The RIBA Future Leaders conference is back for 2025 to help early-career professionals develop their leadership skills in practice. This year’s four-part programme comprises two in-person conference events plus a live webinar and a series of on-demand CPD modules.
Future Leaders 2025: Your Path to Leadership Excellence kicks off at RIBA on 26 March 2025 with presentations from expert leadership coaches, leading UK architects and some emerging young leaders themselves, such as Betty Owoo, who will be presenting The Emerging Leader Toolkit as an on-demand CPD module.
As ever, the conference asks what it takes to be a leader and, in this instance, what to do if an architect is drawn to leadership roles within practice.
How one architect started her leadership journey
At a relatively young age, Betty is already working as a senior design officer in the Greater London Authority’s recently formed Design Unit, working to promote quality and inclusion through design review, research and quality management. This followed a spell at Be First London, Barking and Dagenham’s regeneration accelerator in East London, where as an architectural designer she was leading design strategies for social housing sites.
Throughout her career, Betty – a former RIBA J Rising Star - has gravitated towards leadership roles – either being guided towards them by a colleague or instinctively and naturally drawn towards them. One thing unites both: the feeling of stepping outside of one’s comfort zone.
But despite the self-doubts, she says she was always the person to step forward when a project leader was asked for, always answering her doubting self with the question: ‘why can’t it be me?’.
She was soon leading on community engagement and strategic design projects such as producing design codes and local design strategies.
What is the 5 Ps framework?
To help architects become emerging leaders, Betty highlights a framework developed by leadership coach Amy Jen Su known as the “5 Ps” (from her bestselling book The Leader You Want To Be: Five Essential Principles for Bringing Out Your Best Self—Every Day), which takes a whole-self approach to the leadership model.
Leadership involves a set of skills that can be learnt, but the 5 Ps approach involves the whole person, who should be grounded in themself for the task. There is a focus on self-care, self-awareness and personal agency, and not just the more obvious leadership skills like addressing a room.
The five elements of the framework are:
- Purpose – Staying grounded in your passions and contributions; doing your highest and best work that has meaning and makes.
- Process – Relying on daily practices and routines that honour your natural energy rhythms, enhance performance, save time and provide critical guardrails that keep you on point.
- People – Raising your game by raising the game of others at work and at home.
- Presence – Strengthening your inner capacity to pause between stimulus and response, so matters of effectiveness and impact drive decisions and actions, rather than old habits or knee-jerk impulses.
- Peace – Learning to trust your capacities to evolve, adapt, and respond to whatever comes your way. And, how to lead from a place of acceptance, gratitude, and trust, rather than a place of stress, striving, and ego protection.
With all that being said, ‘purpose’ is regarded as the primary principle. And that means staying in touch with that sense of purpose at all times is seen as key to giving a person a greater sense of control.
“It’s this idea that you are bringing your whole self as a leader, and that starts with purpose,” Betty says. “In the module I lay out the framework and specifically look at ‘purpose’ and how delegates need to understand and reflect for themselves on what they think their purpose is.”
Betty uses the framework as a self-reflective checklist, making sure that none of the elements are being neglected: “It’s something you can keep looking at from different aspects. So, at the moment I’m quite interested in the process side of things, as opposed to the people side of things. The job I’m in now has required me to step up in some ways, and I’m realising that my processes perhaps haven’t kept up. I've been looking at how I can put systems in place to help.”
Read more about how introverts can still make good leaders.
Why do leaders need to step away from the detail from time to time?
The crucial management skill of delegation falls within “people”, of course. This is the leader learning how and when to step away from the detail and act as a steward for others, helping and instructing in order to bring the best out of them.
There are many different types of leader, from the strong leader who leads from the front to the empathetic leader who is collaborative and brings their whole self and their passions to the task, and tries to get team members to do the same. With the help of the 5Ps, Betty says that is what she aspires to.
Purchase tickets to Future Leaders 2025: Your Path To Leadership Excellence.
Thanks to Betty Owoo, Senior Design Officer, Design Unit, Good Growth, Greater London Authority.
Text by Neal Morris. This is a Professional Feature edited by the RIBA Practice team. Send us your feedback and ideas.
RIBA Core Curriculum topic: Business, clients and services.
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