Six leadership lessons from the RSPCA’s CEO Joanna Rowland

It’s not often that a project professional becomes a CEO, so the APM Podcast jumped at the chance to interview Joanna Rowland, former Transformation Director at HMRC, when she became the Chief Executive of animal welfare charity the RSPCA.

Rowland spoke to me at the crucial 100-day milestone in her first-ever Chief Executive role about ambition, leadership and how project management skills can set you up for a great career. Here are some of the highlights of our interview.

1. Draw from the familiar

“The CEO role brings together lots of aspects that I’ve done from tech projects, leadership and finance, so it feels both strangely familiar and very new at the same time,” Rowland said.

The weight of responsibility for carrying a whole organisation also lies heavy. “The RSPCA is such an amazing charity. I describe it as like inheriting a stately home. You don’t really own it – you just are the custodian for that generation, and you’ve got to try and hand it off to future generations in a better state than you found it.”

For Rowland, this means building financial resilience during challenging times for all charities – and making a real difference to animals.

“That's not just about our rescue side; it’s also about advocacy, prevention and changing things like food and farming practices,” she explained. As a leader, focus on the ‘why’ of what you are doing and set your ambitions high.

2. Understand stakeholder expectations

Rowland draws on her project management expertise when it comes to stakeholder mapping – understanding who they are and what their needs are, and working out who can accelerate or block you in your endeavours.

“The main thing project management taught me is to really understand stakeholder expectations, because no amount of communication is going to be effective if you are communicating to an assumed expectation when the reality is the stakeholder is expecting something different,” she explained.

3. Treat change as dealing with loss

“Project management has taught me that, for humans, change weirdly is all about loss, even though the project is all about the future, excitement and forward-thinking. The psychology of change is all about loss, so I find myself drawing on that an awful lot when communicating with stakeholders in this role,” Rowland said.

4. Control is an illusion

“As project director, your job is to control chaos. You start a project, it’s full of unknowns and assumptions, and as you work through your lovely programme plan, you’re gradually nailing down more certainty towards delivery. Let’s face it, most project managers love a little bit of control, whereas when you run a big organisation, control can be a bit of an illusion – plus you’ve got to be careful not to stifle innovation,” explained Rowland.

As a CEO, it’s important to adapt to having a different way of thinking about controls.

“While I’d feel lovely and comfortable running an organisation with all the same controls I would have put around one of my programmes, the reality is you can’t do that. It’s got to be more nuanced,” she admitted.

5. Use milestones to motivate

Rowland explains that, when you’re running daily operations, motivating teams is harder than if you have a project with a vision, a concept and an end goal that people can get excited about.

“And if you’re running your project well, you’ve got a clear, defined end point of what success looks like,” she says. “Day-to-day operations can be a bit harder than that; it can be a bit more like turning a wheel.”

While keeping teams motivated through developing a vision is important, one of the ways Rowland has tried to build motivation in operations is by creating milestone points of success along the way.

6. Use agile principles

While there’s a technical management style of agile delivery in project management, there are principles from that way of working that can create agility in the way organisations operate, said Rowland.

“I'm on a big quest to bring into this organisation much more multifunctional working, much more co-design, much more co-innovation. Agile does that really well; it structures pockets of innovation. It puts very strict time, cost or quality tramlines around a very defined problem statement or user story, and the teams innovate within that boundary. There are controls to stop them running over on cost, time, whatever, and the outcome they’ve got to achieve is really clear, but they get to innovate on the how they achieve it. There's something we can learn from that."

Listen to the APM Podcast’s interview with Joanna Rowland wherever you get your podcasts