SPECIAL FEATURE

Jewish Women in Leadership

DDalia Davis is the CEO of Foodbank Aid and was previously the Director of Operations at Seed. Foodbank Aid is a grassroots charity that tackles the daily challenge of food poverty in North London. Operating as a central donation and distribution hub, they collect and purchase food, toiletries and household goods and distribute them to food banks where the need is greatest.

“I grew up in South Africa in a very culturally Jewish home and my parents actually sent me to an ultra-Orthodox school until I was nine, even though they weren’t religious. That is probably what started me off on the path to becoming more observant later on.

After high school I decided to do a teaching degree and although I loved the creative aspects, at the end of the four years I knew that teaching wasn’t right for me, so I went on to study for a postgraduate degree in business management at the top business school in South Africa. It became clear that business was the right path and I finished in the top three of the class. I went on to work at KPMG for two years as a management consultant specialising in HR. It was such an exciting time – I wrote job descriptions for Nelson Mandela’s staff and set up a performance appraisal system for them. It was an amazing start to my career and I had incredible mentors there. My husband and I then decided to take a year out from work to travel, with London as our base. Within three months we realised how much we loved it here, and I got a job at Brent council in organisational development, where I stayed for six years while I had my children. They gave me a lot of different training opportunities, and while I was there I set up Brent’s first elearning system. I then moved on to TrainE-TraidE who were just starting out, running training courses for people in the community. I helped the organisation to grow, setting up a mentoring scheme and supporting job-seekers with CV and interview skills. I then set up the job placement department and the summer placement scheme for students.

With my husband’s encouragement I then decided to ‘go it alone’ and set up an HR consultancy. Seed was one of my clients, and for six months I went in for one day a week to help them with their HR processes and policies. I actually found working for myself quite lonely, so when Seed asked me to come in more often I was happy to, and then when their Director of Operations decided to leave, Seed offered me the role and I accepted it. I transformed the operations processes while I was there and also spent a lot of time working on strategy as part of the leadership team.

I have always had huge confidence issues, so when I was first offered the role at Seed I would lie awake at night thinking “There’s no way I can do this”. When it came to applying for my current role as CEO I really just went along to the interview to see what would happen – I didn’t actually think I would get the job. But Rabbi Herman, Rabbi Grunfeld and Moshe Morris had been wonderful mentors and I don’t think I would have even applied had I not developed so much in confidence and skills working with them at Seed.

Foodbank Aid is an amazing organisation. The founder Naomi Russell is an incredible woman - she offered me a mentor for charity CEOs from day one, which has been invaluable. And the work we do is so important – we are now facing the worst cost of living crisis imaginable, and thousands of families are already being forced to make impossible daily choices on how to feed and provide for their families.

With the energy price cap rising it’s not going to get any better any time soon, so our food banks are going to become a lifeline for more and more people in the coming months.”

Jewish Women

KKaren Harris is a highly accomplished entrepreneur, CEO and team builder. She has successfully built and sold three businesses, including the UK’s number one consumer PR agency, an integrated marketing and digital agency, and an online shopping centre. Karen is a mentor for women at Google and Amazon as well as a number of small businesses.

She was a trustee of UJIA for eight years and is currently a trustee of JFT and chair of trustees of Noa.

“My mum was a refugee. In 1947, when she was 3 years old, she travelled with her two sisters and father from Egypt to what was then Palestine, and they were placed in a refugee camp for 18 months. One of the other refugees told her father they should go to England, where they were taken in by Norwood. She met and married my dad at 18 and then they moved from London to Sheffield, where I was born. I was the youngest of three and we moved to Leeds when I was ten. When I was a teenager, I was very involved with BBYO, and my ‘forever friends’ from that time have all gone on to become superstars. It was a very empowering organisation – those with talent rose to the top of BBYO and since then they have all been incredibly successful.

After completing a law degree in Manchester, I moved to London for my first job and it was there that I met and married my husband Andrew. My law degree was a strategic decision. I knew I wanted to go into business and employers would value a law degree over other disciplines. I worked in a graduate marketing job for three years, climbing the hierarchy and then worked for another three years at a larger agency before leaving with my boss and a colleague to set up our own agency. I can’t believe it now, but when my boss suggested that we create our own company, I wasn’t interested in equity – I told him that I wanted the ability to work from home when I got married and had children.

Q&A

Did you always know you wanted to be in a leadership role?

Karen: I never thought about having my own business in the early days of my career. I was brought up knowing that I needed to earn money for the family, but as a contributor rather than necessarily being an entrepreneur.

Naomi: It wasn’t a conscious decision, but looking back I was always very involved with the community and was a leader in my youth group, and then marrying a rabbi... I am quite passionate and driven but I still feel as if I just naturally fell into it. As a rebbetzen I definitely feel strongly about the importance of having strong female role models within the shul, and female-led Jewish education in the community in general.

What are the benefits of having women as leaders?

Dalia: I think women are generally sensitive and creative and that these traits are hugely beneficial to a leadership position. They can help organisations to grow and become more multidimensional and diverse.

Naomi: I think there’s a misconception that we need to have more female leaders because we need to be ‘fair and equal’ or to ‘re-balance the power’ but actually it’s so much more than that. We need more women in leadership because the leadership qualities that women possess are essential to success and more likely to lead to great outcomes, productivity and more successful businesses and services. There’s research carried out by McKinsey that points to the nine traits that really help organisations to succeed - five of them are more common in women than in men, two are more common in men, and two are the same for both men and women. So it’s clear that we need female leaders in order to be able to grow and achieve as a society.

Karen: As women, we have a responsibility to nurture the world. The world needs our unique care, and I believe we can empower each other to step up and bring our own light into the world.

What do you think prevents women from becoming leaders?

Naomi: We can be our own worst enemies sometimes when it comes to our insecurities – a stay-at-home mum can feel a lack of confidence because she isn’t working, when really she should be celebrated for her choice. On the other side, a mother who is working can feel guilty for not spending enough time with her children, when actually it makes her a better mum to have a job she enjoys. We need to support each other’s choices so that more women can overcome these barriers.

Dalia: Confidence is probably the biggest issue, and having experiences where people don’t believe in you. Also the reality that women are generally responsible for more of the day-to-day running of the home, and unless you can compartmentalise, it can be overwhelming. Having said that, I think the world has changed a lot and if you prove yourself it doesn’t need to matter if you can’t do the typical ‘9 to 5’.

in Leadership

Have you ever experienced ‘imposter syndrome’?

Dalia: I live with imposter syndrome – I talked about it in my first meeting with my mentor. He told me that I have to remind myself that they chose me and I’m not in this role by fluke. It’s a constant battle – I don’t even feel comfortable signing my name with ‘CEO’ yet!

Naomi: 75% of women in leadership positions struggle with this and I’m definitely one of them. Imposter syndrome can actually help to ground us though and keep us humble – I think it’s one of our superpowers as women. Humility is fundamentally a feminine trait and I think it’s crucial to being a good leader – it helps us to acknowledge and learn from our mistakes and to take into account other people’s experiences. So I think there’s definitely something positive there, but we just have to make sure it doesn’t limit us. So many times I’ve seen brilliant, intelligent women that just don’t have the self-belief and are so crippled by imposter syndrome that they end up not being able to achieve their potential. Two things have really helped me - “Don’t believe everything you think” – just because you have these thoughts, it doesn’t mean they’re true – you can choose to let go of them. Also having a strong belief in G-d. He puts us in different situations and gives us our strengths, and who are we to argue with that? When I feel overwhelmed I have to remind myself that if Hashem thinks that I can, then I can. If He has put me in this position then in a sense it’s my duty to live up to it and be the very best that I can be.

Karen: I don’t really experience imposter syndrome to be honest, I think because I see it all as a bit of a miracle. Of course my success didn’t just happen and I did work really hard – most evenings I would be working until midnight, and in the early days there were definitely some all-nighters. But there were things that happened that were beyond my control, and because I don’t really see it as being all about ‘me’, imposter syndrome isn’t really something I personally relate to. We live in an age of authenticity. I’ve never been diagnosed but I’m 99% sure I have dyslexia. I remember doing my O-Level exams and being stunned watching everyone writing furiously, thinking – how are they doing this without reading the question? Now I know that of course they had read it - it was just that it took me much longer to read the question than it took them, because of my dyslexia. StoriBoard has helped me see how what may appear as weaknesses can also be our strengths. The flip side of my dyslexia is the ability to think differently, to be more creative and intuitive. I’m sure this has helped me to be a successful entrepreneur.

Are there any particular mentors or role models who have helped you in your career?

Dalia: Moshe Morris helped me a lot, both at TrainE-TraidE and at Seed. Debbie Sheldon was also an incredible mentor. I think you have to learn from everyone that you work with.

Karen: My parents could not have been better role models. Their work ethic was incredible - my mum stood in a factory and did the pattern cutting night and day. They were always very philanthropic as well. Family was everything to them and we lived a life of values, and of taking responsibility, being involved communally and giving charity. I can see how ridiculous this seems now as everyone works from home, but at the time it wasn’t the ‘done thing’. He couldn’t believe his luck that I was turning down the equity! Yes, I was young and naïve, but being a Jewish woman with four kids and a people carrier was really my only dream. A year later I was married and pregnant. Three months after I had our daughter Hannah my boss phoned me to ask when I was coming back to the office and I said “Don’t you remember that conversation?!”

So I started working from home, and I was more profitable in that first month than I had ever been in the office, so he never called me back in after that.

My clients soon became quite different from the agency’s main clients - I started to work on big behavioural change campaigns for the government’s department of health and department of education. I employed a small team working from home, and after a couple of years running the most profitable arm of the agency my boss suggested splitting the business into the main agency and a separate agency specialising in the public sector. Being married to a corporate lawyer helped ensure that this time I wouldn’t be quite so naïve about the benefits of equity. The agency grew - we had 30 employees and I sold it to a management consultancy specialising in the public sector. The whole thing was a complete miracle. I didn’t plan any of it – it all just happened. I was just so happy that along the way I got my four kids and a people carrier…

Since then I’ve been blessed to have built and sold two further companies, and I’m now working hard on my new start-up – everything I have ever done feels like a dress rehearsal for this one! At StoriBoard we are building a platform where it’s easy to find people who are going through the same life experiences, empowering them to tell their stories, share lessons learned and connect. We are re-defining peer support.”

Jewish Women

N Naomi Lerer is the CEO and Founder of Noa, a child and adolescent psychotherapist and Rebbetzen of Central Synagogue. Noa provides practical, emotional and therapeutic support to adolescent girls in the Orthodox Jewish community in a safe, caring and non-judgemental environment.

“I came from a very supportive and stable family. Nowadays as parents I think we find it very difficult to see our children struggle, and as a result they then struggle to develop resilience. My parents were supportive but not over-involved in the day-to-day, which I think helped me and all my siblings to build resilience. I was brought up in Manchester, went to Jewish schools and then spent a year in sem. I always thought I was going to be a lawyer but then I decided to do a business degree instead. While I was at university I ended up doing my year-long placement at Aish, and I was so inspired by the passion around me that I decided I wanted to make community work my life-time career – I also met my husband who was studying to become a rabbi. I became the youth director at Hampstead Garden Suburb Synagogue and particularly enjoyed working with and supporting teenage girls. I started studying at the Tavistock with a view to just doing a post-graduate certificate, and six years later I qualified as a child psychotherapist.

As a community we are so good at looking after vulnerable people – poverty, disabilities, serious illnesses – but back then I realised that when it came to girls and young women struggling with their mental health or coming from complex family backgrounds, there wasn’t really any support available. So 13 years ago I decided to start a small organisation with just seven girls and a budget of £15,000. I thought that if we could grow Noa to support 30 girls a year then we would be supporting all the girls in community who needed support. We now support 250 girls a year, we have 52 on our waiting list and even with a budget of £1.8 million it’s clear that we still aren’t meeting the need yet! Naomi: Lady Jakobovits set the bar really high in terms of bringing people together from different walks of life. She worked incredibly hard to make people feel supported and included, and she used her phenomenal memory to help people feel special and cared for. Although she passed away a long time ago, I often ask myself “What would Lady J do?” At the moment I’m very inspired by one of our trustees, Rebbetzen Feige Hager, who has made amazing, transformative changes in Stamford Hill, helping us to build bridges with community leaders and changing attitudes within the community. She goes about it with such humility, discretion and quietness. Also our head of therapy programme Amelie Turgel who really empowers her team and makes them feel valued – I have learned a lot from her. There are incredible people all around us who have so much we can learn from. I was also recently on a leadership course with Rabbi Herman from Seed and I was so inspired by how authentic and genuine he is. When you have someone like that in a leadership role, you know that whatever that organisation delivers will be exceptional.

Have you ever felt disadvantaged as a woman – either in the workplace or as a leader in general?

Dalia: At Seed I was always encouraged to share my opinion when it came to major organisational decisions. During all my time working in business I honestly never felt more heard and listened to than I did by the rabbis at Seed. I always felt respected by the leadership and it helped me to grow hugely in confidence as a professional. The fact that I felt so listened to was a huge springboard to help me move on to the next part of my career.

Karen: I’ve never felt it in my philanthropic work, and I think there are less issues now in the working world than there were when I first started out. When I started my first own business together with my ex-boss and another male colleague from our previous company, the male colleague actually took credit for all of my work and I never knew he was doing it. It wasn’t until after I built up and sold my part of the business that my ex-boss told me that the male colleague had always taken all the credit, and he had believed him. With a refreshing degree of remorse, he admitted that only as he watched me succeed over the years whilst the other guy plateaued, did he realise that what he had been told was a lie. I don’t think that the colleague taking the credit was because they were two male work colleagues who went to the pub together and I wasn’t part of their ‘club’. Now in the business world I think there’s a lot of skewed positivity towards being a female founder – if anything it’s probably harder being a man!

As a working mum, how do you get the balance right between your home and working life?

Naomi: I have four boys and a girl, aged from 11 to 21, and I’m fortunate that my husband is very supportive and takes a very active role with the kids. I don’t think there’s a way to do it all and feel happy with what you are doing. I think it’s about being OK with the fact that you’re not going to be able to do it all, and this speaks to one of my

in Leadership

biggest challenges, which I’m sure I share with other female leaders - perfectionism. There’s always more to do, and although it’s very hard, I’m trying to learn to be OK with ‘good enough’ and understanding what ‘good enough’ means for me. Having good help at home and knowing what I can outsource is also something that I’m constantly working on.

Dalia: I have three children, two with special needs and full-time EHCPs. They both have ADHD and one has quite severe autism and oppositional defiance disorder. With a neurotypical child, there’s a lot of teacher emails and medical appointments and other things you’re responsible for, but with a neurodiverse child that gets multiplied hugely. Not a day goes by without an email or call from a medical or educational professional! You have to be kind to yourself and cut out the things that you can. I don’t entertain as much as I used to, and when I do I make it much more straightforward. You have to ignore the peer pressure and listen to your inner voice to make sure that the balance is right.

Karen: We have four children - our eldest daughter is married to a rabbi and living in Miami, and my youngest daughter is studying Computer Science at UCL. Then we have two boys in between – one works in biotech and the other is in his sixth year of medicine at Imperial. I think if anyone was 100% honest, they would have to admit that you can’t have it all. I ran myself dry working from home and trying to always do bath-time and bedtime and stories with my kids. It wasn’t easy. Now my kids are grown up I feel I have a better balance. Being observant helps so much, as your life is designed around the family. There are so many festivals, and every week there’s Shabbat, and that drives the agenda and has been our saving grace as a family.

What about self-care?

Karen: When the kids were younger, the bit that went for me was self-care – I didn’t eat healthily or exercise, and the only time I ever saw friends was on Shabbat.

Naomi: I can tell other people how important it is to fill up your cup, because you can’t fill up anyone else’s otherwise, but I don’t always find it easy to do it myself! I’m fortunate that I do find my work and my family energising, and I also offload to my sisters whenever I need to. But self-care is definitely an area that I need to work on and to practice what I preach more!

Dalia: I swear by exercise. It’s amazing for mental health, and as soon as I don’t exercise, I can’t juggle my responsibilities. There’s honestly a direct correlation! I also love online shopping and pretty things – I can’t help it, they just bring me such joy! As a woman juggling so much, I think you have to know what brings you joy and be able to access that quickly.

What is your advice to the next generation of female leaders?

Naomi: There are two short, sweet quotes I really like. “Have courage and be kind” and “We rise by lifting others”.

Dalia: If you really want it, I believe you actually can have it all. When we started Noa, the girls generally had very complex backgrounds and were dealing with trauma, but over the last five years or so there’s been a huge increase in mental health challenges across the board. A large number of the girls we support now come from very supportive and caring homes, but they are struggling with mental health challenges. There is nobody who is immune. As a society and in particular as a community we need to do more to educate both parents and our youth earlier on in order to try and prevent some of these issues from arising as much as we can.

Because we work in the Orthodox Jewish community there are often barriers to the girls accessing services from elsewhere, so it’s incredibly important to offer a culturally sensitive provision that they and their families feel comfortable coming to. Noa is a clinically-driven service with an extensive therapy programme alongside a lot of practical support such as help accessing services like housing, study and employment.

I am a big believer in the innate power of girls and women. If they’re given the right support and opportunities they can achieve anything. There’s an amazing quote that I like to use: Noa isn’t about making girls strong – they are already strong – it’s about changing the way they perceive their strengths.”