She’s a specialist nurse turned successful CEO. Here, Laura Lee explains how Maggie’s centres are addressing the issues that hospitals simply don’t have the time, staff nor space to.
There were snipers on the roof when Laura Lee met Michelle Obama last year. But it didn’t stop her getting in the line of fire when the First Lady swooped in for a hug.
"She was just amazing," remembers 43-year-old Lee, CEO of Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, and a mother of three. "She was smart, articulate, interested in everyone and able to look people in the eye and say ‘I’m hearing what you’re saying’. That, combined with her capacity to touch and hug and immediately engage at a deeper level, is a unique skill."
It’s a skill Lee has come across before, nearly 20 years ago. Then working as a clinical nurse specialist, she had been assigned to a patient in her 40s who had been newly diagnosed with breast cancer, and was immediately drawn to her.
"Maggie had a gentle, inviting way, and was someone you just wanted to approach," she says of the writer and garden designer, Margaret Keswick Jencks. So it was no surprise that the two went from being nurse and patient to friends – eventually launching a charity together that would dramatically impact the care that cancer patients and their carers could access across the UK.
“I was married, had career motivation in nursing, and then did this odd, slightly risky thing. I didn’t really think about it at the time, it was an emotional commitment”
The charity was Jencks’s idea originally. Surrounded by beauty all her life, she was struck by how bleak the hospital experience was for people like her – either facing a life sentence with cancer or imminent death. So, together, they began building the blueprint for a centre in Edinburgh that would put the focus on helping people with the emotional journey of cancer rather than the medical one.
Today, there are 14 Maggie’s centres either built or under construction across the UK, with the latest opening in the Cotswolds this month, and Oxford, South West Wales and Nottingham centres in the pipeline. These are places anyone suffering with cancer, or caring for someone with the disease, can go to get help adjusting to life with the diagnosis.
Each centre houses a team of specialists, which include nurses and clinical psychologists. Along with emotional and psychological support, they offer diet and nutrition advice, benefits advice, stress management and bring people together in support groups. Put simply, Maggie’s helps people address the issues that hospitals simply don’t have the time, staff or space to do.
Laura Lee has been leading the charity since the first centre opened in 1996, a year after Maggie’s death. Originally from Peterhead, a fishing and farming area in Scotland, Lee left home at age 16 to become a nurse. Once qualified, she found herself drawn to the area of cancer care. "I like meaningful relationships," she explains, "and that’s what you get treating people with cancer. You’re working with them and their families over prolonged periods of time."
It was the relationship side that attracted her to the idea of Maggie’s later on, and eventually led to her becoming CEO. Both women had originally interviewed people for the position, but when things fell through, Lee took it on part-time, and then went full-time two years later. "I was married, had career motivation in nursing, and then did this odd, slightly risky thing. I didn’t really think about it at the time, it was an emotional commitment, and it just grew from there."
Today, Maggie’s employs 150 staff, consistently punches above its weight in terms of press coverage, and attracts as much national as local attention whenever a new centre is launched. And while there’s no doubt that this is down to strong business leadership, for Lee, it’s still about emotions.
The ethos, for example, is fiercely preserved through staff training and induction programmes, ensuring the charity’s original aims remain the focus – to help with any cancer associated problem, no matter how big or small.
Even Maggie’s buildings are emotionally charged. The first was designed by renowned architect, Richard Murphy, a friend of Maggie Jencks, with the building work paid for by her husband, the architecture critic Charles Jencks. Since then, other famous architects have queued up to work on Maggie’s centres (building is now paid for through fundraising), including Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas and Richard Rogers, who won Maggie’s London centre in Hammersmith the 2009 RIBA Stirling Prize.
It took Lee a while to understand the architectural element. "It was important to Maggie," she explains, "whereas I came from a perspective that it’s the professional expertise that’s important. But then people came in the door of the centre, saying it made them feel hugged.
"Now I see that rather than the stress and anxiety [people experience] sitting in a waiting area, coming in here and being distracted by the building, hearing the kettle boil and starting a conversation, they reveal more in those first few minutes than in any hospital. You’ve just got that depth of communication far faster."
“People reveal more in the first few minutes here than in any hospital, by simply coming, being distracted by the building, hearing the kettle boil and starting a conversation”
Quick to point out she’s learnt everything on the job, Lee is equally self-effacing when it comes to the charity’s growth and success under her watch. "I’m no businesswoman," she insists. "I’ve not been trained to run an organisation and I’m mindful of the fact that I might not be the right person to take the organisation through the next phase of growth because of my own limitations."
In fact, it’s this combination of self-awareness and self-questioning that has enabled the charity to flourish all these years. Always steadfastly refusing to put herself at the centre of Maggie’s success, it has enabled communities to embrace their own centre, get involved with fundraising and take ownership, by ensuring it’s used and meeting the needs of locals. The result is Maggie’s centres being placed at the centre of the community. And while Laura Lee may argue differently, this is good business sense.
Maggie’s would like to hear from senior women interested in getting involved at either a trustee or board level. To find out more contact Laura Lee via pam@maggiescentres.org .
To make a donation, visit www.maggiescentres.org . Coutts & Co’s Cheltenham office is a proud sponsor of Maggie’s Cheltenham branch.
By Barbara Walshe
