Despite falling into employment with the telecoms and IT services firm “completely by accident”, he is now chief operating officer after having held five other senior positions at the company within five years – which includes running the HR department.

Up until joining Colt, Powell had run his own consultancy house, PS-1, which focused on doing what he does best – fixing businesses. Following rapid growth, however, he sold the company and his aim had been to take a year off.

But it didn’t quite work out like that. He so impressed Colt’s chief executive with his ideas during that six-week stint that he was offered a senior role as head of professional services in order to put them into practice. Then in 2009, the company began an immense change programme that would see it moving from being a series of 16 locally-run country operations into a homogeneous, pan-European services provider.

Powell thought that the best place to drive that change would be to situate himself within the HR function and so he persuaded the chief executive to transfer him. His rationale was that the changes were going to require some tough conversations with people and that the HR function should be the one holding those talks.

 

But Powell also had a longer-term aim of transforming the role of HR in order to ensure that it became a more strategic and respected part of the business. At the time, the department acted as the company’s ‘accident and emergency ward’ in that it tended to react to problems rather than proactively support the business.

“We wanted to do that change very aggressively but HR wasn’t really at the top table at Colt and it didn’t add value to the strategic thinking of the business,” says Powell. “To create sustainable change, we needed HR to be proactive and engaged.”

But while this was all fine in theory, taking over a 140-strong team with no experience of HR himself made it a little tricky at first. “When I landed in HR, I thought I’d landed on a different planet. It was the most surreal experience of my career,” recalls Powell.

 

 

His talk of 90-day plans, key differentiators and product lines were like a foreign language to members of the department, which had up until then acted as a backroom facility that was one step removed from the business.

“My view on HR is that if you don’t understand the top strategy of the business and what the key business drivers are, you can’t really do your job. HR really has got to be a commercially-oriented partner to the business units or to the business it services,” Powell says.

The business turnaround at Colt took 18 months, from June 2009 to January 2011, and started with repositioning it from being a stodgy telecoms firm to a vibrant services provider. Communicating these desired changes effectively to the workforce was key, however, and Powell used a number of techniques to get the message across.

 

These included taking the unusual step of hiring a specialist storytelling consultancy in order to explain the changes in a six chapter story form. A community of 100 ambassadors was also created across the firm’s 16 geographies. The aim was to involve them fully in the change design process so that they could push the message home quickly at a local level.

But Powell also made sure that senior managers were seen to be involved in introducing change too. The workforce was informed that the company rebranding exercise would be launched in six months, but only if management could prove that five or six major changes that had been identified by employees were implemented during that time.

 

Each of the six changes, which were whittled down from 56 different suggestions, was assigned to a member of the executive team to take responsibility for and their progress was monitored and published on the corporate intranet. If an individual executive failed in their mission, they were accountable to the chief executive.

But Powell had never intended to move into HR on a permanent basis and so, six months into the job, he hired a vice president of HR who worked alongside him as head of learning and development for a year before taking over the reins.

One of the things that he noticed on taking on the HR director role, however, was how it changed his relationship with the CEO. “Being CEO is quite a lonely place – who do you turn to? What I learnt through my 18 months in HR, is you can build a really interesting relationship where you become a coach or mentor or a sounding board for the CEO,” Powell says.

As a teenager, however, he would have been very surprised that his career has turned out as well as it has. Powell had been a budding footballer but, like so many promising youngsters, didn’t quite make the professional grade.

 

 

“I always thought I was going to be a super-sportsman but, at 15 years 6 months, I began to wonder whether I was going on the dole or into the factories,” he remembers.

Instead, Powell joined the army at 16, where he remained for 12 years. He loved the military life and a job that allowed him to indulge his passion for rugby, boxing and football. “I also found a natural home for my appetite for learning and ambition to grow,” he says.

By the age of 20, that ambition led him to volunteer to work in special forces, which exposed him to a very different leadership style from the autocratic approach of the mainstream army. “In special forces, you work in very small teams and see humanity at its most outstanding,” Powell explains.

And for him, good leadership is summed up in the figure of US statesman and former army general, Colin Powell. “Colin Powell talks about leadership as a service and that’s always stayed with me. If you create enough clarity for talent around you, then you’ll be really surprised what people can achieve. Too many leaders are all about what’s in it for me rather than creating a platform for others to be successful,” believes Powell.

On returning to his original unit after five years in the special forces, however, he found that he had changed as an individual. Although his career path to lieutenant colonel was all but mapped out, Powell found that the return to the autocratic style of the regular army was now at odds with his outlook.

 

So he left and found a role as a project manager at Sun Life Financial of Canada. But it was a shock to join civilian life and find that people started work at 9am and left at 5pm, even if the job hadn’t been finished. “I’d worked in teams in the military. If they said they’d get something to you by 3pm tomorrow, you never had to ask for it because it would be there,” Powell says.

He also worked at a number of companies ranging from Energis to Boots, mainly undertaking interim management assignments before setting up his own consultancy.

As chief operating officer at Colt, a position he was appointed to earlier this year, it is now Powell’s job to take an holistic view of the company, evaluating everything from processes and suppliers to tools, that is required to prosper. But that does not mean to say that he is now divorced from what’s going on at ground level.

“I really like having my hands in the business. I don’t mean micromanaging, but if I speak to an engineer involved in putting in routers, I want to understand what they’re doing. As a leader, you have to be able to micro- and macro- manage and not be a ‘skater’ who doesn’t really understand anything,” Powell concludes.

And finally….

Who do you admire most and why?
The leader I most admire is Colin Powell. I’ve never met a leader in my career with such charisma and clarity of thought. He said that, as a leader, you’re here to serve and create an environment for others to be successful, which is something I believe in.

What’s your most hated buzzword?
Thought leadership.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
Always do the right thing and do it with integrity.

How do you relax?
Because of my military background, I like to keep physically fit so three or four times a week I do work out. I love my football and I’m passionate about Swansea City.