diversity and inclusion in organisations and facilitating personal development of business leaders. Projects have included supporting charity AdvanceHE on leadership development programmes, designing and delivering part of its women’s leadership development programme, Aurora, and ongoing programmes to increase representation of diverse talent at senior levels with National Gas and Wolverhampton Council.
Between October 2008 and July 2013, she headed up coaching provision and strategy development for Learning and Skills Improvement Service, a sector-led body formed to accelerate quality improvement in the further education and skills sector. Other initiatives have included rolling out a programme accredited by Institute of Leadership and Management, enhancing succession planning and attracting younger talent.
And in 2015, after realizing how much young people were struggling, including navigating social media, she co-founded social enterprise Rocking Ur Teens for teenagers aged between 13-15, to boost their aspirations and to connect them with potential careers, organizing events for more than 2,000 students from more than 150 UK schools, 75% of whom came from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Garrett also does one-to-one coaching, including through Cambridge University. She shares how as part of a review of coaching carried out in the university setting, someone said ‘Jenny’s the queen of a killer question’.
“I’m always thinking, ‘what’s at the heart of this, what’s the question that’s going to really help [the coachee] think it through, to come up with their answer to tackle the piece that perhaps you haven’t tackled in the past?’ I try to ask incisive questions that aren’t painful, but also not easy. I think that’s probably a signature of the work I do.”
Background
When she was very young, she wanted to be a ballerina, then later at school, a fashion designer.
“I loved fashion and art. I used to spend money on Vogue magazine and I remember walking around with a beret on thinking I was very elegant! I continue to love art, so if anyone asks me to an art exhibition, a gallery, anything like that, I love it. I’ve always said, when I retire, I’m going to open an art gallery and just have parties all the time with people coming to see art.”
Garrett wanted to go to art school, but she couldn’t get a grant, “so I went into the world of work”, a world that eventually led her to coaching.
Having worked as a marketing executive at Hamptons International between 1992 and 2002, she later worked (2004-07) in a senior marketing role at Ashridge Business School, which was where she discovered coaching and leadership development. A colleague suggested she train people or look
into coaching.
She completed her postgraduate certificate in coaching in 2005 with Lancaster University.
“It was a very pivotal and transformational time, helping me to understand myself better and think about what I really wanted, as opposed to perhaps fulfilling other people’s dreams or wants for me.
“I learned so much… There was that ‘I think I’ve grown up to be a very good girl’, all about doing a lot of pleasing of other people. Coaching helped me think, ‘what does everyone want for me, what do I want for myself, what does that look like, and how could I be braver about that?’
“I found out all sort of things. I was shocked to realize that, guess what, I didn’t listen properly! I hadn’t done a lot of work on myself at all prior to that. So it opened up a whole new world to me. My poor husband, Rob, had to put up with me, because there were weekends when I’d come back and say, ‘Oh, let’s unpack a few things.’ It really was that sort of, wow, there’s just so much to see here and so much to know! And conversations can be quite different.”
She is grateful to her husband for “rolling with the changes over the years in how I see the world. Maybe I wouldn’t have made all the same decisions without the firm foundation of that relationship. He’s always there cheering me on.”
After completing coach training, she “felt quite stuck”, realizing there weren’t opportunities at the business school to work as a coach full-time. So she hatched a plan with her then coach to go down to four days, using the fifth to see if she could get some coaching clients and decide if she liked coaching as much as she thought she would.
“We also set a financial target. If I could earn in a few days the sort of money I earned in my full-time role, then instead of taking a leap into freelancing, it would just be a step in the right direction.
“Within a year, I’d managed to secure a contract, which meant I could. It really was wonderful to do it in that way. I’m quite a cautious person, not a big leap kind of person.”
She started working for what was called the Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL) building a team of coaches to deliver its programmes
and services.
“It taught me an awful lot about managing coaching, not just doing coaching. It was a really great time for me, to be doing the thing I loved, working with coaches all the time, in an environment where people were really supportive and understanding of what coaching was about.
She was inspired too by working with Lynn Sedgmore who at that time ran CEL. “She was just one of those people [who says] ‘let’s plant lots of seeds and see the flowers bloom’. She was a great example of really good leadership.”
When Garrett started to branch out, she took mostly associate work. “Interestingly as a marketer, I couldn’t market myself! I found it really hard to talk about me and to think about my uniqueness, the sort of thing that you do for others. So it felt safer then to be an associate. [But] I loved the work.”
At that point, Garrett mostly coached leaders on leadership programmes, which was “familiar to me from my work at the business school; a real sweet spot that I really love to do”. She then gravitated towards developing her own leadership programmes, returning to Lancaster University to complete a master’s in management, learning and leadership, which she loved.
“It was probably one of the most stressful times because I had a young daughter, I was running a business, and studying for a master’s. But it was a real growth period for me. It was a lot of learning in action, helping me think about how I shape leadership programmes.”
She started to deliver general leadership programmes and leader-as-coach programmes into organizations, “helping leaders develop coaching skills to get the best of their teams. I really enjoyed doing that”.
Female breadwinners
When she completed her master’s, she was invited to come back when she wanted to do a doctorate. She found a piece of research about the experience of breadwinning women and “when I read it, it made me realize that was my own experience. When I started my own business, my husband, who had been in accounts, decided to also follow his passion and work with disaffected young people, and it meant my salary increased and his decreased. The research really spoke to me.
“Also one woman said to me, ‘I was the main earner for three years, and those were dark days in my life,’ and I thought, women shouldn’t feel like that. This should be something we can celebrate or work through.”
She thought about embarking on a doctorate but was put off by how long it would take to complete, so instead she set out to write an article, which then turned into a book.
“I ended up getting a book coach and writing my book, Rocking your Role: The ‘how to’ guide to success for female breadwinners. And that propelled me into a bit of a different world. I was on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour the week the book was launched, and then started being asked more to speak in the media and in corporate organizations about women’s experiences.
She also went on to create leadership programmes specifically for women.
Rock Ur teens
Meanwhile, her daughter started to have some challenges in her secondary school years, and suspecting the potential negative impact of social media, Garrett started researching this, and realized there was a bit of an epidemic in the world, particularly for young girls. This prompted her to create the social enterprise Rocking Ur Teens, “which is all about inspiring, empowering and increasing the aspirations of young women”, supporting them “in a real solution-focused way: what’s working and how can we do more of it? How can we celebrate ourselves? How can we not get bogged down in what people expect of us or expect us to be? How can we find ourselves, I guess, in the same way I found myself through coaching.”
Just as they have inspired Garrett, so too has her mother and grandmother inspired Garrett’s daughter, Leah:
“Neither of them had it easy, but they’ve both been hugely inspiring to my own daughter, who has been quite fearless so far in her 22 years, from being voted in for youth parliament at an early age and speaking in parliament. She’s not a person who doesn’t experience nerves, but she says, ‘I’m going to do it anyway’. So for me, I’m very much surrounded by inspiring women, and their legacy gets me up each day when I think about my grandmother, mum and daughter.
“I think this whole journey I’m on has been about thinking, ‘you’re a role model right now, you need to show up, because if you don’t, she’s [her daughter] not going to’.”
Diversity and inclusion
One way she’s being a role model is in her work around diversity, which has included launching the BAME coach directory. This came about after she was contacted by a coaching organization which wanted to add coaches from diverse backgrounds into its associate coach pool.
“They said they couldn’t find any. I said, ‘Oh there’s lots of us’. ”
Within a week, Garrett had sent the organisation 15 CVs, and they’d recruited two. “But it made me realize that coaches from diverse backgrounds aren’t always visible, and that we need to do more work around that.”
During the pandemic, Garrett put the directory to one side,“but then the coaches who I’d approached said, ‘after the killing of George Floyd, you should just put this out there, this is really important.’ So I just put it online, and it’s really grown. The 40 or so coaches are really amazing [and] they’re all doing great work.”
Organisations use the directory to find diverse speakers to avoid “going to the same old white men” although “sometimes they get called on very much for the race element”.
Garrett personally is very happy to talk about race and ethnicity as a black woman but reminds us that “coaches from whichever background also have expertise in so much more than race.”
Garrett hopes her latest book “is a way into the topic that doesn’t feel threatening. There’s no blaming, naming or shaming. For someone unconfident or unfamiliar with how they might tackle issues of race in the workplace, it’s just, ‘this might help you through’. My books are very practical.
“In society, we’ve been thinking, ‘if I treat everyone the same, then I’m giving everyone an equal chance’. And it absolutely makes sense because it looks like fairness. But, as I talk about in the book, it’s a little bit like a seesaw. We haven’t got two people of equal weight. Some people have more weight just by virtue of birth, of who they are, and some have less, and as a result, they have less power.
“What we’re trying to do with equity is thinking we recognize that imbalance on the seesaw; we want to balance it up so that everyone can have the same outcomes, and that might mean we do things differently. We might sponsor someone in an organization, give someone a little bit more development and a bit more time, or word things differently so that it appeals to them, etc. We put these sandbags on the seesaw to even things up, and then there’s much more push and pull in terms of how we interact and engage with each other. That’s what it means to me.
“The fact we’re considering and having these conversations is fantastic. I’ve been in the coaching profession a long time, and I definitely felt isolated and alone in it, that quite often I was almost being questioned as to why I was in the room.
“I think that it’s really important for us to make the profession as inclusive as possible, so we can really walk our talk. And it’s great that we’re doing more of that now. I think we’ve got a way to go. But I just want to acknowledge that the profession is trying which is brilliant.”
She will soon be launching a research project exploring whether and how it might matter who coaches who in terms of ethnicity, and is looking to partner with coaching bodies, academic institutions and corporates.
“I think there are different coaches for different times. But we’re trying to understand all that so it’s not just this feeling we have, but there’s some evidence base to it as well.
Spreading the power of coaching
She’s keen for coaching to tap more into “voices and wisdom from all over the world…I think it’s really exciting that people are thinking about doing that more”.
On 27 June, she hosted a panel discussion on Decolonizing Coaching: Integrating Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledge at the Black Voices in Coaching research conference at the University of East London.
More generally, she wants coaching to be a force for kindness and compassion:
“I think that coaching is a hugely powerful tool for good. I feel there’s more we can do collectively to show how powerful coaching is in [a range of] settings, to counter some of the cancel culture that’s happening in the world… something about more compassion and kindness in leadership. Coaching is a kind process.”