In conversation with Alice Williams

In conversation with: Alice Williams, Founder & CEO, Luminary Bakery

Luminary Bakery is a social enterprise offering opportunities for women to build a future for themselves. Using baking as a tool, Luminary Bakery provides courses, work experience and paid employment to equip women with entrepreneurial and transferable skills for the working world. Alice founded Luminary Bakery in 2014 after being inspired by her meetings with women in East London who were experiencing gender-based violence, poverty, homelessness, and criminal activity. Getting to know these local women, Alice realised that although they were facing complex issues, these women were incredibly resilient and had so much potential.How do you align your organisation with its purpose?

How do you align your organisation with its purpose?

Luminary was set up to address a really specific social need and our purpose has been defined from the get-go, it’s how we measure success, and we attract staff/customers/supporters who are passionate about that purpose, so the alignment is a fairly natural one. Our impact is also physically really close to us because we have women on our programmes in the bakery with us every day so the evidence of the progress, they are making is really tangible – that keeps the purpose close to our hearts and keeps us passionate about it!?

Can you tell us about a moment in your career that had a profound impact on your approach to leadership?

I actually think it’s been more of a process of learning about my natural communication & leadership style and using that understanding to challenge myself. I’ve always known my personality traits lean more towards collaboration & reflection etc which are good qualities for a team player but in a leader it’s not always what people are looking for. So, using profiling tools to understand my style better has helped me to focus on the ‘yin to my yang’ as it were! And I’ve been able to practice being more assertive/decisive – some key moments that I look back on as ones that shaped my leadership have been those difficult conversations, I’ve pushed myself to have.

How would you define yourself as a leader?

I think as someone who facilitates, supports, and oversees my team – keeping us on track and united in driving forward, providing the resources they each need to do excel in their roles, being willing to step in to help when needed and providing guidance where I have expertise. I'm not a classic entrepreneur in the sense of having an endless stream of ideas! But I’m also not someone who gets bored easily, so I’d say I’m a committed and dependable leader. As a CEO I think a big part of my role as being an ambassador for Luminary externally, but also internally to keep our team in the loop, motivated & inspired – something I'm challenging myself to focus on more!

What is the biggest challenge you have faced in your career to date? How did you overcome it?

Building a social enterprise has been full of challenges! Personal and professional. Lack of funding has proved our biggest challenge – not being able to afford competitive salaries or extra staff to ease the workload. And there are unique challenges that come with running a charity and business together – in lots of ways there aren’t precedents for the decisions we have to make or ways we need to operate so we’re having to invent the wheel, trial things and learn the hard way! Obviously running a small hospitality business during the pandemic has been immensely challenging but I actually found that when covid hit it wasn’t necessarily any harder than anything else we had been dealing with on a daily basis, it provided loads of extra hurdles to navigate, but finally people actually ‘got’ the issues we were facing! That felt like quite a relief for a while when there was loads of compassion, understanding and support for small businesses and charities trying to survive.?

If you had the chance to learn from any leader in history, who would you choose? And why?

I found this question so hard! There aren’t enough women coming to mind annoyingly!??I guess maybe someone like Barack Obama – I admired his composure in the face of the most pressured job in the world, he seems to be an incredibly wise and thoughtful leader whilst also courageous, commanding of respect and still down to earth – a unique combination, I’d love to hear how he does it! Politicians must have to develop such a thick skin too, which is something I think every leader needs!?