Dionne Lewis-Reid
SPOTLIGHT: DIONNE LEWIS-REID
Leadership & Career Transition Specialist | Communication & DEI Practitioner | Cultural Convenor
Dionne Lewis-Reid's career defies a single job title. Across more than two decades she has moved through training and development, equality and diversity, media, event management and behavioural coaching, always driven by one mission. Helping people recognise their potential and rise through change.
As Founder and Director of Lewis-Reid Consultancy, Dionne delivers bespoke coaching and training in communication, employability, DEI and career transition to organisations including the DWP, Ministry of Defense, NHS and OFCOM to name a few.
Before that, as (former) Promotions Manager at The Voice, Britain's leading Black newspaper, she helped launch the Annual Voice Awards, a platform built to celebrate Black excellence and worked on events alongside Dr Maya Angelou, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Iyanla Vanzant, including In Celebration of My Sisters and the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust Ball.
Dionne is a trained Personal Performance Coach, Certified DISC Profiler and Licensed Motivational Maps Practitioner and a former member of the British Psychological Society.
But her understanding of career transition is not only professional, it is personal. In 2009, Dionne was made redundant from her role at Croydon College. Rather than let that moment define her, she built Lewis-Reid Ltd from the experience, turning disruption into the foundation of a business now dedicated to helping others navigate theirs.
From celebrating Black achievement on stage, to championing equality behind the scenes, to building a business around transformation, Dionne's career is people, purpose and possibility in motion.
We put questions of confidence, presence and influence to Dionne Lewis-Reid as she joins us in the NBWN Spotlight.
All information and links were correct at the date of original publication on
11 Sept 2026
You have stood behind the scenes with Maya Angelou, Desmond Tutu and Iyanla Vanzant and at the DWP and Ministry of Defence. What do the most powerful communicators and the most bureaucratic institutions have in common when it comes to how influence actually moves through a room?
What I learned very early is that influence has surprisingly little to do with how much you say.
When you are around extraordinary communicators, you notice their ability to make people pay attention without demanding that attention. Maya Angelou had that in abundance. Notwithstanding the fact that she was tall, beautiful and statuesque, she had presence, certainly, but there was also clarity. You understood what mattered to her and she communicated that message succinctly. There wasn't a huge amount of wasted language.
And strangely enough, when I have worked in large institutions such as the DWP or Ministry of Defence, influence works through some of the same human mechanisms.
The organisational structures may be complicated, but the people aren't necessarily complicated. People still want to know: Do I trust you? Do you understand my world? Are you credible? Is what you're asking me to do meaningful, will it make a difference?
The mistake people make is confusing authority with influence. They are not the same thing.
I have been in organisations where the most senior person had the least influence over what people actually thought. And I have watched somebody ask one good question and completely change the direction of a conversation.
That knowledge has influenced my own work. I don't need to win the room. I need to understand it. Who is speaking? Who isn't? Where is the resistance? What are people agreeing with publicly but questioning privately?
That’s where influence really lies.
The Voice Awards platform you helped build in 1996 was designed to make excellence visible. Seventeen-plus years into DEI work at board level, has 'visibility' become easier to manufacture and harder to make meaningful or the reverse?
In the world we live in now, it’s much easier to manufacture but much harder to make meaningful.
When we were creating platforms to celebrate Black achievement in the 1990s, visibility itself mattered because so much Black excellence simply wasn't being recognised by mainstream institutions. Seeing somebody who looked like you being publicly celebrated could be incredibly powerful.
We have much more visibility now. Organisations know how to produce the photograph, the campaign, the Black History Month event, the diversity statement. Social media has made visibility almost instantaneous.
But I think we have become much better at displaying diversity than redistributing opportunity.
I am interested in what happens after the photograph.
Who gets promoted? Who gets the development opportunity? Who gets forgiven for making a mistake? Who is told they have potential before they’ve proved anything? Who gets access to the conversations where decisions are really made?
Visibility is really important. I’d never dismiss representation because, growing up, as I did in Sheffield at a time when not many people looked like you, and if you did see them it was rarely in a positive light so I know what it means to grow up without seeing yourself reflected positively.
But visibility without access, progression and influence is little more than a performance.
The question I ask organisations now is not, "Can I see diversity?" It is, "Who holds the most power?"
Because understanding that allows me to really know what’s going on in that organisation.
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Having coached individuals through redundancy and advised institutions on equality strategy. When an organisation says it wants to retain and progress diverse talent, what is the signs that demonstrates this truth versus policy language?
Look at the decisions that they make.
Don't start with the diversity strategy. Look at who gets promoted, who leaves, who gets access to development, who gets described as "high potential", who gets sponsored and who repeatedly receives the advice to get a little more experience.
Then look at the data.
If an organisation tells me it has excellent retention but Black and Brown employees are leaving at twice the rate of everybody else, then the headline is hiding the problem. The same applies to recruitment and progression.
I also look at what happens when somebody raises a difficult issue. That tells you a huge amount about the culture.
Are they listened to? Does it get investigated? Does anything change? Does it get swept in the carpet? Or worse, are they gaslighted into dropping the issue? Does the person gradually get written off as being difficult?
There is another test I use: what is the organisation actually prepared to give up or change to make this happen? Because real commitment usually costs something. It might cost money, time or resource. It might mean changing a process that has been in place for years, challenging a senior leader, sharing power differently or admitting that something the organisation thought was fair actually isn’t. That is when you begin to see the difference between an organisation that genuinely wants change and one that simply wants to be seen to support it.
When an organisation is prepared to put their money where their mouth is and change something it values in order to achieve the inclusion it says it values, I start believing it!
Is there a client or individual you have coached through transition whose turnaround still stays with you. Someone who believed one path was closed to building something you could not have predicted e.g. what changed for them and what did it teach you about how transformation actually happens?
Oh my goodness, there are hundreds, but actually, rather than talk about someone’s dramatic Hollywood-style transformation I want to tell you what stays with me after almost every person I coach and it’s a pattern I have seen repeatedly in career transition work.
Someone comes to me after redundancy and says, "I don't know what I can do." Yet they’ve probably worked successfully in a job for 15, 25 or even 30 plus years.
That fascinates me, because it isn’t that their capability has disappeared. What’s disappeared is the structure that told them who they were. The job title, organisation, status, salary, team. Take those things away and some very accomplished people suddenly struggle to describe their value.
The shift often comes when we stop talking about their last job and start examining what they actually know how to do.
Suddenly there are skills that are transferable. Relationships they’ve built. Problems they know how to solve. Things they thought were ordinary because they had been doing them for years.
I've watched people physically change during those conversations. They sit up straighter in their chairs. Their language changes from "I only..." to "Actually, I also ..."
What that has taught me is that people often haven’t lost their confidence completely. They’ve just lost sight of the things they’ve already done well.
Sometimes my job is simply to help them see that again. Once they do, they start thinking differently about what might come next.
Your assessment toolkit, DISC, Motivational Maps, occupational ability testingis built to decode individual behaviour. Scaled up, what does that same lens tell you about why some leadership teams cannot execute the culture change they say they want?
Because organisations have personalities too.
Put ten individually capable leaders around a table and you don't automatically get one capable leadership team. You get ten sets of motivations, fears, preferences, egos, incentives and assumptions interacting with each other.
Culture change often exposes the gap between what people intellectually support and what they are behaviourally prepared to tolerate.
A leadership team may say it wants challenge, but several members become defensive when challenged. It may say it wants innovation but they punish failure. It may want greater diversity but continue recruiting people who feel or look familiar. It may say it wants psychological safety while rewarding the leader who always has the answer.
Assessment tools have taught me to be curious about individual behaviour rather than just judging it.
What is driving this? What is somebody protecting? What motivates them? What happens to their behaviour under pressure?
Scale those questions up and they become larger organisational questions.
Culture is not what the leadership team agreed at the last away day. Culture is what their collective behaviour repeatedly tells everybody else in the organisation is safe, rewarded and expected.
You lost your own role in 2009 and rebuilt from it. For a senior leader who has never had their competence questioned publicly, what does redundancy or forced reinvention teach that two decades of success cannot?
It teaches you the difference between your position and your worth.
And that can be a really hard lesson.
When you’ve been successful for a long time, your role often confirms to you who you are. When you meet someone for the first time, they often ask you what you do, it defines who we are.
You may have a job title, or status where people return your calls. You’re invited into certain rooms. Your opinion is listened to. Your title explains you before you have to explain yourself.
Then redundancy can remove all of that very, very quickly.
I experienced that myself in 2009. I could have treated redundancy purely as something that had happened to me. Eventually I had to ask a different question: Am I going to let this redundancy define me and what can I build from here?
Lewis-Reid Ltd came out of that period.
I think forced reinvention teaches you things that success simply can’t. Things like whether you can ask for help. Whether you can tolerate the ambiguity of not knowing what’s going to happen next. Whether your confidence is really yours or a byproduct of your job title. Whether you can become a beginner again.
For senior leaders in particular, that last sentence can be very difficult because we might have worked in an organisation for years, doing our job at the highest level, it’s daunting to start over again, to be a beginner.
But there’s lots of freedom in discovering that your competence is transferable, your job was just one expression of that. It was never the only thing.
Across media, government, healthcare and education, you have seen how radically different sectors handle the same conversation about identity and opportunity. What is one thing the private sector could learn from how the public sector, for all its flaws, approaches equity?
Accountability to the people affected by the organisations decision.
The public sector certainly doesn't always get this right. But there is at least an established expectation that decisions should be scrutinised for their impact on different communities. Consultation, equality analysis, published data, public accountability: imperfect mechanisms, but they are important ones.
In parts of the private sector, equity can become much more dependent on enthusiasm. You have a passionate CEO, HR Director or DEI lead and things move.
That person leaves and suddenly the energy disappears.
Or the movement runs out of steam …… think of all the organisations who posted squares on social media in 2020 to show solidarity and a commitment to equity in the immediate aftermath of George Flloyds murder. Now, in 2026, how many of those organisations have sustained their commitment?
That tells me it was never embedded, it was surface level, often reactionary.
My work with Equality Impact Assessments has made me a strong believer in asking the question before the decision is made: who might this affect differently and what evidence do we have?
That sounds so simple, but in reality, it isn't. It requires organisations to accept that apparently neutral business decisions can produce unequal outcomes.
The private sector could borrow more of that discipline. Less reliance on good intentions. More evidence, scrutiny and accountability.
AI is now reshaping how leadership, hiring and even 'potential' get evaluated. Given your background reading human behaviour professionally, where do you think algorithmic decision-making will get talent and representation dangerously wrong and where might it actually help?
The danger is when we confuse consistency with objectivity.
An algorithm can apply the same rule to everyone and still produce unfair outcomes if the assumptions, historical data or definitions behind it are biased. We must also examine the perspectives of the people who design and programme these systems. Their biases can become embedded in the technology, deepening inequality and producing poorer outcomes for some groups than for others.
"Potential" worries me too, particularly because human beings already struggle to define it consistently. We often recognise potential more easily in people who resemble people who have succeeded before. If we train technology on that history, we risk industrialising yesterday's preferences and calling the result objective.
AI may also miss the context behind a person’s CV.
A career gap does not explain why someone stopped working. They may have been caring for a child or an elderly relative, rather than lacking ambition. AI might view an unconventional career path as a weakness, while an experienced coach or recruiter may see adaptability, resilience and a broad range of experience.
However, AI could help reveal patterns that people often overlook. Like, recruitment outcomes, pay disparities, promotion rates, what language patterns are used in appraisals. What common theme’s show up in the people who get shortlisted and who doesn't.
It can help us ask better questions of much larger amounts of information.
But ultimately, I would want humans to be accountable for the decisions that are made.
AI should help us interrogate judgement, not allow us to outsource it.
You have spent your career helping other people navigate transition and define their next chapter. What does your own next chapter look like and how will you know when Lewis-Reid Ltd has done what you set out to do?
That's an interesting question because I don't think I want Lewis-Reid Ltd simply to become bigger.I want the work to become deeper.
When I started the business after my redundancy in 2009, success meant survival: getting clients, building credibility, being asked back, earning a living doing work I was passionate about and believed in.
Seventeen years later, my measurement is different and the question I ask myself is now;Where can my experience have the greatest impact? What do I know now that I didn't know when I started? And how do I take everything I have learned from coaching thousands of people, facilitating in difficult rooms and working with organisations that genuinely changed, as well as those that talked about changing, and turn that into something that lasts beyond the training/facilitation or coaching session?
I’m more interested in that legacy piece. Writing may become part of it. Developing programmes that other people can use is part of it. Continuing to work with leaders who have the authority to change systems is part of it. And I want to keep working directly with individuals because that is where I am constantly reminded what all these organisational strategies ultimately mean in someone's actual life.
Will Lewis-Reid Ltd ever be "done"?
Probably not in the conventional sense.
But I will know I have achieved what I set out to do if the work no longer depends entirely on me being in the room. If an idea, a question, a programme, a person I have coached or somebody I have trained carries something forward and does something with it that I never get to see.
I think that would feel like success to me!
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dionne-lewis-reid-mbpss/
Website: www.lewis-reid.co.uk