Introduction
Tash Pennant has driven a digger remotely from a government office in Leicester, gone underground in a working coal mine to see what the surface reports never showed, and walked out of A&E four hours after a car hit her hard enough that the windscreen bore what paramedics call a bullseye, an impact most people don't survive conscious. None of it was the plan. All of it built the instinct she now sells: go and see what's actually happening, then tell the truth about it.
A precocious, hyperactive childhood rooted in community
Tash describes herself as a precocious, hyperactive child whose mother enrolled her in modern, tap and ballet from ages 5 to 14, partly as an outlet for her energy at a time when hyperactivity diagnoses looked different than they do now. She grew up in a Black Caribbean Pentecostal church community and a close multi-generational household, seeing her grandparents daily while her mother raised her as a single parent, two houses sharing the same road and, effectively, the same family life. She describes the childhood plainly: it was good, she can't complain.
Blocked from school council: an early lesson in being "too much"
At a predominantly white school where she was one of fewer than 20 Black, mixed race or Asian pupils, Tash ran for school council on genuine, practical issues: better food in the vending machines, healthier lunch options, break times. She campaigned hard and lost to another pupil, and was called into her head of year's office and asked, in effect, whether she thought she deserved to win. At the time she took it at face value. Looking back now, she reads it as censorship: a gregarious, articulate, outspoken Black girl asking for change wasn't the representative the school wanted with access to senior leaders. It's a pattern she now recognises across her later career: bringing transformational results rather than safe, easy compliance can unsettle the people who'd rather keep things as they are.
Going underground: why she learned to see what reports don't show
Tash's grandfather was a coal miner, and coal heated her family's home as part of his pension. Years later, a recruitment call led her into the energy sector as communications manager for UK Coal. Rather than manage communications purely from the surface, she asked the pit manager for the kit to go underground herself, reasoning that she couldn't understand her audience, miners working nine-plus-hour shifts below ground, if all she ever saw was the view from her desk. What she found below the surface, workers coping with hazardous conditions, informal norms and behaviours invisible from above, became the template for her consultancy practice. Her method now is deliberately unglamorous: sit in the staff canteen, have a cup of tea, find out what's actually happening at the point where official narratives and lived reality diverge.
From Caterpillar diggers to a government round table that changed her course
Tash's first day at the Department for International Trade, on 1 November 2021, involved remotely driving a digger in Arizona from a Caterpillar demonstration in Leicestershire, an experience that shaped how she built the department's network of ministerial visit locations. A turning point came on 16 March 2022, when she sat as a note-taker at the British High Commissioner's Caribbean round table in Birmingham, listening to senior business figures criticise the department directly for failing to support Black and Asian businesses. The moment sparked what she calls quiet activism: continuing her day job, which she was excelling at, while working, largely unofficially, to close the gap she'd just heard described. She had written to the department in 2022 predicting that women-led and ethnic minority businesses would be the coming growth markets, a call she says has since been borne out.
Living with MS: a hidden disability and a faith that held
Tash was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis on 15 February 2010, after months of collapsing and numbness that culminated in her collapsing on a train from Nottingham to London. Working in NHS commissioning at the time, where her own team tracked patients blocking hospital beds, she refused to be admitted, insisting on being treated on the platform rather than become a statistic on her own list. She describes ongoing relapses severe enough to affect her ability to walk, periods of real anger at God, and a faith that has held anyway, grounded partly in the hymn "It Is Well With My Soul." Her mindset has shifted over time from resentment to gratitude: if she's walking and talking, she counts herself as making it, aware that her experience of the condition isn't universal for everyone who lives with it.
Knocked down crossing the road for a takeaway, and back at work by Monday
In 2022, Tash was hit by a car while crossing the road to collect food, an impact severe enough to divert traffic and leave the windscreen with what paramedics call a bullseye, a mark typically associated with unconscious casualties. Tash remained conscious throughout, was discharged from A&E within four hours, and was back at work the following Monday, before breaking down in tears on a train that afternoon, which a doctor identified as delayed shock rather than pain. She now speaks publicly about the experience under the title "I Get Knocked Down But I Get Up Again," using it to make a point about leaders often carrying private recovery processes that never become visible in public.
Connection as currency: relationship credit, not networking
Tash's approach to building relationships is deliberately non-transactional. She describes treating people consistently regardless of job title, from cleaners to chief executives, and cites specific examples of goodwill returned over years: colleagues covering for her, a coffee stand owner extending credit when she'd forgotten her card, and one especially telling story of looking after a director's children when their childcare fell through during a work commitment, a purely human gesture that built a depth of trust no formal networking event could replicate. Her rule of thumb: the real connection rarely happens at the event itself, it happens in the follow-up afterwards, and sometimes years later.
Leadership as authenticity and naming the emperor's clothes
Asked to define leadership, Tash lands on authenticity, partly learned, partly felt, paired with the willingness to ask people for things that feel impossible within tight timeframes. She's equally direct about the harder edge of the role: leadership sometimes means telling an organisation the equivalent of "the emperor has no clothes", naming what isn't working even when everyone around you insists it is, and staying with a client or organisation through the difficult, unglamorous work of actually fixing it rather than walking away once the truth has been spoken.
