We’re delighted to welcome Sara Weller CBE, Co-founder of ActionAble, to the ImpactExpert QT series.
Sara Weller CBE has led 25,000 colleagues, helped change the way people receiving Universal Credit access bank accounts, and raised £262,000 for MS research after becoming a wheelchair user. Yet the lesson running through her career is remarkably simple: make the destination clear, bring the right people together and focus on action rather than words.
The former Managing Director of Argos has served on the boards of Lloyds Banking Group, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Money and Pensions Service. Today, as Co-founder of ActionAble, she is using that experience to help organisations turn disability inclusion from an ambition into something people can see and feel.
Key Takeaways:
- Great organisations put customers first and enable colleagues to do their best work.
- Real social impact often comes from connecting organisations that could not solve a problem alone.
- Leadership is about creating clarity, not complexity.
- Collaboration creates better answers than individual expertise.
- Progress matters. -celebrate the journey, not only the destination.
What was one of the best roles you’ve ever had and why?
Probably the role I loved most was being Managing Director of Argos. We had 25,000 colleagues and the catalogue was in two-thirds of UK homes. It was the first time I had the opportunity to shape a whole business around the way I believed it should work: customers first, then the people who served the customers, and then the rest of the organisation serving those people. It was a fantastic opportunity to build my own team and improve customer satisfaction and colleague satisfaction at the same time.
When I left after seven years, following my diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, I was so sorry to go. It felt like leaving a family behind. It was one of those roles where my work and my values came together, and I could build something I was personally proud of as well as professionally proud of.
What’s one decision you’ve made that helped align your work with your own values?
Moving into a non-executive career allowed me to choose organisations where I could concentrate on the things I cared about most: customers, colleagues, culture and trust.
I wanted to return to financial services because I’d loved the sector earlier in my career, but I also felt customers weren’t getting the service they deserved. Joining the board of Lloyds Banking Group gave me the chance to help change that. With 27 million customers, I knew that if Lloyds improved the experience it offered, the rest of the industry would have to keep up.
As a non-executive, I could concentrate on customers, colleagues, culture, conduct and rebuilding trust after the financial crash. The organisations changed, but the question remained the same: how do we make financial systems work better for the people who rely on them?
What’s the biggest thing you’ve done to improve social impact?
Probably the place that enabled me to create the most direct impact was serving on the boards of Lloyds Banking Group and the Department for Work and Pensions at the same time.
On one of my first visits to a Jobcentre, a member of staff came up to me and said, “There’s something you need to fix.” Universal Credit was being introduced and, unlike previous benefits, people needed a basic bank account to receive it. The problem was that many people didn’t have the identification banks required to open one. Jobcentres would send people to a bank, the bank would send them back again, and they became trapped in a frustrating cycle.
I thought it would be relatively straightforward. It took two years.
Working with Paul Davis at Lloyds and colleagues at the DWP, we developed a process that allowed banks to use the identity verification already completed for Universal Credit. Lloyds went first, followed by Barclays, Nationwide and eventually much of the industry.
It is now a standard route for helping people without conventional identification access a basic bank account. I am proud of it because it could only happen by bringing together people who understood both sides of the system and trusted one another enough to solve the problem.
Can you share some key milestones or proudest moments in your career?
In the summer of 2022, after living with multiple sclerosis for 16 or 17 years, I needed to start using a wheelchair. It felt like the end of the world at the time. I wanted to put myself into a more positive mindset, so I entered the London Marathon to raise money for MS research. When I started, I thought raising £25,000 would be brilliant. A small group of people I’d worked with over the years came together to help, and eventually we set ourselves a target of a quarter of a million pounds.
We raised £262,000 for the Stop MS Appeal – the biggest single fundraiser the MS Society had ever received and one of the largest individual fundraising totals from that year’s London Marathon. Crossing the finish line, knowing the money would fund research for people diagnosed with MS after me, was an incredibly proud moment. The training also helped me make the transition to using a wheelchair.
It may not be a career milestone in the conventional sense, but it drew on every relationship I had built throughout my career. Every mile was worth it.
What’s one project or piece of work that taught you a big lesson about impact?
It has to be the ActionAble Conference that Leigh Smyth and I organised in February 2025.
When we started talking about it, I imagined a much smaller and simpler conference. But the more we discussed the impact we wanted to create, the clearer we became about the problem. Lots of organisations talk about disability inclusion, but they don’t always know what practical action to take. We also knew every organisation faced different challenges, so a traditional conference with one stream of speakers wasn’t going to work. Instead, we built an assessment to identify people’s gaps, sessions they could choose based on those gaps, and practical tools they could take away to build an action plan.
In the end, 450 organisations registered, including 45% of the FTSE 100, and 80% of attendees told us their confidence to influence disability inclusion had significantly increased.
The lesson was that impact comes from matching a real problem with the right solution and focusing on action, not words. I also learned to be more ambitious. Leigh reaches for things I would never have dreamt of attempting; I bring the structure that turns those ideas into something people can use. ActionAble became what it did because we needed both.
What’s one piece of strategic advice you’ve found yourself giving more than once?
I often share a way of thinking about leadership that I call the Fairy Tale Castle.
Imagine standing on one side of a valley looking across to a fairy tale castle on a hill. It has towers, flags and a huge portcullis. It looks like somewhere everyone would want to be. That’s your vision. People need to understand where you’re going and why it’s somewhere worth getting to. Next, you build the train tracks that will take you there. Those are the major pieces of work that will get you from where you are today to where you want to be.
Finally, you put stations on the line. When I was little, my grandmother used to write down every station on our train journey to London so I wouldn’t keep asking, “Are we nearly there yet?” I could simply look at the list and see where we were. Leadership is much the same. People need to know where they’re going, how they’ll get there and where they are on the journey. If something changes, you might divert the tracks slightly, but you’re still heading for the Fairy Tale Castle. I do not think the fundamentals of leadership are that difficult. People want clarity. They want consistency. They want to know they are making progress.
What’s one learning from delivering work at scale that you think others should know?
You can only work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you want to create impact beyond that, you have to engage other people.
When I took on my first large leadership role, I’d been used to managing small teams of highly experienced professionals. Suddenly I was leading a couple of hundred people. I learned everything I could about the sector, spoke to customers, built a strategy and presented it to the board. About a year later, my team gave me some 360-degree feedback. They said, “We love the vision and the energy. We’d just like to be able to help.” I was shocked. I’d assumed they would naturally know what I wanted them to do.
I had mistaken enthusiasm for alignment. People could see my energy, but they could not see what was in my head. Since then, I have believed that great leaders turn complexity into a story people can understand, repeat and act on.
Who or what inspires your approach to creating impact through your career?
There are lots of people I draw inspiration from, but I always say that inspiration is a choice. Two people can hear exactly the same story and take away something completely different.
One person who has inspired me enormously is Kate Nash, founder of PurpleSpace. Kate has lived with a significant disability since childhood and has been part of the disability-rights movement through decades of legal and workplace change, including the campaign for the Disability Discrimination Act. What I admire most is that, throughout all of that, she has remained relentlessly optimistic. She never ignores the realities of disability, but she always believes we can create change and build a better environment for disabled people.
She encourages people to be caught doing things right. Rather than focusing only on what has not yet been fixed, she recognises progress and helps people see what better looks like. That has shaped my own approach. ActionAble was never about criticising organisations; it was about helping them understand what good looks like and giving them practical ways to do better. Kate has been a huge inspiration in shaping that philosophy.
What’s the thing that brings you the most work joy?
Collaboration. One of the organisations I applied to as a graduate rejected me because they thought I was too competitive, too individualistic and not enough of a team player. Looking back, they were probably right.
Over time, I learned to collaborate first within organisations and then across them. Now, when someone brings me a problem, my first question is: “Who else needs to be part of solving this?” I’ve built networks across financial inclusion, digital inclusion and disability inclusion, and bringing those people together almost always produces a better answer than any one of us could reach alone.
The real joy comes from working with extraordinary people – engineers, bankers, academics, social entrepreneurs and leaders from so many different sectors – and seeing what happens when everyone’s knowledge comes together. That’s pure work joy.
What is your favourite quote you would like us to include, and why?
Like many people, I have several quotes that inspire me, but one has stayed with me for years. It’s from a little Zen Dog cartoon:
“He knows not where he’s going, for the ocean will decide. It’s not the destination, it’s the glory of the ride.”
Earlier in my career I was a perfectionist. I focused almost entirely on reaching the end goal. Over time, I realised that if you’re trying to solve complex problems, the destination is often a very long way away. If you only allow yourself to celebrate once you’ve arrived, you’ll quickly become demoralised. That quote reminds me to recognise the progress you make along the journey and take pleasure in that too.
It’s also shaped the way I lead others. You can’t ask people to wait years before they feel they’ve achieved something. They need to know they’re making progress along the way. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that a strategy that’s 80% right with 100% support is far better than one that’s 100% right with only 80% support. In the end, it’s not the perfection of the strategy that matters – it’s how well it’s implemented.
That little cartoon has been on my wall for around 20 years. It still reminds me to take pleasure in the ride.
