Introduction
Davina Williamson nearly got thrown off her A levels because the college discovered she was working what amounted to a full-time job on the side. Dean Forbes had his identity, in his words, snatched away when football ended and debt forced him to take the first job available.
Neither start looks like a route to the boardroom. Yet Dean became a unicorn tech CEO and one of the UK's most influential Black people on the Powerlist, and Davina co-founded Six Degrees Talent after two decades in PR recruitment. In this double-guest episode of Everyday Leadership, the first cousins from South London talk to Sope Agbelusi about ambition, balance, representation and what you owe the place you came from.
The mindset does not change; the aim does
Dean is clear that his drive never changed when football ended. He always wanted to be the best and to be seen as good. Football was simply where that mindset manifested first; business is where it points now. The trick, he says, was not letting it get distorted during the pivot.
He extends the point to people from his old area who went down the wrong path: some of the qualities it takes to be involved in that tragic, incorrect lifestyle are powerful qualities when aimed at business. It is not the mindset that condemns or saves you. It is where you aim it.
Careers built around a life, not the other way round
Davina's philosophy comes from watching women's careers stall or derail when they started families, and deciding it would not happen to her. She has worked a four day week since she was 29. She and her business partner built Six Degrees Talent deliberately for lifestyle and service rather than pure fiscal drive: low overheads, remote working from day one, staff free to work three, four or five days as life demands, and higher commissions because the savings go to people rather than fancy offices.
Her recruitment advice is blunt and useful: there is no dream job, nobody works in their dreams. Work is the place to sustain you, not to be everything. If you do not enjoy what you do at work, you will not enjoy your life, because the working week owns your headspace from Sunday evening to Friday night. And to employers: you are not hiring a PR, you are hiring a person.
Two honest models of balance
The pair are refreshingly different. Davina holds a daily family dinner table, teaches yoga weekly, meditates, and fills her life with people. Dean admits he does not balance naturally. Left alone he would work continuously, so he manages through extreme discipline: Sunday noon to six is blocked, his son's Wednesday football is blocked, and his diary is the mechanism that makes him a present husband and father. He is not proud of needing it; he is honest that it works.
Dean also pushes back on a lazy assumption: choosing balance does not mean less ambition. Davina is fiercely competitive and a strong businesswoman. Balance and ambition are not opposites.
Taking over from founders and handling hostility
As a professional CEO who usually replaces founders, Dean says managing that transition is the hardest part of the job. The culture is built in the founder's identity, and staff can experience the change like losing a parent. You cannot trash what came before without losing the people who built it, and you cannot set the new direction too aggressively, because that is just a polite way of saying the past was bad.
His method: read the tone. At one company, staff simply refused to meet him for weeks; open hostility required visible, public consequences, and people either re-engaged or left. At another, resistance was subtle, agreeing in meetings and then not doing the work, which called for direct one-to-one conversations that let the penny drop on its own.
The innovation case for diversity
Dean's favourite way to explain why diversity matters strips out the categories entirely. Every company needs to innovate, and innovation is consistent creative thinking. Ten like-minded people will not out-innovate ten people with ten different frames of reference, because in the diverse group every idea gets filtered through nine other perspectives before it ships. If you believe the like-minded group wins, he says, you need to mix up who is around the table.
Davina adds the mirror test: if your thousand-person business is diverse and your board looks like one type of person plus a token, your decisions are not fuelled by the diversity your business claims to represent.
Pregnancy, talent and the false economy
Davina tells the story of a standout candidate who wanted to withdraw from an MD role after discovering she was pregnant. Instead of quietly pulling her out, Davina spoke to the CEO. The candidate started five months pregnant, worked to nine months, took six months off, came back and nearly doubled the business in two years. Dean matches it with his own hire who took a role while pregnant and returned with extraordinary commitment. Punishing women at the moment of family, they agree, is a false economy; the discretionary effort that follows genuine trust outweighs months of leave many times over.
Dean's structural answer: make women, and every other perspective, the norm at senior levels, and the byproducts take care of themselves.
The Powerlist and what representation is actually for
Dean spent years refusing race-based lists. He did not want to be defined by his skin colour; he wanted to be simply good, since the people he competes with are mostly not Black. Then he showed the Powerlist to his children and watched it dawn on them that they could do anything: his daughters realised a cosmetics brand they used was built by a Black woman; his son discovered jobs he did not know existed. That moment, he says, is what representation is really about, and it turned pride into purpose.
The Forbes Family Group: how could we not?
What began as an idea to open investment opportunities to people who actually need them evolved into two strands: community investments, like the Lewisham football organisation Ten Em Bee \[CHECK spelling: rendered "10 b"/"tennenbee"/"10mb" in transcript\] that produced players such as Ian Wright and Joe Gomez, and backing founders that others overlook, like a home-grown food business Davina led investment into. Project 10, their mentorship programme, aims to give 16 to 18 year olds without networks paid six-month placements in industries they do not know exist, because, as Davina puts it, nobody told a 16 year old in Peckham that being paid to talk was a career.
Dean's logic is disarming: I can call 20 people and place 20 kids. So how could I not?
Two definitions of leadership
Dean: the ability to get others to participate in the cause with high motivation, full willingness and complete choice. Davina: strong intention about what you want to achieve, doing what it takes, and taking other people with you, which is the difference between doing it for yourself and doing it as a leader.
