It only seems like yesterday that we were arguing about the name, looking for an office and taking on our first clients…  Going through our diaries it has been quite a trip! Talk about white water paddling…
“The beauty about starting a business during a recession - muses WWS Director François Moscovici – is that you cannot be disappointed! We started the year when Arthur D Little, founders of the consulting industry in 1909, went bankrupt. It has been up ever since!” Adds Averil: “we rapidly discovered that an office next to Trafalgar Square kept you at the heart of things: from the high of the Olympics announcement to the respectful gathering to honour the victims of the London bombs a week later, from the madness around the English Rugby team to the intensity of Nelson Mandela’s speech in front of South Africa House.”

Professionally, things have progressed as coaching and leadership development have become more sophisticated: “we have moved on from being simple experts to actually drafting the agenda for the industry, either through the Association for Coaching or through our research. Our current focus on Balanced Leadership is the result of five years of thinking”.

We are looking forward to the next five years: our next Big Birthday will be just after the London Olympics – no doubt we will attend the White Water events!

Congratulations to our head of research Claudine Provencher on gaining her PhD in social psychology from the London School of Economics. She has spent the last 6 years researching how people make complex decisions in ambiguous circumstances, using the MMR vaccine as her field work. Drop her a line [embed mail link: cprovencher@wwstrategies.com] to find out more…

Claudine will now divide her time between her new role as Tutoring Fellow at the LSE and our research, including our Balanced Leader survey (more below).

Communication and diversity expert Helen Goodier joins WWS to help companies retain and significantly improve the number and diversity of women in senior management positions. Having managed worldwide communications for Unilever, Helen has been advising multinationals on diversity for over 10 years. We have worked together to design our new WWS coaching women in management programme, a combination of workshops and coaching to help companies retain women and progress them to more senior levels.

“When I started working on diversity issues with companies, it was mainly about straightforward gender issues: how to get more women into management roles and hopefully to stay” says Helen. “The scope is now much broader: ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation to name a few – but most companies still choose to focus on women at work because it remains an unresolved issue.”
“At a basic level problems such as pay equality are still live: the gap in the UK is still 17% for full time work and 38% for part-time roles. But the real concern is the wastage from graduate to boardroom: over half of graduates are women but there are currently only 13 FTSE 100 companies with women executive directors, and this is actually dropping.”

“Research on the business case for more women in senior roles is compelling on both sides of the Atlantic” adds Helen – one can find a good summary in the Financial Times 28th October 2007 - “But how do you get to a tipping point where you start to instil a different culture and get the business benefits of a significant and stable number of women in senior ranks?”

Our conclusion having reviewed the latest research is that you need to get women to make up at least 30% of middle management, but the biggest attrition is between junior and middle management: “While men go and run the difficult assignment in emerging markets – and get noticed and put on the fast track, women start a family and miss the vital line in their CV.”

So we decided to develop a programme that would focus just on this: helping women manage their choices so that they can plan and maximise their chances to get the middle ranking job. If they achieve this, then the top job will take care of itself. “There probably no longer is a glass ceiling for women in business,” she concludes, “But there is a labyrinth of choices and young women need help in deciding which path to take in order to maximise their overall career and life satisfaction”.

Heartfelt thanks to all of you who have completed our online survey on Balanced Leaders. We are still analysing the results: watch out for a special issue of Rapide soon. Meanwhile, as promised, we are making a £1250 donation to charity on your behalf. We have chosen to help young carers who look after their sick or disabled parents, often from a very young age. Read profiles of young carers here.

Millnet operates in a niche market processing documents for the financial and litigation markets. It was born out of the financial printing sector, traditionally covering IPOs, M&A documentation and Report and Accounts. It is now 11 years old and has grown from two desks and two people to over 200 staff operating from modern 12,000 sq ft premises in The City. As one of WWS’s first clients, Millnet continues to use coaching and psychometric testing to this day.

“Our first really big litigation job involved a matter between BA and Virgin with millions of pages. At the time we had one photocopier which could process 20 pages a minute,” says Chairman and founder Marcus Craggs. He smiles when he recalls how the client called to say he wanted to meet and check the premises two days later.

“It was a Thursday which just about gave us time to clear out our tiny two room office, decorate it, borrow furniture, plants and more importantly three photocopiers. We finished in the early hours of Monday morning, having worked the entire weekend.” In the 20 minutes or so during the visit on Monday, the client thought the operation secure, bespoke and good enough to place the order...

“In any kind of company, if you have huge initial growth you need to recruit smartly as well as quickly. Many businesses may find that challenges occur during this period. One of the biggest challenges occurs when people do not naturally fit into a team and Averil – initially introduced through a mutual friend - has been pivotal in helping choose the right people.”

After nearly 10 years in the army, Marcus knew he needed to manage his re-conversion smartly: he got himself an MBA at the London Business School where he recognised the need to work on interpersonal skills. “For me, coaching doesn’t provide all the answers but it has made me much more sensitive to the needs and motivational drivers of others.”

As a result Board Directors and senior managers of Millnet have been coached, both individually and as a team. “We found it has helped individuals understand themselves and their motivations much better - myself included.”

Also, using psychometrics as an aide remains vital to the business and in Marcus’s words: “If we don’t have them for the interview process, we feel naked. Psychometrics genuinely help you realise how someone would fit in and also the different, individual strengths they would bring to Millnet.”

Five years on, Marcus still grumbles about the cost of coaching: entrepreneurs have to look after the pennies! But he recognises that it has made a tremendous difference to Millnet’s ability to grow and seize opportunities. “I wish WWS another five years of growth and look forward to complaining about costs in 2012!”

Few would argue that Ethics have a place in modern business but post Sarbanes-Oxley et al we still don’t seem to know what that place is: Moral Compass or heavy regulation? John Reynolds is both the Chief Executive of specialist investment bank Reynolds Partners and the Chairman of the Church of England Ethical Investment Advisory Group. He obviously has a view:

“I doubt there is a clear consensus about where exactly the place of ethics should be: a guiding light, a part of the rubber-stamping of decisions by non-execs, or perhaps compliance with a governance code. Ethical decision-making can be valuable, whether or not business is approached from a religious perspective. Among other things, thinking about the ethics of a decision forces one to consider its long-term implications and thereby acts to protect reputation and business value. There is a dangerous tendency for consideration of the ethical issues involved in a decision to be replaced by a more legalistic approach, a tick-box attitude. This is unlikely to be an effective substitute for an organisation inculcating ethical values at all levels”

“In some cases, decisions are quite straightforward: in spite of appearances we live in a fairly moral society, so anything that will protect long-term reputation and the business’s brand is likely to be the right decision. In other cases we need to look beyond the immediate circle of stakeholders to take a complex decision. For example in a recently published report on supermarkets and their effect on British farming livelihoods, the Ethical Investment Advisory Group has published the results of extensive research into buying practices of the major UK supermarkets. The response to this report by supermarket groups has been varied, from some changing their processes to others effectively dismissing the report and its concerns over business practices. They did not have to agree with us but at least they had an ethical basis on which to make their decision” concludes John.

So what should companies do? “Compliance with the plethora of regulators, laws and directives surrounding us is essential, but ethics goes far beyond this and should not be confused with compliance” argues John. “For companies to protect and foster their reputations and shareholder value, as well as helping avoid decisions which bring long term unforeseen costs, the ethics of decisions should be considered and acted on at all levels in an organisation. And that is down to leadership” he concludes.

We take a break from reviewing other people’s books to proudly launch our latest tome…

It’s another congratulations, this time to Averil on burning the midnight oil (including writing a daily chapter on holiday, as well as playing plenty of tennis!) to achieve the tough deadlines set by the publishers of the Dummies series. Her new book, Performance Coaching for Dummies, co-written with Gladeana McMahon will be available from February 2008. The publisher’s dedicated pages provide a full description. Reserve your copy now!