20 The Times Magazinehe setting: a movie star’s
Hollywood trailer. The scene: a
sleazy, unreconstructed producer
attempts to persuade a young
female starlet – with whom he has
muddied the professional waters
with sex – to reshoot an intimate
scene with more of a female gaze.
A third person, a new director,
is present too. In the movie star’s
summation, this director is “the feminist the
studio has brought in to put the dinosaur’s
dick in the mangle”.
The actual set-up may be fictitious- from the recent Channel 4 comedy Chivalry,
written by and starring Steve Coogan (as the
producer) and Sarah Solemani (as the feminist
director), plus Sienna Miller (as the movie
star) – but so nimbly does it skewer the film
industry in its post-#MeToo moment that it’s
not hard to imagine similar conversations
taking place in trailers across Tinseltown.
Coogan has, in fact, revealed that the
impetus for the series grew out of real-life
sparring between him and Solemani while
working together on the 2019 film Greed.
Back then, every week heralded a fresh
Hollywood scalp, another titan toppled by
his own misconduct: Harvey Weinstein, Aziz
Ansari, Matt Lauer, Bryan Singer, to name a
few of the power players knocked off their
lucrative perches by their own impropriety.
In the wake of that industry earthquake,
the workplace in general has seen a tidal wave
of complaints from staff of bullying behaviour
and toxic cultures.
As Coogan’s aggrieved character – a man
who calls on-set intimacy coordinators “the
sex police” – puts it, “You can’t even describe
people with adjectives any more.”
In the real world, many of the Camerons
and his ilk are now sent to Lacey Leone
McLaughlin, a woman also hired by studios
to “put the dinosaur’s dick in the mangle”.
Described by the US press as, variously, a
“cancel culture consultant”, a “rage coach” and
“the woke whisperer”, McLaughlin is the help
hired to save the suddenly precarious careers
of senior executives in a town in which
the power structure has been dramatically
upended, not just by #MeToo, but also “social
justice and the pandemic and generational
differences and social media”, says McLaughlin,
who prefers the title of executive coach.
Before I speak to McLaughlin I’m expecting
(for some reason, perhaps the power suits and
killer heels I’ve seen her photographed in) a
bit of a ballbreaker; a terrifying alpha female
who could puncture the ego of an arrogant
director with one withering look.
The 43-year-old woman who Zooms into
my kitchen from her home office in Pasadena,
however, is warm, funny and charismatic. Yes,
she’s a groomed, glossy blonde in caramel-
T
IN MY TWENTIES, I worked hard and
played hard, and I loved it. I worked in PR,
and I was thrilled to be at the Brit Awards
after-parties, for example, even if it meant
working very late.
Most of our clients were men and most
of our staff were women. Our job was to be
professional... but also to be charming. And
always to wear make-up. My first boss, a
woman, told me to keep a pair of heels
under my desk, and staff were frequently
sent home before events to change.
There were drunken lunges in the back
of cabs from clients (and journalists), but
I would deal with it by giving them a polite
shove, reminding them they were married,
and waiting for the sheepish email the next
morning. It made me feel (naively, I’m sure)
as if I had some influence over them.
At 29 I set up my own company, and I
viewed myself as cut from the same cloth as
everybody I hired. I was slightly older, but
I was the fun older sister. We were building
something together, and saw things the same
way. Now, 11 years later, with more than
70 per cent of my staff in their twenties,
I no longer feel that way. The pandemic
has accelerated [change] enormously, but
the generational divide, and the wokeness,
were happening well before that.
Sometimes, standing in front of my staff
to introduce an HR presentation, I think:
when did I become this dinosaur? I wouldn’t
say that I’m scared of them – I am happy to
evolve – but I am running a business and
I’m not going to be held to ransom.
It’s stressed in interviews that this is
not a nine-to-five job, but we are reasonable;
people can’t be expected to work every
night of the week. Where it becomes a
problem is when someone is constantly
saying, “I don’t feel I have work-life balance,”
“I want my evenings free,” or, “I feel like my
mental health is suffering from this job.” At
that point I have to say – kindly – that this
is perhaps not the industry for them.
I have never spoken the words “my
mental health” to anyone in the workplace,
and particularly not my bosses. I would
have been ridiculed.But every week, I receive texts from my
staff complaining about their mental health.
This morning, I had a text at 5.58am from
an employee saying she couldn’t come to
work because she’d had a panic attack.
The tension over working from home
is a big one too. I think it’s important for
junior team members to be around senior
members for the majority of the week – you
learn so much by osmosis. But when you’re
interviewing people, it’s one of the first
questions they ask: how many days am
I going to be in the office? Will I be able
to work from home? Having built the
company on a five-days-a-week-in-the-
office model, we’re not going back to that,
because nobody will work for us if we do.
Already there is a serious dearth of talent
out there. And of commitment. There’s
none of that idea that you should stay in
a job for at least a year so it looks good on
your CV. People will work for you for two,
three, four months then leave. It’s no longer
a case of what I can do for my employer;
it’s what my employer can do for me, and if
they don’t, I’m going to leave – and hit social
media. That part is quite scary at times.
A year ago, as a response to both Covid
and to the recruitment issues we – and
so many others – are having, we started
establishing our “company culture”. It’s
another of the first questions interviewees
ask: what’s your company culture? And we
really didn’t have an answer before. Now
we have company culture surveys coming
out of our ears, defining who we are, what
we stand for and what we offer.
Long-term, I think change is good. But
currently we’re in this transitional phase
where there has been a lot of change very
quickly, and bosses and companies are still
trying to find their feet.
Things had to change. I would never
want to tell anyone what to wear. And if
one of my team came in and said a client
had lunged at them in a cab, I would be
very disturbed and I would deal with it. But
I hope we don’t go too far the other way;
I don’t want things to get so woke that
nobody is having fun at work any more.A millennial British employer on tensions with her team
‘Sometimes, standing in front of my staff,
I think: when did I become this dinosaur?’
The BOSS, 40
HAIR AND MAKE-UP: DOMINIQUE LERMA AT FORD ARTISTS USING OMNIA BRUSH, ENZO MILANO HAIR TOOLS AND ELEVEN AUSTRALIA