Richard Hinwood is the Founder & CEO of Enriched Leadership, a company dedicated to empowering leaders to increase their effectiveness, achieve exceptional results, and enjoy a lifetime of success. Drawing on years of personal and professional experience, Richard specializes in helping leaders at all levels—from C-Suite executives to emerging talent—unlock their potential. Through his work, Richard creates a lasting impact on both individuals and organizations, ensuring long-term resilience, sustainability, and success.
Could you elaborate on the nature of your business, highlighting its purpose and the ways it benefits people?
Enriched Leadership exists to elevate the performance of leaders.
We help ambitious leaders, leadership teams, and executive boards across all sectors to increase the real-world impact of their leadership.
Enriched Leadership solves the difficult challenge that all leaders face, namely how to most effectively increase the immediate impact of their leadership while also ensuring they are successfully investing in their own growth, development, and the future they aspire to create.
We do this by taking a deep-dive into each leader’s unique combination of skills, knowledge, and experience as well as the context they are operating in. Together, we co-create a plan of action built around the key leadership competencies that will enable that leader/team/board to instantly begin to overcome the largest challenge(s) they’ve been facing. Together, we also create a blueprint to ensure continued leadership development and long-term resilience, sustainability, and success.
Our clients gain:
- Enhanced leadership skills
- Greater leadership effectiveness
- Increased sense of confidence, agility, and resilience
- Greater sense of personal fulfillment
- Tangible business results
We are different because we don’t just focus on enhancing the leadership skills and capabilities necessary for immediate success, but also the health and wellbeing of everyone in the organization to ensure sustainable success. The pressure to continually perform at the highest level drives some leaders to work to excess and in extremes, which results in sub-optimal decision-making, ineffective leadership, and poor performance. At its worst, such behaviors can also lead to burnout. The best leaders prioritize their own health and wellbeing as well as that of all those within their organization. It’s the most human thing we can do as leaders.
We are passionate about what we do because we believe in the power of leadership to create meaningful and positive change. We aspire to advance the practice of leadership and create success for our clients that positively improves the lives of their people and their clients while also delivering exceptional business results.
What inspired you to start your journey as a coach and entrepreneur? Were there any specific events, challenges, or people that motivated you to take this path?
I founded Enriched Leadership to elevate the practice of leadership across as wide a spectrum of leaders, businesses, and leading enterprises as possible, drawing on all my personal and professional experience to that point.
I was fortunate to work closely with a fantastic female CEO over the first decade of my career, and I undoubtedly learned a lot from how she did things and why she did them.
Entering the boardroom for the first time while still in my 20s certainly gave me a sense of imposter syndrome at first, but that experience quickly enabled me to develop my strategic, operational, and governance skill sets at an accelerated rate. The Board had a near-perfect gender balance and enjoyed diversity of race, sexuality, and age, all of which helped to elevate our collective decision-making capabilities.
I was also inspired by the leadership of Danny Boyle, who was the creative director of the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games held in London in 2012, where I was one of 1,000 drummers in the Industrial Revolution segment.
One of his first big decisions was to attend the first rehearsal for every volunteer and share with us his vision for the ceremony. He had been advised against this, since doing so was increasing the risk of his vision being shared with the media and public ahead of the event. Nevertheless, he took this risk because he wanted us to embrace the vision and bring it to life. His trust in us created a sense of spirit and community that elevated our ultimate performance.
A second story from that same experience features a prolonged torrential downpour of rain! During one rehearsal, several thousand volunteers stood out in the pouring rain for over four hours to rehearse a significant segment of the show. Danny could have stayed inside, overseeing everything from the comfort of the control box, but instead, he came down onto the stadium floor with us and spent the whole rehearsal taking one-to-one with every single volunteer. Despite the awful conditions, Danny’s leadership meant that we all went home that night feeling elated about the experience!
Looking back at the beginning of your career, what were the major challenges you faced when establishing yourself as a leader/coach? How did you overcome those obstacles?
The most challenging thing for me as a coach is promoting myself! I passionately believe in the power of leadership to create meaningful and positive change. I’m driven by the desire to advance the practice of leadership and create success for our clients. I gain far more enjoyment and satisfaction from talking with clients about their leadership, their businesses, and their aspirations—and helping them to achieve success—than I ever do when talking about who I am and pitching for work! Self-promotion is not something that comes naturally to me, but it’s something that I need to do for my business, so I’ll keep working to improve!
Would you like to share any remarkable achievements?
Women are a growing force in the workplaces worldwide, standing shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts. What are your thoughts about women leadership today?
The first firm I ever worked in had a terrific gender balance, including within the firm’s leadership, so I know first-hand how effective female leadership can be and how successful female leaders can become. Today, I work with just as many female leaders as I do male leaders and I hope that will always be the case.
At Enriched Leadership, we focus on the effectiveness of leadership behaviors. Women and men can be equally effective in the way they lead. We strongly advocate for each individual to become the most effective leader they can be, which means embracing all their personal strengths and attributes and bringing these to the fore. This is the same challenge for leaders regardless of their gender.
When we focus on collective leadership of Boards and Teams, what’s important is encouraging and embracing diversity, including gender. The most effective Boards and Teams I’ve seen, worked in, and advised are those where the membership was as diverse as it could be, with everyone empowered, encouraged, and expected to share their unique voice.
It’s fantastic that there are ever more opportunities for female leaders to thrive. I genuinely believe we are in a leadership evolution in which a more human way of leading will increasingly come to the fore. Vulnerability is a greatly underrated leadership quality. It’s also arguably one of the qualities that many female leaders embrace more effectively than their male counterparts.
I hope we continue to see a rise in female leadership across all sectors and geographies and that the most senior leaders, regardless of their gender, embrace the value of diversity in all its forms.
What message/advice would you have for future women leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs?
Don’t hesitate to become the best leader that you, as the unique individual that you are, can become.
A quote that immediately comes to mind for me here is from the author Marianne Williamson:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. […] We are all meant to shine. […] And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
Every person reading this has the potential to positively impact the world.
My hope is that Enriched Leadership can continue to help female leaders to do exactly this long into the future.
Please insert website or social media links (if any):
www.enriched-leadership.co.uk
www.linkedin.com/in/richardhinwood
