Clare Wright, former Chief People Officer at Jardine Motors Group and now UK People Director of logistics company Kuehne-Nagel, explains to Lynda Ennis, Co-founder and CEO of Ennis & Co Group, why a people-first approach is so fundamental to business success.
Lynda Ennis: You worked across a range of sectors before moving into senior leadership roles in automotive retail and, more recently, logistics. Tell me about your career journey and how it has shaped you.
Clare Wright: Starting from the beginning, I grew up in a normal working-class family and excelled at school, but I had no desire to go to college or university. My teachers were mortified that I didn’t want to stay on to do my A levels, but all I wanted was to go into a job and earn money.
I started by doing a YTS in administration at a small marketing and advertising agency, and, within a month, I was helping with the accounts. I was curious and enthusiastic to learn about how everything worked, which is something I think I inherited from my dad. He had his own plumbing business and was always very tenacious.
I moved around a bit for the first couple of years of my career, and then, when I was 19, I spotted an advert for a job in customer service management at a Volkswagen & Audi dealership. To be honest, I wasn’t interested in cars, and the main attraction was that the job came with a company car. I met the founder of the business, Andy Lawton, and persuaded him to hire me on the grounds that although I didn’t have any automotive experience, I understood customer service. He told me to go and prove myself.
Andy turned out to be a huge influence on my career. He was tough, but he was also a great innovator and really taught me about the commercial side of the business. I was lucky to be put on a leadership programme, and I ended up being a Head of Business at the age of only 22. When I joined the company, the customer service and the people management were extremely poor, and I quickly realised that we needed to do something different in the way we treated our teams. I persuaded Andy to let me do a CIPD [Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development] qualification, which I did at college for a year and then two nights a week for two years at Manchester University to gain a Post Grad Diploma in HR Management.
After about seven years, I reached a bit of a crossroads. By that time, Volkswagen and Audi had separated their retail operations, and we were running just with Volkswagen across three sites. Volkswagen were looking to improve the customer experience and launched the Volkswagen Retail Experience project. They approached me about working on the project with one of their consultants based on my people, leadership and commercial experience.
During my two years in the role, one of my key responsibilities was assessing the personnel at retail businesses across the Volkswagen network. This was quite a tough gig for a young female in a male-dominated world, but it really developed me in terms of understanding the business requirement, the business case and measurement. It also developed my influencing skills because it was all about talking to people about how they led their teams properly and making things like transformational leadership and the 7s framework real to those who had been running their family businesses for 20 or 30 years, whilst also getting them to see the benefits of a ‘people first’ approach to bottom line.
The consultancy role really taught me the importance and impact of great leadership, and this has followed me throughout my career. To run a successful business, you must put people first and be humble. That doesn’t mean you have to be soft. I don’t think anyone could ever describe me as soft, and in fact I was quite difficult to work with in my early days when I was immature and trying to emulate the behaviour of my male colleagues. Fortunately, I received some coaching, and I learnt that you don’t operate that way. It’s all about understanding people and treating them as human beings.
Having decided to continue going down the HR route, I felt I needed to broaden my experience, and so I left automotive. After a short but very interesting stint as Head of Talent at the casino company Stanley Leisure, I joined Shop Direct Group as Head of Learning in their contact centre division before being quickly promoted to Commercial HR and Change Director. The business was going through a huge transformation and cultural change involving 33,000 people, and a key element of my role was honing in on transformational leadership and what that meant exactly – assessing leaders within the business against that and coaching or moving people where necessary. Individuals were encouraged to really open up about their leadership skills and understand what drove them, including unpicking the bad bits.
After five years with Shop Direct, I returned to consultancy and experienced very different leadership propositions, working first with the Fire and Rescue Service, which was highly hierarchical, and then with social housing, which was community-led and required a more flexible approach. From there, I went to Daisy Telecoms, which was a big M&A exercise where we acquired 10 businesses in 12 months. I then worked with the Argos commercial team on a short-term contract before joining eFront, a private equity-backed French software business that gave me my first global role.
In 2015, I returned to the automotive sector as Chief People Officer of Jardine Motors Group, which turned out to be a hugely eventful nine-year journey for me until the business was sold. If the definition of great leadership is about truly understanding your people, valuing your people and being an authentic leader to drive culture change, then I think we were incredibly successful at Jardine. It included getting through Covid, and I would say what we did was a model of how to get through an incredibly tough time by being joined up as a leadership team, being open about your weaknesses, understanding your people, helping them as human beings and yet still being visionary and clear about the direction of the business.
Throughout my time there, the biggest thing for me was seeing everything through the lens of how it impacts people and treating people like human beings, even when the messages were difficult.
LE: One of my hobbyhorses is that it’s common for a Finance Director, a Chief Operating Officer or even a Chief Marketing Officer to become a CEO, but it’s very rare to see a Chief People Officer stepping up into the role. I understand that there are some CPOs who would never be able to fulfil the role of CEO, but if you have broad business experience as well, then I think having a strong people background would be a good thing for a CEO to have. What’s your feeling?
CW: I completely agree. For me, it all comes down to the people-first approach, whether it’s individual employees, teams or customers. I saw this vividly at Daisy, when I did the HR role and then moved to be Customer Experience Director because essentially it comes down to the same approach. It’s about understanding what the customer wants and then aligning that with what you then need to do as a business. I think chief executives and other C-suite executives often don’t fully appreciate the importance of the people aspect, but you can’t run a successful business unless you understand people and you have a genuine desire to understand people. If you look at the leadership traits in some of the best and most sustainably successful businesses, they are all about customer and people first. Thinking back to my time at Jardine, we built up a lot of data over the years, and we could clearly show that the businesses that performed the best had the best customer metric, the best financial metric, the best people engagement metrics and the best colleague retention. They were all very different businesses; the leaders of those businesses were not carbon copies of each other. They had their own ways of doing things, but what was consistent was the customer- and people-first attitude.
LE: Do you think the experiences you had outside the automotive industry in the middle of your career really shaped you in terms of what you brought to Jardine?
CW: Having different experiences of different cultures in different sectors, but all with a strong customer bias, definitely helped me. Working with some of the big consultancies was particularly helpful in terms of seeing a more sophisticated way of doing things and then implementing them in a way that is understandable. For example, at Shop Direct we did six sigma and prince project methodology, and I’ve used that experience throughout my career in terms of leading big change programmes.
LE: You have worked in some pretty challenging environments, and you’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly. What are the key traits that you think leaders of the future will need to have?
CW: Leaders definitely need tenacity and resilience, and they must have the desire and curiosity to understand people – both the customer and employees. Self-awareness is also a big one.
LE: There is a lot of talk about how younger employees have a different attitude towards work-life balance and are perhaps unrealistic about the sacrifices required to become a future leader. What are you seeing in terms of people coming into your current organisation?
CW: Kuehne-Nagel take a lot of graduates, and many of them have moved through and are doing really well.One of my observations is that the younger people coming into the business have not had to deal with challenging situations. They’ve been protected to a certain degree, and so there’s a lack of resilience when things don’t go right. I’ve seen this, for example, when people don’t get a certain job because they’re not considered to be ready yet.
One of the key things that the younger generation needs to recognise is that you must invest in yourself to be better. There’s a cost to everything, isn’t there? There’s a personal cost to being successful in terms of the personal time you have to give up.
LE: When I talk to industry leaders about equipping people for future leadership roles, many emphasise the importance of moving horizontally to broaden one’s skill base rather than focusing just on moving upwards. Is this your philosophy?
CW: I mentor a lot of young women, and the advice I always give is that you have to broaden out if you want the bigger roles because you need to experience different aspects of a business, if not different sectors. With greater breadth comes greater depth.
Another trait that I would single out in terms of great leadership is the need for self-awareness, honesty and the ability to have frank and open conversations. Where things go wrong is when this doesn’t happen. Being honest and able to take feedback is so important, which then comes back to resilience.
The other important aspect is that great leadership never stops. If you look at some of the great leaders in the world, especially in business, they are people who just keep going. They never say that they’re going to sit back. They always want more, and they always want to be doing better.
LE: Thinking about your experience in leading major transformations, acquisitions and integrations, what kind of leadership is required in such situations when some people are potentially going to lose their jobs?
CW: Transparency and integrity are fundamental. You can’t always share exactly what’s going to happen, but when you are able to, you must be honest. You must be able to deliver a tough message, but always remember that there are human beings on the receiving end of it. It’s not about being soft but about dealing with people in a very empathetic way, particularly when they are losing their job.
Thinking about Jardine, we had never done a major restructure, but, coming out of Covid, we had to do a cost-cutting exercise because of the losses we experienced as a result of COVID. Despite the extent of the restructure, we didn’t have a single employment tribunal claim, and we did it by facing into it directly. In fact, I faced into it personally. I could have got some of the team to do it, but I didn’t see the point in shying away. If you’re doing transformation, you have to take personal responsibility and be visible as a leader, not hide away. It’s a very tough situation, and you know you are dealing with people who have families, but you just have to treat people as human beings.
LE: When we did our research report on skills gaps in the automotive industry, we found that there was a lot of activity around developing people when they first came into the organisation before they entered what I call the ‘business as usual’ middle part of their career. One thing that Jardine was always known for was developing their talent for the future, but my perception is that, across the industry, there has been insufficient investment in mid-career people, which has had a knock-on impact on succession planning. Where do you stand on equipping people for leadership?
CW: There needs to be ongoing development. A bit of sheep-dipping is required at the beginning to prepare people for future leadership roles, which has the added benefit of making people better at what they are doing in their current role. After this foundation work, there are no magic courses that can make you a great leader, but what we did well at Jardine was the continued investment in mentoring and coaching. As an executive, every quarter we would have an off-site session with an external facilitator to keep us true to what we were doing. There simply has to be ongoing investment to be a high-performing business.
LE: I know that if somebody cut you in half, you would bleed inclusion. You’re a true believer. But what advice would you give to leaders in terms of trying to keep that momentum going and ensure it doesn’t become a tick-box exercise?
CW: For me, it’s about doing the right thing and understanding why you’re doing it in the first place.If you think about recruitment, what is it that you need in a certain role? Start with the needs and then map back to the type of person who can fulfil that need, irrespective of gender or whether they are neurodiverse, as an example. Keeping the requirements of the role in mind, make sure you’re not always looking for the same thing and recognise that difference can be a positive. When it comes to neurodiversity, for example, there are certain roles that people on the autistic spectrum will often excel at.
In terms of the wider issue of inclusion across the industry, I think people always think about the gender piece and not about inclusion in a wider sense. That’s what I keep saying in my current role. They are actually pretty good in terms of the gender piece from a management point of view, but we have to think about all levels of inclusion because it’s the right thing to do. All the evidence shows that if you have a more inclusive team, you get better results, but it’s not just about gender. It’s about people feeling that they have an opportunity irrespective of their background or whether they have a disability.
LE: Last question… Who in your career has really inspired you?
CW: As I mentioned before, Andrew Lawton was a big inspiration at the start of my career. There were some things I wouldn’t replicate, but he was a really strong people person who was incredibly tough at the same time. He was also very entrepreneurial and always pushed the boundaries. Very sadly, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer about 19 years ago, but he still kept going because he loved his business. He definitely influenced me in terms of his curiosity and love of innovation – the feeling of always wanting to do better. Even when you’ve reached your goal, you go again.
