Dolly Parton – A masterclass in values-based leadership

A few years back, I wrote a piece trying to make sense of my first few months in the CEO seat, framed around my all-time leadership hero, Dolly Parton. Recently we lost her, and someone reminded me of this bit of writing, so to try and honour a bit of the impact she has had on my life and my leadership style, I’m giving it a revisit.

Music has always been a huge part of my life. My Dad was a wonderful musician with the most eclectic tastes, Genesis one day and Donna Summer the next. And occasionally, a little bit of Dolly. As a result of that upbringing, music frames how I navigate life. It affects how I show up as a leader, and it helps me make sense of things when life feels particularly hard.

Everyone knows about Dolly, the hair, the voice, the sass. But she’s always been an inspirational leadership figure to me, so here’s my attempt to honour that. All structured around my favourite Dolly songs. Listen to them and your day will immeasurably improve. Promise.

Here you come again

Since I wrote my first ode to Dolly, I’ve left Wrexham Glyndwr SU (now Wrexham SU), and I’m now CEO of Lancashire Students’ Union (formerly UCLan). The amount of name changes in that sentence alone tells you something about how much change we’re having to navigate as a sector at the moment.

It’s a time when we need to be innovating more than ever, but isn’t that an inherently difficult thing for humans to do sometimes? To break patterns and look to build a new future. That’s what ‘Here You Come Again’ always makes me think of. It’s so easy to stick with the same, but the consequences of sitting in that comfort can be dire. It’s a warning song to me about being bold in my leadership and taking risks.

When I started my current job, I entered a different building, started working with a different team, faced a different set of opportunities and challenges, but I’m still the same person with the same patterns and the same life experience.  It would be easy to keep going back to that old familiar flame, but we’ve not done that at Lancashire SU.

We’re at the start of a significant change journey where we’re testing a few deeply ingrained assumptions. Has that been easy? No. Have I wanted to occasionally go running back into the arms of those “dreamy eyes” of more traditional SU structures? Yes. But here I go-o-o! Thank you, Dolly, for keeping me on track to try new things.

9 to 5

I wrote previously about the fear of taking on the CEO title and becoming the maligned ‘boss man’ and also reflected on my promise to myself to not become someone who thinks working yourself into the ground is a badge of honour.

I’m not going to pretend I’ve nailed that since. Taking on a bigger job, with more responsibility, is unsurprisingly a more significant challenge. There have been many occasions where I’ve completely ignored my own advice and run myself into the metaphorical wall, because I’m passionate about this work that we’re doing.

My mentor, Barry Dore, regularly used to say to me, “Remember you choose to do this job, you can stop,” whenever I tiptoed into complaining about the work. This is a phrase that will stick with me forever.

My view of leadership is that it is a vocation and a craft, and most crucially an honour, that you need to decide to be all in on every day or don’t do it. It’s not a 9 to 5, and it never will be, and I think a good leader walks into this with eyes wide open. But if the passing of Dolly has made me think on anything, it’s that we’re all just renting space on this earth. Enjoy your weekends and turn the emails off.

But on that note of being able to decide to leave a job or not, and the privilege that’s built into that idea, 9 to 5 is an incredible song, but it’s not a happy song to me. It’s a jolly-sounding protest song. The voice of the workers, the women, without a voice, receiving no credit, but in solidarity.

It’s a useful reminder to me of the power that I hold over people in my organisation, whether I want to admit to being a ‘bossman’ or not. In the student movement we hold ourselves to a higher set of standards in terms of equity and welfare of the people in our unions, and rightly so.

I think about this every day, and worry about this every day, and I hope I never lose the fear of being that “bossman.” I think the day I lose that completely is the day I quit senior leadership. Dolly never lost that.

Jolene

Is this still the greatest Dolly song of all time? Maybe. Listen to it really loud, and then imagine me trying really hard to get that guitar lick right in my bedroom when I was 11.

I digress. I wrote about imposter syndrome and getting lost in the admiration of inspirational female leaders last time. The imposter syndrome hasn’t clocked off, unfortunately; it’s just changed postcode. But I have managed to collect even more incredible women in my working life who have helped me to soften it a little.

What’s always struck me about Dolly’s storytelling in Jolene is how she speaks about Jolene with such care and admiration, even though she’s ‘takin’ her man away from her!’ She’s a little jealous and awestruck at the same time, and somehow lets both be true without turning the other woman into a villain.

That’s stuck with me more as I’ve gone further into this career, working alongside brilliant women who I could easily have let myself feel threatened by, if I’d let myself lean into that patriarchal trope that women need to compete in the working world.

One of the main reasons I’ve stuck around in this sector for as long as I have is the women’s solidarity. We have specific groups for women in leadership to connect and work through challenges, and I sometimes take this for granted, but when I look at other sectors, I see that this is a very special thing indeed.

A recent Forbes article noted that the number of women at the top of companies has been declining in recent years. We have to remain vigilant about equity in leadership, and I’m so grateful I’m in a sector where I feel regular and action-oriented solidarity. Dolly would have loved this.

Coat of many colours

Progress noted, but we’ve still got work to do to fight for equity of representation and opportunity in our sector, especially with and for racially minoritised communities.

In Coat of Many Colours, Dolly speaks about growing up in poverty, but focuses less on the hardship and more on the richness she gained from her mother’s love and attitude. I love this song for so many reasons, but I need it now more than ever to remind me to keep going when social justice work feels particularly hard.

I took on a bigger job because I was excited about having more resources to make a bigger impact on more students’ lives. But with more resources comes more opportunity to get diverted away from your mission. One thing Dolly never did was get lost. And she gave us a blueprint for allyship that we need to remember and emulate.

Dolly’s philanthropic and just general decent human acts are well documented, so I won’t list them all here, but her move to use royalties from Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” to invest in a predominantly Black community after Whitney’s death is a story I’ll never forget. Dolly put her money where her mouth was, always. And she also did it with a kind smile. Another key point I try to remember.

We can’t tackle the big issues in the world if we don’t stay well, and if we don’t move forward with love and a bit of joy. Dolly was, at her heart, a joyful person. She brought silliness to everything she did, and made fun of herself whilst taking her work incredibly seriously.

One of our organisational values at Lancashire SU is to ‘Prioritise Joy,’ and I pushed for that with Dolly in mind. SUs are meant to be places of slight silliness, of togetherness. They need to be, because we bring people together, and because we need to maintain energy to tackle the hard things. I don’t know of anyone else who struck that balance as well as Dolly.

The little lady leader we all needed

I’ve spent this whole piece using Dolly as a soundtrack, but she was much more than a collection of songs to me, and to lots of other people, I am certain. She was the leadership example I never had a reason to formally study, because nobody puts a country singer on a business syllabus. But she should be on all of them in my opinion!

She’ll live forever in her music, so I’m not going to stay too sad. It’s not what she would have wanted for us, that’s for sure. But taking a moment to recognise the huge impact she had on the world after her passing is a helpful and mindful pause. Take what you need from her songs and from the life lessons she gave us and try and bring a bit more Dolly into your life. You won’t regret it.

And if you’re ever having a really bad day, pop ‘PMS Blues’ on really loud before you head to your next meeting. You’re welcome.