In this inspiring podcast episode, Ellie Fox, Associate Director, Opus Recruitment, sits down with Victoria Tutt, Logistics and Project Director, to explore the realities of female leadership. Victoria shares powerful insights from her career, including the importance of slowing down to speed up, taking time to reflect, reassess, and refocus to drive better results in the long run.

They discuss:

✔️ Why slowing down helps leaders move faster with more clarity and purpose

✔️ Balancing leadership responsibilities with personal life, and why no one has it perfectly figured out

✔️ The best leadership advice Victoria’s ever received: “Leadership isn’t about you, it’s about clearing the way and empowering your team.”

If you’re a leader (or aspiring to be one), this conversation is packed with actionable advice and refreshing honesty about the challenges of leadership and balance.

Listen to the full episode now and catch the full write up below...

 

What are the most important lessons that you've learned throughout your career?

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is the importance of slowing down to speed up later. I think so much in work and life is a marathon and not a sprint. Building a department, building an operation, building your own career, developing teams. It doesn't happen overnight, and it probably shouldn't. So, taking the time to slow down and reflect is really important.

From my perspective it helps ensure you're still heading in the right direction and that what you're working on is really adding value. It helps me assess whether anything has changed or whether I need to take a different approach with something. I'm a big believer in slowing down to speed up later and giving yourself headspace to think and reflect.
 

We all just have more and more pressures on our time and whether that's in work, out of work, family. We all just have so many things going on, so anything you can do to pause and reflect is good. It feels a bit counterintuitive at the point you do it, you think, well, I've got so much to do and I'm slowing down, but I every time I've done it, I'm able to go faster with more clarity for having done it.

I think so, in my personal experience, definitely. And the other lesson that ties into this, which I learned the hard way, is you can do anything, but you can't do everything all at once, so having the ability to prioritise and reprioritise is important. And again, if you've got the headspace and you're pausing and slowing down, you can then see things more clearly and you can think, if I've got 64 things to do, what do I need to be doing 1st and what don't I need to be doing?

How do you balance leadership responsibilities with personal life?

I think that's a really important question. It ties into what we were just talking about. It's about priorities, time management, and setting personal boundaries. I'm a better person at work if my personal life is balanced, happy and fulfilled, and I think everyone is.

We’re people first, then we’re employees. For me, it's a case of looking at the week/month ahead and planning what matters to me, if I've got events going on, if I'm seeing friends, family, visiting people. Then I juggle that with what needs to happen work wise, whether that's travel, deadlines, project go lives. It’s important to be honest and be real. Some weeks aren't balanced at all. Some weeks the balance slips massively to either personal life or slips massively to work. But if you can look over a month or a quarter and see how it's netting out, you can check the balance a bit more.

I think it's about being aware, knowing what makes you your best self at work, and that does start fundamentally with your personal life and making sure you're looking after yourself inside and outside of work. So, for me it's really about prioritising. It's about managing time, setting boundaries and knowing what's important to you. Nobody has this nailed. Life is always changing, and the point you think you've got it nailed, you haven't. So, it's just about being mindful and checking in.

In my case it's about accepting. There might be some really busy months at work and there might be some really busy quarters at work. But actually, how does that balance out over a longer time period and how do you flex personal life or vice versa to make the whole thing work together? We live in such a dynamic, fast-paced life that we are constantly switched on and engaged and it makes it really hard to view it day-to-day. Sometimes when you're in those really busy days and the balance isn't perfect, which it never is, you've got to see the bigger picture

Then you’ve got to go, OK, well, in this moment in time I'm delivering this project or in this moment in time I've got this going on with my family. How's it going to look in 2/3/4/5/6 weeks’ time and that then ties back into the prioritisation and making sure you've got the headspace and the time to reflect that we touched on earlier.

What's the best leadership advice you've ever received?

This is such a good question. I'm really fortunate to have worked with some great people over the years and had some really good advice. I think my favourite is probably one of my old managers, who's now a mentor, who reminds me constantly that leadership is not about me. It's not about any of us. It's about clearing away and it's about empowering teams, and when I apply this to what I do, project delivery isn't about me. It's about working cross functionally and collaborating.

If you can clear the way and work with great people and empower them, then that's how magic happens. That's how the good work gets done, and that's how everybody's happy, fulfilled and challenged to enjoy what they do. It’s a cliche, but we always say work and business isn't personal, and I just think about that advice, remembering it's not about you. It's about teamwork, collaboration, prioritising people and teams and focusing on the impact you can have. It's a more fun way to work and it also eases some pressure if you feel like it's not all on you. You’re more creative in the solutions you come up with and you work more collaboratively with people. I think it's just a really nice way of looking at the world and at leadership, and it's something I try and remember in my day-to-day as I go about my job.