Alison Jones, Global Chief Parts and Services Officer at Stellantis, is recognised as one of the most senior and influential women in the global automotive industry. She discusses her career and her thoughts about leading through change with Lynda Ennis, Co-founder and CEO of Ennis & Co Group.
Lynda Ennis: After beginning your career in finance, you’ve risen to become the most senior UK executive within the global Stellantis organisation. Tell me about that journey.
Alison Jones: After qualifying in finance, my aim was to move jobs every two or three years because I wanted to gain different experiences. So, I moved between companies that focused on manufacturing, export, automotive and fleet management.
During my time at the manufacturing company, which made and exported scientific instruments, I was on a small board and really enjoyed the commercial side of the business. I later went back to Volkswagen Group, joining Volkswagen UK with the intention of moving out of finance into a more commercial role. I eventually got a break and moved into retail operations, which opened the door to a number of different roles on the commercial side. I liked fixing things, driving results, working as part of a team and learning about different parts of the business.
I was then offered a promotion and returned to finance as a Finance Director for Volkswagen Brand, but I was still keen to experience different parts of the business. I got involved in a fleet project around moving to a fleet agency model and was later asked to fix customer care because I had strong opinions about customer service. When I look back at this period of my career, I think it was quite pivotal because we were having to run the day-to-day with dealers and customers at the same time as driving transformation through large groups of people. I like doing the operational at the same time as the strategy or transformation – the implementation alongside the strategic thinking – and I was able to build on that experience when I later headed up aftersales and customer quality for all five Volkswagen Group brands. When the emissions scandal broke in 2015, I was put in charge of crisis management due to my skill set. A year later, I landed my dream job at that time of Managing Director of Volkswagen UK.
A general theme of my career planning is that I always used to look two jobs ahead and ask myself, ‘What skills don’t I have or what experience do I lack? How I am going to convince somebody that I can do that job?’ I’ve had failures along the way where people have not recruited me because I didn’t fit with what they wanted, but equally I’ve had breakthroughs where I’ve been put into a job and succeeded – often in roles that have been very difficult but also very rewarding.
LE: From what you say about always thinking two jobs ahead, you were very proactive in terms of taking control of your own career journey. Did you do everything yourself or did you, as is now commonplace, have access to business coaches to help shape your career?
AJ: I did get coaching support later on in my career, but not to start with. I used to think that if you delivered strong results, you would naturally be considered for promotion and I learned
the hard way that is not always the case. Seeing people get jobs that I wanted and that I felt I deserved was painful, and I learned that I needed to speak to the hiring managers directly about the jobs I was interested in. If they told me I couldn’t do a certain role, I would ask them why so that I could plug the gap. I would also push for training opportunities. For example, when I won the ‘Barbara Cox Woman of the Year’ award in 2020, the prize was a £5,000 personal development fund. I then went to my company to ask them if they could top it up, which enabled me to do a course at Harvard Business School. This was a very powerful experience and I still use a lot of what I learned now.
LE: Another striking thing about your career is that you were very happy to move across horizontally before you went up. In terms of what you are seeing today, are people prepared to do what you did and broaden the base of their experience, or are people more impatient now and more fixated on moving upwards?
AJ: I think it depends on the individual, and it depends on what they want to do and whether their aim is to become an expert in their field. Marketing or PR is a great example. If you want to be an expert in a field like that, then you have a narrow breadth and you gain seniority by moving through different companies or being promoted. Other people want to work across the whole spectrum of an industry and so they are happy to move across because it gives them the breadth that ultimately enables them to move up.
I think there’s a strength in both strategies, depending on whether you want to be a specialist or a generalist. I do worry, though, that people sometimes try to jump too quickly. It works for some but not for others because moving upwards too fast means you haven’t got the necessary breadth of skills: understanding of how to do things, how to lead and motivate people and how to get through challenging times. What I would say is that you gain strength by working outside your comfort zone because it gives you a different perspective. You see and learn different things, which makes you more adaptable and resilient.
LE: You were leading the UK business for PSA when the group merged with FCA to become Stellantis in 2021. Can you talk through some of the challenges that you had to manage and how you approached it? What are the lessons for leaders who are faced with navigating an industry that is subject to constant change?
AJ: The main challenge is that you are often having to deal with multiple things at the same time. If you think about the period from 2018 to 2021, we had the preparation and implementation of Brexit, where we were still looking for definitive answers about how things were going to work just days before it went live. Then we had Covid, and then we had the merger of PSA and FCA. All the while, we were also dealing with CO2 and electrification.
One of my key learnings as a leader is making sure you have a diverse group of people with a range of experiences around you as your role becomes broader and more complex. You can’t possibly know everything about everything. Even if you do, it’s guaranteed to go out of date. The key is having a diverse group of people and finding a way to manage them because, by their diverse nature, they are likely to have differing views. You need to bring them together when they need to be but let them work in their individual areas and trust them.
I learned a lot from a speech given by the psychologist and change management expert, Dr Terry Paulson, and I actually brought him into a company where I was working. He talked about guardrails – setting your strategy and knowing where you’re going. If something starts to divert you, you need to decide when to get it back within the guardrails or whether course correction is needed. That’s the key role of a leader. You can have a little bit of mess going on in the middle, and that’s okay so long as you’re going broadly in the same direction. The challenge is leading groups of people to enable them to do that while making sure that people have their voices heard. That’s not always easy.
LE: Thinking specifically about a merger or acquisition, one of the key leadership challenges is the integration of what can often be very different cultures in terms of the impact it has on the people working in those organisations. What is your experience of managing this cultural tension?
AJ: The challenge is the same whether you are bringing together different companies, different countries or different individuals. When you have engineers, sales and marketing teams and finance people in the same room together, they bring different experiences in terms of their roles and how they have been trained. It’s exactly the same when you bring different companies together in terms of how they are going to work together. Some of it is purely practical. Who’s doing what? What is their role and responsibility? Who makes the decision on certain topics? How do we ensure decisions are made to move forward rather than going round in circles?
If one group has greater power than another group, that might be okay in terms of driving results but the down side is that you are then alienating one group. This is where the leadership challenge lies, and being clear about roles and responsibilities can really help. It’s not always straightforward, though. I’ve operated in a matrix organisation where, regardless of bringing two companies together, you’ve also got the matrix of decision-making to deal with. This is an environment that I’m used to, but many people are not, so you just have to find a way to keep moving forward and keep driving towards the results. You also need to be clear about what you represent as a leader, what you will do and won’t do, and what you expect of others.
LE: Reflecting on your career across various automotive brands, are there any pivotal moments or decisions that have shaped your leadership style?
AJ: When I was asked to run the contact centres at Volkswagen Group UK, the customer service centre was in a really bad place. There were backlogs and calls weren’t being answered, and the teams did not have the answers to be able to support. I was parachuted into the middle of all of this and found that, though the teams were trying to do a good job, just about everything was broken. Without being a micro-manager, I was quite hands on in terms of wanting to know how things worked and understanding the problems being faced by the teams. I was trying to manage a very diverse team and looking to find solutions from different parts of the company and outside the company. I was also having to do it at speed in a robust way.
Looking back, this was a pivotal moment for my leadership. I now know I like to drive positive change through large groups of people where you don’t know how you’re going to achieve it, but you know you’ve got to achieve. The contact centre experience taught me when to push, when to support, when to challenge and when to get out of the way and let people get on with it. As a leader, I was the one who was taking all the responsibility. I was having to accept the flak and work out how much of it I needed to pass on and how much I just had to absorb myself and deflect. The learnings from this help to carry me through many different things later in my career such as dealing with uncertainty, crisis management and also thinking positively and driving growth.
LE: How have you had to adjust your leadership style to manage people remotely, particularly in such a highly matrixed organisation like Stellantis?
AJ: I’ve talked about focusing on things that are not working well, because that’s my nature, but if things are going well, you should still look at it and ask, ‘Is that good enough?’ If you’re trying to understand whether a result is good or whether it can be improved, there is no substitute for investing time in talking to your teams. For example, I was speaking to the China team this morning. Later I’ll be talking to EMEA and this evening I’ll be on to Latin America. That is how you lead. Investing the time is so important.
LE: There has to be a level of trust from the board to be able to lead effectively but, from a lot of the conversations I’ve been having, much of that boardroom trust seems to be breaking down, sadly. What has been your experience?
AJ: I think it comes down to individuals and what their belief systems are rather than a board collectively. In any group of people, you see some unacceptable behaviours that we would just not have seen years ago. I think behaviours have changed over time in day-to-day life not just in the corporate world.
LE: Building trust throughout the organisation is all the more important when you’re going through a transition or a change period. Would you agree that this comes down to having a robust strategy and communications plan, because this where trust starts?
AJ: Absolutely. It’s all about having a plan, having strong communications about the direction you are going in and being confident that it is robust enough that people will follow. You can still change it or go in a completely different direction, but you need to be able to explain it. You need to be transparent about it all times. I do interactive Q&As and people are sometimes surprised that I don’t require the questions in advance. My team can ask me any question, and if I don’t know the answer, I will say so and tell them we’ll find out. If I can’t answer because it’s confidential, I will also tell them that. People will understand there’s a reason why you can’t answer, but it’s important to give people the chance to ask.
LE: Who have been your most significant mentors or inspirations, and what was it about them which made them memorable?
AJ: I’ve read a lot of business books, some of which have gone out of date but some of which I have re-read. I tend to keep certain hints or quotes in my mind. As for being inspired by individuals, I take elements from different people rather than being inspired by any one single person. Equally, I’ve been influenced by leaders who have had unacceptable behaviours and have promised myself never to behave in certain ways.
My experiences at Harvard and London Business School have had very positive influences on my career. They were only short courses but there were certain case studies that I studied that still resonate. A particularly memorable one was about the doctor who wanted to make heart surgery available and affordable for people in the US. The solution was to make it into a production line and drive process efficiency to enable the surgeon to concentrate on operating on the patient while all the other peripheral things were done by people who were experts, and still making sure the patient felt cared for.
LE: You’ve gained recognition as a top female executive in the automotive industry. What does this recognition mean to you, and how do you see it influencing the next generation of female leaders in automotive?
AJ: It’s always flattering to receive an award because it means that somebody is recognising you for the results you’ve achieved. After winning an award, you tend to get invited to speak to groups of people and share some of your experiences, and hopefully some of that will be beneficial for people aspiring to be automotive leaders. When I’ve done different things with people, I’ve tried to be really open. That can sometimes be hard because you’re laying bare your internal feelings, but I do believe you have to be honest and give of yourself if people are going to benefit.
LE: A lot of people might think that you’ve got it all in terms of the job and the status within the industry without appreciating the sacrifices you have to make to be a good leader. Do you think there is sufficient understanding of what it takes to get to the top?
AJ: Life is about choices. You have to make some big personal choices when work and home clash, and that never goes away. Do you push to the max or do you say, ‘No, this needs to stop. I need a time-out’? This happens all the time and it doesn’t get any easier. My family have had to make sacrifices, and you carry a lot of guilt with you!
There have been jobs that I’ve not taken or for which I’ve not applied for personal reasons, and there have been jobs I’ve not been given because people have made assumptions about me and my personal life. It’s not perfect but you just have to be comfortable with the choices you make and be clear about what you are absolutely not prepared to compromise on. That can often be very hard because I’ll internalise things and go over and over the what-ifs when reflecting on my career.
I’m no role model for time management at all, but if you get to the stage where you are stressed and burnt out without any respite, then it’s time to reassess what you’re doing. If the bad days outnumber the good days in a job, you need to make a change and take control.
LE: I know you still have many years left in the automotive industry but, looking ahead, what legacy do you hope to leave, particularly concerning sustainability, a subject I know is close to your heart, and leadership?
AJ: Regarding sustainability, I hope that we will have implemented it in a way that works economically and that customers value. At the moment, customers value it based on price but hopefully we’ll get to a point where they value it because it’s both affordable and sustainable and we’ve made it mainstream.
On leadership, I hope on a practical level that people who are progressing their careers and aspiring to leadership roles can look at me and see that you can succeed by being yourself and being human. Hopefully, I’ll been seen as someone who was able to inspire people on an individual, one-to-one level. I don’t think anyone is going to say anything like ‘Alison was an amazing, standout leader’ because once people like me go, the next generation will simply take over. But I sometimes get people coming up to me and reminding me of something I once said to them that has really helped them, so it’s nice to leave that sort of legacy.
