An entirely different bubble - Rhiannon Sheridan

00:00

It wasn't for me intended to be this big life changing, oh, I'm leaving behind a certain career path to go and do this thing. It was, initially something I did to support my sister, then next something I did to support the people right in front of me.

00:15

How has waiting compensation changed in your own decision-making since the very beginning?

00:23

Initially you graduate university and you're just looking for a salary and a job title and some experience, aren't you? And you don't really have any understanding about you can do your internships and all the training programs that you want, but you don't really have any understanding about what a career is and what to get out of it. And I think the longer I'm working, the more I've realized that the things that I'm good at and the things that I have a passion for are probably the things that are going to end up, one, generating a salary as well, because if you're good at it, you're probably going to succeed in your area, but also deliver value outside of salary. So there is always that standard of living that you want to preserve, but I think once you have enough to live a comfortable life, then enjoying what sign online to do every day has a value beyond the salary you take home at the end of the month.

01:25

When did that realization come to you?

01:28

Yeah. I had a bit of a life shift moment when I was in my mid twenties. The refugee crisis was happening in Europe and I lived with my sister at the time and she really wanted to go and do something and she wanted to go and go and visit the refugee camps and go and help. And she was bringing it up and bringing it up. And I was like, if I come with you, will you go? And she said, yes. So I took extended leave from my job and she quit her job [crosstalk 00:02:07].

02:07

Bet you regretted saying that, oh my goodness.

02:10

... three months. I'm very much one that will, I want to do, I don't just want to just talk about doing things. I don't think that generates any value to anyone. Once you say you're going to do something, just get on and do it. And so, yeah. So we went out to very small island called Chios for a few months at the height of the refugee camp crisis, and very much frontline [crosstalk 00:02:38].

02:38

Work wise, what situation are you in at this point? Well, are you working at Capita at this point?

02:46

Yes I was. Yeah. So fortunately they have a, quite a generous leave policy. And I've been there long enough to have quite a lot of annual leave. And also you can take unpaid leave. You can buy leave days. So yeah, through a combination of my leave and taking unpaid leave, they allowed me to take quite a long period off. And I basically, I think they were like, well, if you're asking to do this, you're either going to quit and go, or we're going to give you the leave and you're going to go was the conversation I had. And so, yeah, they very generously gave me the flexibility to go. And I did come back and I worked for about another year before I realized that actually the things that I'd learned and seen and done out there meant I was no longer motivated to be making rich people richer, I suppose.

03:48

Do you think that you would have actually quit if you hadn't had the chance to try it?

03:54

So I definitely wouldn't have quit to just go to the refugee camps, but I think I always would've inevitably reached that point where I wanted something a bit more and it might have taken me longer. I probably would've wasted plenty more years going down a more corporate career path. But I think there was inevitability about it, partly from wanting to get away from the big companies, which I had always thought I wanted to work for and getting away from the purely profit driven businesses as well.

04:33

What was it like when you first went?

04:38

Unlike anything else that I've ever done in my life. There is no comparison in so many different ways, because I didn't go out with a formal charity or anything like that. It was a, this amazing woman that lives on the island when they first started getting boats in the middle of the night, had got together a group of people to just drive around and try and find these people and give them a cup of tea and a blanket. And from that, it had grown to be a volunteer group of people all around Europe, just coming to help. I arrived a time of year where they're quite short on volunteers. So it is really, you are thrown in the deep end the minute you arrive. Within a matter of a few weeks, I was taking the position where I had the phone and I was the person that was on call for running the volunteer organization for 24 hours.

05:47

And that means you get the phone calls in the middle of the night from the police, from the coast guard saying there's an emergency, it's time to go. And we would get in our cars and we would drive to wherever we needed to go and not know what situation you're going to be thrown into. And there was some amazing moments where for some people landing in Europe is the best thing that's happened to them for the last decade, for example, if particularly if they're from Afghanistan. And so being part of that moment and being the person that greets them into what they think is going to be the start of the rest of their life is amazing, but there's also some very, very difficult traumatic stories. Some people die in the crossings. Some people have very traumatic crossings, and you also know that what they think Europe is going to be for them is not what Europe is going to be for them.

06:52

So extreme highs and extreme lows from a load of different angles. But I really took from it how, if you just want to go and fix something you can, and just being a person and being there and doing your best can make a difference to people's lives.

07:13

When you were in it, did you feel like the trade-off that you'd made by leaving that corporate life at home was worth it? It must be so difficult to comprehend in that moment, and there must be moments waiting, oh, I'm sitting around waiting here or I'm not achieving the thing that I wanted to, but how did it feel in that moment having gone from that corporate life to helping? Did it feel worth it?

07:43

There was no time to think, there was no thinking or feeling. You act or you just sleep. I think it took six months or even a year to really understand what had happened. So, yeah. I can't remember even, yeah, stopping to think about how it felt, or a comparison to things at home, or what I would do next. Though it wasn't for me intended to be this big life changing, oh, I'm leaving behind a certain career path to go and do this thing. It was, initially something I did to support my sister, then next something I did to support the people right in front of me. It was quite a lot later on that I realized how it had shifted my mentality.

08:35

How did it end?

08:35

I had to go home. It was a finite period of time. I'd only booked a certain amount of leave.

08:40

Was it difficult to leave?

08:41

So yeah, my flight home was always booked. Yeah. Yeah. I was getting messages off refugees in the middle of the night for weeks after I'd gone. So yeah, that was really hard.

08:56

What did you do next?

08:57

Went back to normal life.

08:59

That sounds difficult.

09:03

Yeah. You can't compare. It's just a entirely different, we all live in our own bubbles and when you go to a bubble so different, you can't really reconcile the two. So you just carry on with day to day life. And it was only through time being back in my normal life that I realized that wasn't really enough for me anymore. It didn't motivate me. I found myself where I'd always been working till 7:00 PM, very contently trying to get things done, I found myself looking at the clock at 3:00 PM. And it was only when I started doing that, that I realized something had changed, I think.

09:49

And that's despite your effort to compartmentalize it, did your time there accelerate the ending of, yeah. Did it accelerate the ending of Capita? I asked a silly question, because it almost sounds like it's fucking obvious that it did.

10:12

Yeah. Yeah. I think at the time I might have thought it was because there wasn't much career development for me, there wasn't really any roots for me to progress in an area that interested me. So it was like a two trigger ending, but yes, it did in hindsight, I think it was inevitable the minute I got on the plain that I wasn't going to come back and do the same thing.

10:40

When you were making the decision about what you want to do next, how did the experience that you'd been through affect your thought process? And by that, what I mean is, did you decide that what you wanted was to do something good for the world, or did it just teach you that you didn't want a corporate job, or what did that experience teach you about what type of work you wanted to do next?

11:08

So I have specific skills that are not what I thought were the skills you needed to be a do gooder for lack of a better phrase. I was going to work in finance and I'm good at admin and all those corporate skills. So I never even considered the charitable or social enterprise space for as something that would fit me. And then it was when I was in Greece that I found I was putting in place processes and systems and all of this infrastructure that was generating huge efficiency gains. You have such limited resources and I was watching them being used inefficiently and without consciously doing it, I realized I was improving the operations of this volunteer organization. And so through that, I think I always knew I wasn't going to go volunteer in an orphanage, because that's not where I add value, that's not where my skills are. But what I did realize is that my skills can add value and do good. And so that's the path I went down. And so I got into this research hole of trying to find financial services, style roles that have a social value.

12:44

What did that process practically look like, because that's pretty niche?

12:49

Google.

12:50

Was it? Yeah.

12:52

Yeah. I initially, and actually it's been a few years for me to find it to be fair. Initially you're looking at financial services to help people in poverty, you find microfinance. And so that's the first path I went down. After a few months of doing some work in that area, I realized it wasn't quite what I thought it was, which again left me with a bit of a career gap where I floated around trying to find what that thing was. And then financial inclusion and using technology to improve financial inclusion became such a perfect fit for what I was looking for. So it probably did take me maybe three years to figure out that was the thing, but it was a combination of, yeah, the internet and then getting a plane to Cambodia and doing a volunteer role to help microfinance companies and then floating around Cambodia for another six months trying to find out if there was any company out there doing the kind of thing I wanted to support.

14:11

And then by chance, a friend put me in touch with someone that works in a company and I came across my first FinTech startup. So it was very much a few years of just putting myself out there to the idea and seeing what came along.

14:26

Yeah. It must have felt like whilst you were putting yourself out there to that idea, like it might never arrive.

14:36

Yeah. Yeah. I was a couple of weeks away from booking a flight home when I found the opportunity.

14:44

It's crazy. And are you [crosstalk 00:14:47].

14:47

Yeah, well, I think that's how these things happen, isn't it?

14:49

In the 11th hour.

14:52

Yeah. I think it's always, when you're... If it's meant to be, it will find its way to you.

14:58

Yeah. Why didn't you want to go back and fully volunteer? It sounds like what you've been able to do is find this middle ground in some ways between almost like the best of both worlds, the security and the excitement and the modern nature of working in a company, but then also the good of what you were doing before. How come you didn't go by and continue it, even though it was for that short period of time?

15:34

Why didn't I go back and volunteer for longer?

15:37

Yeah.

15:40

I couldn't, that is the most draining full on thing in the world, that real frontline response. And I don't think anyone can do that longer than the few months. And I think anyone that does is an absolute hero, because emotionally and sheer energy, it's too much. It's too much. It was certainly too much for me. Then also financially I am a very career driven person and I always pictured myself having a very successful career. And that's how I pegged my life. And it's only through age that that's become slightly less important, but not completely unimportant.

16:28

Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's interesting, I wonder whether that's age that's giving you that perspective, or whether it's experience that's giving you that perspective.

16:40

That's a much more appropriate term, it's definitely experience, that has come with more time. Yeah, absolutely.

16:45

How would you have defined your best work when you were leaving university, and how would you define it now?

16:51

So what do you mean by that, by find your best work?

16:53

Forget the word find there. So just your best work, it's different for everyone. I use that word, that phrase, as on purpose, because it really is different and, yeah, I'd love to know how you would've defined doing your best work when you left university? And what does it feel like now? How would you define it?

17:18

I think how I measure success, oh, there's an insight, best work, success. I think that probably hasn't changed, but I think how I go about doing it has changed. There were a lot of things that I didn't think were my skills have ended up being my skills. And my take on, for example, ideas on how companies should be run. I think I always, when graduating university, really subscribe to that corporate structure where your manager tells you what to do, and then you go and you achieve the best for your manager.

18:03

I think I definitely bought into that. And your career is assessed by your job title and how high you up are on that hierarchy? Whereas now I see it much more subjectively in that if you, how do I see it? I still have a to-do-list that I like to go through at the start of every day. And I don't feel like I've done my best work unless I've ticked off for everything on my to-do-list that I thought I needed to do, but I also take pride and responsibility in getting other people's best work out of them as well. And making sure that you do deliver for your team and, yeah, making sure that you help develop the kind of culture that you would want to work in.

19:11

And so my work is no longer just about whether I've done the tasks I needed to do to look good to my manager. Now it's much more about whether when I feel like I've delivered the best outcome for the company, whether that's what someone else has told me to do or not, but also that's not just a task related to my role, it's really fostering the right culture in the company as well.

19:44

How do you think that the experience that you've gone through with this immediate career transition will affect the way that you make career choices in the future?

19:58

I very much base my career choices on just what feels like it fits. I think the first time I meet someone in an initial interview for the jobs that I've enjoyed and felt fitted me, I felt a instant connection with the company and the people that I'm interviewing it with. And they ask you a question, it feels so natural and it's an enjoyable conversation. And what I've found is that any interviews I've been that it doesn't have that instant connection, that instant, this feels right. I'm going to get this job. We are on the same level. It's not worth your time because even if you got that job, it wouldn't be the right fit. And I take that both ways when interviewing for myself and hiring people, I think when a candidate and a role fit, you can feel it straight away, it just feels natural. And that's always how I will make my career choices, not based on some tick box criteria, but just on whether it feels exciting and natural.

21:13

Do you find it any harder being remote?

21:15

I love being remote because it gives me the flexibility to be wherever I want to be in the world. I've just moved halfway across the world, but I've got the same job and I've got the same colleagues and I can still do my job just as well. And I'm so fortunate to be able to be living my adventure and also building a career at the same time. I think that's such a privilege, but there are definitely huge challenges that a lot of companies have not risen to. I think fostering a really close knit culture, good relationships, is so much harder remote. And that's where I feel so fortunate at Lightning because it was a company that was founded remote. All of everything is set up to be remote.

22:21

And so I have colleagues, well, I've never met any of my colleagues and yet I feel like we have a very close relationship. I talk to them all the time. It's weird to say that I've never met them. Whereas I think a lot of companies that existed in offices and then have gone remote, have really struggled to keep that coworking, that culture alive and people feel quite isolated, sat at their desks all day. I'm very lucky to not feel that because we've managed to keep that communication really alive.

22:56

Was it genuinely that instant connection that you had on that first call, or were there any questions or other ways, maybe nonverbal, that you were able to pick up what the culture would be like?

23:11

Yeah. I think my initial interview was with my predecessor, so I was never going to work with him. And through speaking to him, I realized that his role is very similar to the roles I've done in the past. And therefore I think the role would be a really good fit. And then I, after my initial interview did a little bit of googling of [brand 00:23:37] the founder and some of the other team members and what the company has done, and everything they said just really resonated. And that was it for me. I wasn't looking for a job in the UK. I wasn't looking for a job in the charitable space. I was looking more financial inclusion, looking at more mobile applications to help [inaudible 00:24:00] bank accounts, things like that. And it was purely the message really resonated, the culture really resonated, that I gave up on a lot of other things I was aiming for, for, yeah, that culture. And it was definitely a great decision

24:17

How you've handled stress, because this, one of the tricky parts of life is knowing how far to push out of yourself, to find growth, but how to also follow your heart and still be you. And you've gone and done one of the most traumatic things that you possibly can, you've gone and been the furthest outside of your comfort zone that you could be. And that must come with some extraordinary benefits in your personal growth, but it must also come with some negatives too, perhaps.

25:06

I don't think so. I thrive off stress and change and new challenges and trying new things. And though they might be a little bit difficult at the time I could not live without that. I could not, I'm constantly going to be, as soon as I feel comfortable, I'm always going to be pushing for something new, trying to find something new. But I think that's just a inherent personality trait that there's no way I could fight that. I couldn't just sit and do the same thing every day.