The Princess of Wales has used her first major public speech in two years to call on business leaders to priorities “time and tenderness just as much as productivity and success”.
Kate told a gathering of senior executives in the City of London that “profitability” and making a “positive impact” were not “incompatible”, at the summit hosted by her Royal Foundation to drive action and investment in the early years development of children.
The future queen has been making a gradual return to public duties since completing a course of chemotherapy last summer, and in January she announced she was cancer free.
The princess last gave a significant address in November 2023, when she made the keynote speech at the national symposium of her Shaping Us project, a major awareness raising campaign to increase understanding of the crucial importance of the first five years of a child’s life.
Delivering the summit’s opening speech, Kate told guests her passion for promoting early years, described in the past as her “life’s work”, stemmed from the “essential truth” that “the love we feel in our earliest years fundamentally shapes who we become and how we thrive as adults”.
She went on to say: “A loving home ultimately teaches us how to love and how to care, but every environment has the potential to shape our hearts.
“Every one of you interacts with your own environment; a home, a family, a business, a workforce, a community. These are the ecosystems that you yourselves help to weave.
“Imagine a world where each of these environments were built on valuing time and tenderness just as much as productivity and success.
“As business leaders you will face the daily challenge of finding the balance between profitability and having a positive impact. But the two are not and should not be incompatible.”
The princess has been carrying out a range of public duties from attending Trooping the Colour to supporting her charities during her cancer journey and has recorded a number of video messages, but has yet to undertake a major overseas foreign tour.
Kate’s Royal Foundation Business Taskforce for Early Childhood, founded in 2023 to galvanise business action, hosted the event which featured taskforce members such as Richard Walker, executive chairman of Iceland Foods, and Dame Amanda Blanc, Aviva group chief executive.
The taskforce produced a report last year recommending a range of interventions, from creating a culture inside and outside firms that prioritises childhood to supporting parents with greater resources and flexibility in the workplace, and stated the nation could benefit from an estimated £45.5 billion through investment in early childhood.
The princess ended by saying: “Every child deserves respect and safety, and everyone who cares deserve recognition and appreciation. Every act of care creates community because we are all essentially weavers of that same fabric.
“I believe in restoring the dignity to the quiet, often invisible work of caring, of loving well, as we look to build a happier, healthier society.”
She was due to leave the event at Salesforce Tower after a private lunch but decided to stay for the afternoon session when taskforce member chief executives discussed what their firms were doing to promote early years.
A source said: “She feels passionately about the work the Business Taskforce is doing to place early childhood at the heart of the business community.
“She stayed on this afternoon to hear more about how current taskforce members are inspiring some of the biggest businesses in the UK to make change too.”
Former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate took part in a discussion about his own personal development and his coping mechanisms when under pressure during his career as a footballer and national coach.
He spoke about his famous penalty miss in the semi-final of Euro 96 against Germany and how he thought afterwards: “How do I ever recover from this? This is a public humiliation. I failed to execute a skill under pressure in front of half the world.”
But it was a process of “small steps towards recovering your confidence”, and he talked to teammates who had been through similar experiences who provided a support mechanism.
