“My experience on ‘The Apprentice’ didn’t teach me anything about business, but it did teach me about the media and it also taught me a lot about myself,” says Helene Speight, group head of talent management at nearshore IT outsourcing services provider, Endava.
And having self-awareness and an understanding of one’s own strengths and weaknesses are crucial to understanding other people and cultures and making a success of both life and work, she believes.
But what was she doing on The Apprentice anyway? After having spent eight years at General Electric in a number of high-profile operational roles on the service side of the business, Speight found herself under threat of redundancy when, in 2008, the company regionalised its operations.
But on being offered the choice of a new job in Australia or one in Leicester at GE Industrial, which made safety equipment for the aviation industry, it was the latter that snagged her interest as she was keen to gain experience in a products business.
The slightly tongue-in-cheek condition of employment laid down by the vice president that interviewed her, however, was that she take part in the BBC TV show, which he loved. “It was literally a standing joke. I’d never really seen it and no one thought that I’d get through, but it was filmed over six weeks and then I returned to work and it was business-as-usual,” Speight says.
She made it to the finals before her team was ‘fired’ and then, beyond undertaking a few charity events on the back of her new-found celebrity, came back to GE Industrial to take up her role as general manager. The focus of the job was on returning the £50 million acquisition to profitability and sorting out a number of conflictual people issues, which were the result of keeping the former management team largely intact.
“It was a very interesting challenge moving from a functional role to being a functional leader. But the key thing I learned was that you can’t expect to know about everything, whether it’s finance, marketing, engineering or whatever – you have to have good people working for you,” Speight says.
Passionate about people
After a year or so, however, GE made the decision to merge a number of units and, although she was offered an alternative job, she took the big decision to take redundancy in order to focus on an Executive MBA that she undertaking at Henley Business School. And it was during the course of this study that the pieces of the career jigsaw fell into place for her.
“The second module that I did was all about HR and a light came into my eyes and I got very passionate,” Speight says. “I realised that OK, I’d had success in delivering on the numbers and projects on time. But if I was honest, the reason why I was successful was that I was passionate about people, motivating others and putting together an effective team.”
This insight was reinforced by the fact that, when she was asked to take part in after-dinner speaking engagements because of her GE history, the subjects were always HR and talent management-related. As a result, she jumped at the offer of a year’s part-time contractor role with employee and industrial relations consultancy, Marshall James, and “hugely enjoyed” working there.
“I worked with the police force and my entire family is in the police, which is why I was so successful as an HR consultant. I understood the culture and the context. But it really cemented my decision to move into HR,” Speight says.
Therefore, after taking some time off when the arrangement ended, she decided to start looking for HR jobs as of last January. Despite receiving six separate offers, she decided to go with Endava – which she had approached herself anyway to tell them why they needed a head of talent management, even though they weren’t recruiting at the time.
“If you can read a balance sheet and tell them what’s missing and how you would do it, it’s a powerful message,” Speight says.
The appeal of her new employer, which she joined in April 2011, was that it was not a big corporate, but a small-to-medium firm with just under 300 staff that was “open to change”.
Future progression
Her role here is to help “take the business to the next level” by focusing on issues such as employee engagement, succession planning, developing effective training and mentoring schemes and creating internal recruitment and global mobility programmes. She has a team of four to help her, with one based in the UK and the rest at the firm’s sites in Romania and Moldova.
“I really wanted to implement strategy and bring on talented new staff. It’s about driving change and putting my name on something,” Speight says. “I appreciated that it was a slight step backwards to prove myself, but Endava have been very supportive and I’ve never felt that my seniority has been undermined.”
She is still a decision-maker, is involved in all strategy meetings, has her own budget and, if anything, possibly has “more steer in this company than in GE”, she says. “Even though my role there was to write strategy, there were so many more layers of approval to go through”, Speight explains.
Her ultimate aim, however, is to progress from being a senior manager to becoming HR director and to take a seat on the board. She already reports into the managing director of Central and Eastern Europe, Marian Popa, and has moved to Cluj in Romania, where she is currently learning the language.
“There are only 120 people in the UK so it was very important to report to someone in the CEE region. And being immersed in the culture here is valuable as it means that you can talk with an English mind set, but have a big understanding of the cultural issues in the region,” Speight says.
As to mastering the IT brief, she already has some experience of the high tech world under her belt. After undertaking a number of operational roles in financial services firms after leaving school in Leeds, Speight joined GE in 2000 as a call centre duty manager, which involved coordinating staff in both the UK and India.
She was then recruited into the company’s talent management programme, which enabled the top 20% of managers to drive their own careers and, after a couple of years, was asked if she would like to move into an IT role.
Troubleshooter
“It was felt that IT couldn’t communicate with business people who were on a different page. And when I moved to IT as a manager, the techie people asked ‘what is she bringing to the table as she’s got no technical background?’” Speight says. “It was a great lesson about being comfortable with not being comfortable, coming out of your comfort zone and ensuring that people’s voices were heard.”
Although she found the job challenging, she also found it rewarding, introducing, among other things, a graduate trainee scheme to support future managers fresh out of university.
“I wanted to give them confidence and support them. So they saw the value of me as a people manager as it was about motivating them and giving them what they needed from a soft skills point of view. A lot of people tend to be promoted on their technical ability, but it’s unfair to assume they can lead a team of 10,” Speight says.
Following this posting, she became known as a troubleshooter and became involved in a number of turnaround projects located in cities as diverse as Kolkata in India and Moscow in Russia.
“They were all very different culturally and I can see the link to Endava as all of these posts required someone with an appreciation of different cultures, someone who was open to new things and someone with an IT background,” Speight points out.
As for what it takes to be an effective HR professional, she believes that it is about understanding and helping people to deal with their day-to-day challenges as well as finding ways to help get the best out of them. She also believes that it is important to ”embrace cultural difference because that is where the opportunities lie”.
“Although the team in Romania is very different to me, for example, it’s important to embrace that as that’s how the best ideas are generated. So it’s also about having the maturity to understand things from someone else’s perspective,” Speight concludes.
And finally…
Who do you admire most and why?
My sister, who is a police sergeant. She’s a fantastic sister, mother and wife and has worked for the police for 20 years. She’s got a passion for public service and has worked in child protection for the last three years. She says that ‘it’s all about the children’ and I really admire her for it because she always manages to maintain control and look after the best interests of the children, even if it means making tough decisions.
What is your most hated buzzword?
I don’t mind any of them really as long as people know why they’re using them. If they’re used with a purpose and a context and there’s a place for them, they’re fine.
What is the best piece of advice that you’ve ever received?
Understand thyself. Self-reflection and an understanding of what makes you tick and what stresses you out is important.
How do you relax?
I go for a spa day, which is a lot cheaper in Romania than the UK. But when I’m back, which is every four to six weeks, I’m a social bunny so I like to spend time with my family – especially my nephew – and friends. But I only need short bursts of relaxation because, by lunchtime, I’m bored and want to move onto the next thing.
