From Kitchen to Courtroom: How My Husband’s Cake Taught Us About Leadership and Inclusivity

My husband baked a cake all by himself!?

Now why is this surprising? Because it is the first time he has ever baked anything. Let me give you a bit of the back story. One of the ‘WAG’s in our neighbourhood decided to start making her christmas fruit cake and my husband started dropping hints about when I was going to make our christmas cake. Not sure why the sudden competition but I mustn’t digress.

I told him I wasn’t baking a christmas cake this year as most of the time I end up eating the cake while they feast on everything else. This was not what he wanted to hear so he decided to take matters into his own hands and try another strategy.

He does the grocery shopping (well done me!) so he bought all the ingredients for a fruit cake and left them in full view and also told me a few times that had he had bought them. After a couple of days he realised the cake was not going to make itself so he decided to take matters into his own hands.

He set about making the cake himself and I swear I only intervened once, when there was a mixed spice crisis and the SOS to the neighbour only resulted in powdered ginger. I dug out a few spices and made our own mixed spice and then left him to it.

An hour or so later, we had a fruit cake, albeit baked in a loaf tin. I was very proud of him. He was very proud of himself, in fact so proud that he took some of the cake to work the next day to show everyone what he had achieved! This is when things got interesting for me.

You see, my husband is a lawyer and he was in court in central London. Now, courts are not the sort of fluffy places where you go and show off your cake if you are a man. It is full of be-wigged barristers, solicitors and other legal folk all looking serious and making sure that people are held accountable.

And yet, he took his cake to work, and his staff saw a whole different side of him. They even told him that they were having a bake off in two weeks if he wanted to take part. This is what I call senior modelling. The sort of behaviour that breeds inclusivity and allows other people to show a different side of them that perhaps they might not show in the workplace and, it has to start from the top.

There is no point in banging on about initiatives and putting all sorts of programmes in place if the leadership team are not modelling these behaviours. When managers walk the talk, their staff know that they mean business and it is the quickest way to ensure uptake of any initiative.

The women in the workplace report by Lean In and 麦肯锡 found that 95% of companies encourage a respective and inclusive culture but only 54% of managers are taking consistent action. I think we can all say that we know it is the right thing to do to treat each other with respect and make everyone feel included so companies really don’t have a choice but to say that. But what changes it from mere rhetoric to action and corporate culture is when leaders start acting like it.

I am not saying every leader out there should go and learn how to bake a cake, it sure wouldn’t hurt, but they should at the very least know about the bake off that their staff are organising and better still show up for it. They will be surprised at what they will learn about their organisation.

P.S. If you want to have a chat about how to combine your life and work and avoid overwhelm or to be a good leader, you can reach out to me here.