MRSpride Stars: Sophia Papadopoulos
28 April 2020

Sophia Papadopoulos is a Business Analyst at Kantar. An automation evangelist, she started off her career in the research industry. This fuelled her enthusiasm for technology, leading her to be part of building Kantar’s innovative software solutions today. Sophia’s passion though, is inclusion and diversity. She has successfully set up the Pride@Kantar employee resource group connecting Kantar’s LGBT+ community and allies to create a culture that is genuinely, authentically inclusive and build a truly diverse workforce.

Sophia sits on sits on the MRSPride steering group with a desire to expand the horizons and extend the network beyond the four walls of Kantar.

I wish someone had told me at the beginning of my career that it’s ok not to know what you want to do. Take your time to figure out what you DO want to do and keep working towards that. The perfect job exists for some people, but for others, we have to take little steps to get there

I admire so many people! Caroline Frankum is someone I feel very fortunate to have gotten to know. She is very passionate about her work and exhibits leadership qualities that really resonate with me – inclusion, fairness, honesty.

A future-fit research world looks very different to the one we know now. I think clients are going to force the industry to become ever more innovative. There’ll always be a place for traditional data, but increasingly I think clients will want to know more from unstructured sources.

My resilience tips for when times get tough are: Take a breath., identify what’s making it a tough time, smile. That last one really helps you feel better. If I’m getting excessively busy, I’ll take some time out to write my to-do list. Categorise things in to important and urgent. Go from big concepts and start breaking it down in to tasks. Always makes me feel a bit more on top of things.

I’d love to tell the story of my grandparents. They’ve been married for 65 years and have just had this amazing life (they eloped, lived all over the Middle East, lived through a civil war), seeing the world change. They’re just fascinating people.

To me, great leadership is progressive, fair, inclusive and open. Leaders set the tone for how the rest of the company behaves. I think it’s really important that they embody those qualities and show those behaviours to instil them in the rest of their organisation

The main challenge in building a more inclusive world is status quo. Not the band. Change is hard and there will always be people resistant to it. I strongly believe that we have to keep pushing for a more inclusive world, even though it’s one of the hardest things I’ll do…

If I wasn’t doing this, I would be a magician. I still haven’t grown out of that dream.