One thing about me is that I’ve always stayed true to my core values. A few months ago I was helping my mum clear stuff from her house and came across my first ever report card from school – I must have been around four-years-old. It said, ‘Adele is very sociable and likes to organise’. All these years on, I’m glad to say nothing has changed.
There’s little doubt that those ‘core values’ four-year-old me had already in-built are the reason I ended up as a Studio & Operations Manager, but there have been lots of diversions along the way. In one of my other lives, for instance, I was a travel agent. And, you know, how hard can booking lovely holidays be every day? Turns out, it was high stakes and at times, terrifying. The booking system could be quite complicated to use and, just to really add some jeopardy, the keyboard was also loaded with two random buttons that, if pressed, would cancel someone’s entire trip. 10 years on, I still remember what the dreaded command was.
Still, on a more sincere note, it did mean learning how to deal with some pretty varied troubleshooting. I’d have calls from customers asking me to help them get out of a country with no passport or money and some who came back in to tell me about disastrous escapades on trips that I’d booked for them. When that happened, usually I’d say to them, ‘you sound like you need a holiday after all that’, and book them another one. Though after a few terrible anecdotes from the same customer, including one where he was held in an airport prison cell and then deported, we mutually agreed to part ways for his future holidays.
Most importantly, what that job did was allow me to go travelling. I was fresh out of university and worked there for a year to save enough to see some of the world for myself. I’d studied human geography at Exeter for my undergraduate degree – I’ve always had a keen interest in global politics; in development, how we deal with poverty, and how other people live – but I was unsure what I was going to do next. Travelling helped me find the right direction.
It gave me confidence in who I am, and taught me how to accept my little quirks. At school I’d always considered myself to be a bit of a nerdy misfit – I didn’t stand out academically, but I worked hard and consistently, and my brilliant friendship group, who are still some of my best friends 15 years on, preferred drinking beer and laughing at ourselves to doing ‘girly’ things. Learning to be self-sufficient – even the little things like managing money and cooking for myself – really buoyed me for the working world.
The only trouble was, I still wasn’t totally sure where I wanted to be within it. After university my now-husband, Andy, started working in feature films and, since I’ve always adored films, the world of production intrigued me. I ended up finding a job at an entertainment services company as a client coordinator. I would go between the marketing teams at studios like Warner Bros and Disney and our press monitoring team, who would estimate the advertising value of the coverage their films were receiving, occassionally also going on shoots as a runner to support the in-house production team.
I loved seeing how things came together on a shoot, so I sought out a position as a production assistant at a London agency, where I worked my way up to a video producer role.
As I became more senior I began to realise that the things I enjoyed most were about how the team worked. I did a lot of internal wrangling, finding processes that made things run smoother and supporting the people around me to do their best work. Many of the producers I’ve worked with absolutely thrive - and secretly love, even if they deny it - when things go wrong. That wasn’t the case for me, I found it stressful and overwhelming. But here we are, back at the core values; ‘Adele likes to organise’. I’m a people-person and my skills mean that I work well with others to get a wide ranging to-do list done, and I do it meticulously. So I set out to find something that gave me the variety I needed with a team focused angle; and that’s what I found at Flying Object.
If I wrote an ideal job description for myself it would be the one I saw advertising my job at Flying Object. Let me tell you: I was so keen. What really made it feel perfect was the line saying that the right person would make the role their own – seek out the ways to make the studio and business run smoothly for the team and our clients, and make them happen, evolving in the role based on what the company needs. In a nutshell, that’s what I do now.
When friends ask what I do for a living now I tell them I’m the team busybody. I make sure that everyone has what they need at work, that everything is running well – and fix it if not – and help everyone in the team know that they’re supported as an individual person, not just as an employee. That might look like installing a resourcing system to help us manage and scale the jobs coming through, supporting the business by running our day-to-day finance operations, or going on a mental health first aid course to make sure I can fully support staff who are feeling unwell.
Basically, it’s talking to people with compassion, and listening to what they need. One of my core values, if you will. Often it’s a long journey to finding a job you love but often the answer to what makes you happy is there all along – or, sometimes, written down on your very first report card. Four-year-old me was on the money.