Vicky Bond on what it’s really like to lead in animal advocacy

Vicky Bond has done lots of impressive stuff in her career – she started working as a vet and later ended up running a 100+ person organisation, The Humane League (THL), which many of you might be familiar with as one of the key organisations campaigning to get chickens out of cages. She is now the CEO of Madre Brava, an international climate campaigning group focused on food. 

Given Vicky’s extensive leadership and management experience, managing teams ranging from 5 to over 110, I wanted to pick her brains about leadership and management in the animal advocacy movement. I would highly recommend it for people who are leading teams of any size or want to learn more about how to do it well!

Podcast news:

• We now have a Substack where we’ll soon be sharing summaries and key takeaways from all episodes! We’ll also be doing polls where you can vote on the next guests. Sign up here.
• After our last episode with Sjir from Giving What We Can, we’ve had some people take a pledge to donate between 5-10% of their income to effective charities – this is incredible! But I said I would give up to £1000, and most of this is still up for grabs. So if you’re considering pledging, now is a great time as I’ll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can’s effective animal advocacy fund for each person who takes the trial pledge of 1% or full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1000. So, if you sign up via the links below, there is a special tracker that will let me know how many people take it, and I’ll donate accordingly. 
  • The 🔹Trial Pledge
  • The 🔸10% Pledge

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Cold Intro
00:09:38 - Challenges and lessons in being a first-time CEO 
00:20:40 - Vicky's experience running 100+ person THL
00:26:45 - Challenges in running large organisations 
00:39:02 - Misconceptions around running large teams 
00:42:55 - Advice for running 20+ person orgs 
00:46:41 - The downsides of scale 
00:56:04 - What makes a good leader 
01:02:05 - Overcoming self-limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome
01:05:55 - Madre Brava's strategy on protein split ratios

Resources:

• Entangled life: How fungi make our world 
• Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast
• Rich Roll podcast
• Madrebrava.org and LinkedIn
• The secret thoughts of successful women 

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

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