Allison Kirkby: how BT’s first female CEO is transforming the brand

British Telecom (BT) can trace its origins back to the Electric Telegraph Company in 1846, meaning this year BT Group celebrates its 180th anniversary. It does so with Allison Kirkby at the helm, its first female CEO and one of only a handful of women leading FTSE 100 companies.

Kirkby’s ascent to the top has been far from typical. However, it’s given her plenty of experience in leading large teams, developing brands and scaling telecommunications (Telco) companies, while also cultivating personal grit. In our interview, you will learn about:

• How Allison Kirkby started out as a 12-year-old doorstep seller
• What it takes to run a 180-year-old institution through its biggest reinvention yet
• Why the smartest leaders are built on the shop floor rather than the boardroom
• How to hold your nerve when the markets don't believe in your long-term bet

The apprenticeship that made Allison Kirkby

Allison Kirkby grew up in a working-class family in Glasgow. Both her parents were factory workers and encouraged her to be financially independent from a young age.

She started selling door-to-door aged 12 and was an Avon Lady at 14. She delayed going to university when her father fell terminally ill, instead taking up a position as an apprentice trainee accountant with the Scottish Whisky Industry in 1984.

It gave her an education of a different sort, she says. “I learned through doing,” she recalls to Sir Richard Harpin on the Business Leader podcast, “understanding how the company worked from the very bottom to the very top.”

But her big break came when she joined Procter & Gamble in 1990, where she would take on more than a dozen different, increasingly senior roles, both in the UK and abroad. Her time at P&G was “fundamental” to her development as a leader, she says.

“It was almost like a university for creating brilliant leaders.” Other alumni include Christopher De Lapuente (LVMH and Sephora), Paul Polman (Unilever), Jeremy Darroch (Sky) and Austin Lally (Verisure) – not to mention Richard Harpin too (HomeServe).

When you were put in charge of a brand, it resembled taking on a CEO role, she points out. “It was like running a business, with a functional leadership team around you.”

She remained at P&G for two decades, “flexing her leadership muscle”. She also learned about M&A, with the acquisitions of Gillette and Wella. Though it was “a massive wrench to leave” P&G, she was inspired by what her colleagues had gone on to achieve as CEOs, from this quasi-management school.

A string of roles in the Telco sector, including CFO at Virgin Media and then CEO at Scandinavian companies, Telia and Tele2 gave her experience of restructuring and turnarounds.

She also prepared for the BT CEO role by spending five years as a non-exec on its board first, from 2019. This wasn’t a deliberate policy to prepare her, she says, but it “made it an easy transition” for her, bringing deep knowledge of how the company works and the trajectory it was on.

Taking a £40bn bet on Britain's broadband

That hiring trajectory meant that Kirkby was on the board when a crucial decision was made, which will likely define her tenure as CEO. The company decided to make a £40bn investment in full fibre broadband, delivered by its infrastructure arm, Openreach.

“We made a once-in-a-generation decision,” she says, describing it as the single biggest capital investment in the UK. Her challenge since then has been to explain the logic of that long-term investment and demonstrate its financial return to investors, her 100,000 employees and the public.

“Telcos have a history of investing but never delivering a return for their investors,” points out Kirkby, “and so any telco that goes into a major investment cycle, the markets usually start very sceptically, are we ever going to see a return here?”

BT Group’s challenge is even greater because it is a household name, regulated by Ofcom, with challenger brands also competing in the broadband space, demanding a level playing field. And of course, as a public company, BT Group has shareholders eager for a return.

How Allison Kirkby is upgrading the world's oldest telco

Kirby says her plan is to focus back on the UK and “core connectivity”, “pivoting to free cash flow growth sooner rather than later”. The seasoned strategist has mapped out a path to growth and return to growing dividends by the end of the decade.

She also plans to bring the central BT brand “back into the consumer space”, with a relaunch imminent. Its main public-facing brands at the moment are EE and Plusnet.

“BT being the oldest telco in the world,” says Kirkby, “[we were] slow to invest in modern-day technologies, which meant we were one of the most inefficient telcos in the world.” The CEO is now drawing on all her hard-won experience to execute her modern vision for this 180-year-old institution.

Allison Kirkby's four lessons for leaders

Your foundations matter more than your title. Kirkby's path ran through door-to-door sales, an Avon round, and an apprenticeship in accountancy long before she reached a boardroom. That grounding, she says, taught her how a business really works, from top to bottom, in a way no later promotion could.

Scepticism is the price of ambition. Committing BT to a £40bn broadband bet meant accepting that markets, employees and the public would doubt her before they believed her. Real leadership, in her telling, means holding the course anyway and doing the work to earn that trust back.

Scale should make you more careful, not less. With hundreds of thousands of employees, retail investors and pensioners depending on her decisions, Kirkby treats the size of BT as a responsibility rather than a shield. Leadership grows heavier the bigger the platform gets.

Discomfort is where growth happens. Her advice to anyone climbing the ladder is blunt: take the opportunity that scares you. Failure and being stretched beyond what feels possible are, in her view, the only real teachers.

Listen to the full conversation with Allison Kirkby on the Business Leader podcast.