Event
4 Fs: About Films, Football and Female Force: Lessons in Leadership from Dawn Airey CBE
10 July 2026
"Have the permission to be different" was one of many memorable observations from Dawn Airey CBE in conversation with Sally Osman LVO at Echo Research’s Leadership Breakfast this week.
Forthright and plain-speaking, Dawn - the Chair of the WSL Football, Deputy Chair of Channel4, and incoming Chair of Arts Council England – reflected on a career with some of the world's best-known broadcasters and serving global organisations across sport, culture and the creative industries. She shared hard-won lessons about trust, reputation and leadership in an increasingly demanding world.
Several stayed with me:
Know your audience. They are the reason you exist. Great organisations listen first, understand changing expectations and build relationships before they build campaigns.
Culture is all. If you don't get the culture right internally, you have little chance of building trust externally. Reputation is created by people long before it is communicated by brands.
Get the right people around you to build resilience. "You can't do it alone. Surround yourself with talented people who challenge you, complement your strengths and share your values. When difficult moments inevitably come, it is your people, and the culture you've built together, that give an organisation the resilience to respond, recover and emerge stronger.”
Embrace the courage to be different. Distinctiveness isn't a luxury; it's a competitive advantage.
Be mindful of your legacy. Reflecting on how leadership has changed since the days of an overriding focus on brands and shareholder value, Dawn reflected that today, organisations are expected to contribute something bigger, asking harder questions about purpose, transparency and impact. As she observed, "the world is a better place because we're far more thoughtful about what we do and how we do it." That shift makes trust and reputation more valuable than ever.
Use insight to keep it fresh and real. The strongest organisations build cultures that earn belief, attract exceptional people, create confidence, and give stakeholders a reason to support them, gathering evidence along the way to guide your priorities.
Our sincere thanks to Dawn again for an engaging, generous and refreshingly candid discussion, to Sally for drawing out leadership lessons that resonated with everyone around the table, and to Mubadala for hosting us so graciously.
At Echo, we believe these are the conversations that matter most.
In an era of constant disruption and changing stakeholder expectations, reputation is no longer simply an outcome of success; it is one of the conditions for achieving it and one of an organisation's most valuable assets.
