Jane Farrell specialises in working with senior leaders who are addressing challenging and complex organisational issues. They involve change, opportunities, conflict, and risk and always require a sharp analysis of diversity and equity in and amongst. Sometimes diversity and equity issues are at the forefront, and on the front page of newspapers, and sometimes they are 'woven in' in more subtle ways.
In 1992 she co-founded a consultancy and training company called Equality Works (now EW Group) with Dr Annie Hedge. EW Group was a pioneering company with a mission to make workplaces more equitable and more successful. The company grew to become one of the most notable and successful consultancies of its kind. Thirty years later, the business was thriving and Jane decided to begin a new chapter. She sold the company in 2021 and became an independent consultant.
Jane is a specialist in inclusive leadership, and in creatively challenging the ways that advantage and disadvantage operate in organisational settings. She starts from the premise that ''If it was easy, I wouldn't be here”. She loves working with talented leaders who want to tackle systemic and structural discrimination with verve and positivity.
Jane works with individual leaders and senior teams to design new ways of building the capacity of leaders to add value to those they lead and their organisations.
Jane also designs and facilitates senior team or board away-days, and provides individual and group executive mentoring and coaching.
Jane loves designing interventions and facilitations that will change things for the better – relationships perhaps, or the way people are recruited and retained or led. Mediation and conflict resolution has always been a critical part of her work.
Jane has worked with hundreds of organisations across all sectors. Her long-standing consultancy work with Mercedes AMG F1 Team sits alongside her work with the BBC, the Association of Charitable Foundations, Unison, Transport for London, the NHS, The Economist Group, HMPPS, Merck, IPSA, PA Consultancy and Dentsu. Other clients include the Metropolitan Police Service, the London School of Economics, and a wide range of charities.
She is privileged to spend one week a month being the Chair of the successful and values-driven Mulberry School Trust founded in Tower Hamlets, London. This work is a great pleasure to Jane, completing the circle having started her career as a teacher and lecturer in schools and colleges in London.
Jane is a regular speaker at conferences, round tables and seminars, providing challenge, case studies, warmth and humour.