Vicky Bond on what it’s really like to lead in animal advocacy

Vicky Bond has done lots of impressive stuff in her career – she started working as a vet and later ended up running a 100+ person organisation, The Humane League (THL), which many of you might be familiar with as one of the key organisations campaigning to get chickens out of cages. She is now the CEO of Madre Brava, an international climate campaigning group focused on food. Given Vicky’s extensive leadership and management experience, managing teams ranging from 5 to over 110, I wanted to pick her brains about leadership and management in the animal advocacy movement. I would highly recommend it for people who are leading teams of any size or want to learn more about how to do it well!Podcast news:We now have a Substack where we’ll soon be sharing summaries and key takeaways from all episodes! We’ll also be doing polls where you can vote on the next guests. Sign up here.After our last episode with Sjir from Giving What We Can, we’ve had some people take a pledge to donate between 5-10% of their income to effective charities – this is incredible! But I said I would give up to £1000, and most of this is still up for grabs. So if you’re considering pledging, now is a great time as I’ll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can’s effective animal advocacy fund for each person who takes the trial pledge of 1% or full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1000. So, if you sign up via the links below, there is a special tracker that will let me know how many people take it, and I’ll donate accordingly. The 🔹Trial PledgeThe 🔸10% PledgeChapters:00:00:00 - Cold Intro00:09:38 - Challenges and lessons in being a first-time CEO 00:20:40 - Vicky's experience running 100+ person THL00:26:45 - Challenges in running large organisations 00:39:02 - Misconceptions around running large teams 00:42:55 - Advice for running 20+ person orgs 00:46:41 - The downsides of scale 00:56:04 - What makes a good leader 01:02:05 - Overcoming self-limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome01:05:55 - Madre Brava's strategy on protein split ratiosResources:Entangled life: How fungi make our world Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcastRich Roll podcastMadrebrava.org and LinkedInThe secret thoughts of successful women With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!Note: My (James') views here are my personal opinions and don't represent those of Coefficient Giving.If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!