| Colin Duthie | |
| Talent guru joins WWS | |
| Colin Duthie, a leadership
and talent management specialist, recently joined WWS to help clients
raise their game even higher. He has worked internationally in both
corporate and business roles for several top 50 FTSE companies and
public sector organisations. Colin brings expert knowledge on talent
management, and the cost-effective retention of high performing managers.
His strength is benchmarking to help companies measure their efforts
in the ‘war for talent’ against best practice. Through his experience, Colin is able to establish the return on investment achieved by talent management programmes. His real flair lies in creating an outcome-focused approach to talent management, identifying potential throughout organisations and joining the dots between initiatives to ensure that investment is applied where it is really needed. After leaving Scottish Power as Director of Group Leadership Development and Resourcing, Colin became a talent management consultant. He is a former member of the Advisory Councl on Management Education at INSEAD in France and the Business Advisory Council at the Swiss business school IMD. He is also retained by The Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania and works several days a month with clients across Europe. "I’m delighted to be working with White Water Strategies.
I like the WWS style and strategy from a client perspective –
what you see is what you get", says Colin. He adds that: "it
is a small but big thinking consultancy which listens
to clients, yet is not afraid to challenge them." |
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| Coaching the Leaders | |||||||||
| John Campbell, Director of Wholesale Energy, Scottish Power | |||||||||
 John runs one of one of ScottishPower's core energy
businesses in the UK. His role covers three strategic areas: power
generation; commodity trading and renewable energy - each with its
own director who reports into John. His remit includes 1,000 permanent
staff, with up to an additional 1,000 contractors and the business
is spread from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands and includes both
Southern and Northern Ireland.He has been in the role for a year and before taking it on embarked on some leadership coaching with WWS. "I decided to do the coaching because I thought it would help in the transition from my previous role into an executive role. I had always been very hands-on and task-focused and probably needed a little more finesse and style." John also worked with several mentors, and took part in various leadership courses. "It was about deciding to take up the challenge to be part of the leadership team and going for it." |
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| The coaching experience | |||||||||
| So what was his initial experience of coaching like? "To be honest I found it uncomfortable, I'm quite a private person and to open up and discuss other people's views of you is never easy." However, he decided to accept the challenge, go for it and change some of his perspectives and even question some of his values. "We Glaswegians are known for being direct and that can be taken as defensiveness or even aggressiveness - so I worked a little on that." He adds that modesty often dominates in the traditional Scottish Calvinist culture, "There's a lot to be said for celebrating, but it doesn't always come easily." My coach Averil also worked with me on not pre-judging situations or individuals: don't judge the book by its cover. These are small issues but they can be important", says John. On a business note, Averil encouraged John to take on an international project to provide him with some working experience of a very different team. "I worked with a group of Americans and it was a great experience." According to him, the best thing about coaching is that it persuaded him to make a "critical self-examination of his views and values which you can't address unless you recognise them in the first place". He adds that Averil didn't let him off the hook - he had to fill in his forms for each session and face up to any weaknesses. "The choice was mine: did I want to progress in my career to the top, or leave things as they were? I chose to make some changes and still am." These changes have spilled over into his personal life as well. "I would say I have a much better work-life balance these days as a result of coaching. I've got young children and to get home by 6.30 or 7pm a few times a week is usual for me these days, whereas it was less likely before." | |||||||||
| The business case | |||||||||
"I strongly believe there is a business case for coaching – I’ve just put a member of my team forward for it." For John, coaching is about "highlighting and building on your strengths, while identifying and mitigating your weaknesses. It helps makes someone the best they can be and raises their potential to give their best to the organisation for which they work." Ultimately this is important to him because "people in the organisation are everything, they make the business and we need to build on all of their potentials." |
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| In praise of Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap… | |
 If business needs
its heroes, it equally needs its villains and none come bigger than
Al Dunlap, ‘saviour’ of Scott Paper, destroyer of thousand
of careers and waster of billions of shareholders’ money at
Sunbeam Corp. Many quotes have been attributed to this charming man,
including the infamous: “'If you want a friend, buy a dog. I've
got two.” Al was the perfect illustration of the 1990s generation of self-serving managers who thought they have un-earthed the secret of making businesses successful with one simple approach – in his case ruthless cost cutting supported by large share options packages for senior management. So why should we praise Al? Two reasons and two warnings:
Although Dunlap’s tenure at Sunbeam looks like a caricature of ‘profit at any cost’, remember that it actually happened, and that the larger than life picture of hubris and intimidation is not that far from day-to-day situations at corporations around the world. In my view, every leader should have a copy of great failure case studies alongside the traditional eulogising tomes. There is as much to learn from Al as from Jack, Martin or Richard. François Moscovici Do you agree? Do you want to pen the next 'In My View'? Get in touch: |
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| Contact us : | +44 (0) 20 8938 6301 | rapide@wwstrategies.com |