Tristia Harrison is the CEO of TalkTalk, one of the UK’s leading broadband providers with over 4 million consumers and a significant B2B business alongside that. She began her career in PR & marketing before joining Charles Dunstone’s Carphone Warehouse group in 2000, rising quickly through the ranks. When TalkTalk was demerged from Carphone in 2009, she was made Managing Director of its Consumer business. She became CEO of TalkTalk Group in 2017 and is also a Non-Executive Director of Next, the clothing & homewares retailer, a Trustee of the Ambitious About Autism charity and the chair of Crisis.
Determined, inclusive, calm and increasingly confident about backing her own judgement - these are some of the phrases that Tristia and those who know her well, use to describe her. She talks about compartmentalising her various professional interests to minimise the anxiety and responsibility of leadership, along with the benefits of a portfolio of roles rather than defining her self-worth purely on the basis of just one. She stresses the importance of context, accepting that you can only do your best and not taking business matters more seriously than they should be.
Tristia is also as well placed as anyone to talk about the differences between running a private company and a publicly quoted one, having led a take-private of TalkTalk earlier this year. We discuss how she has redeployed the time freed up from no longer having to deal with the public markets and how her approach as a CEO has evolved to meet the demands of running a large organisation post-pandemic. More personally, she emphasises the importance of sleep, a new passion for fitness and running, and the value of her long-running book club circle.