In the first of a series of interviews with some of the automotive industry’s most influential leaders, Lynda Ennis, Co-founder and CEO of Ennis & Co Group, talks to Eurig Druce about his pathway to becoming SVP and Group Managing Director of Stellantis UK, and the challenges of leading in a time of transformation.

Eurig Druce:  I trained as an electronic engineer and spent the first period of my career working for a company in the Republic of Ireland as a tester on a production line. I didn’t really enjoy the work, though, which is why I decided to move into the automotive industry.

Although it is true to say I have stayed with the same organisation contractually, it is also miles away from reality because we are no longer the same company. I joined the graduate trainee programme at Peugeot Motor Company and my first job was working as an aftersales Customer Advisor in a dealership. I can honestly say I learned more in that role than any other. Being on the front desk and dealing with unhappy customers was the hardest thing I’ve done. I have always had a lot of admiration for the retail side of our business and that informs my decision-making today.

Peugeot Motor Company merged with Citroën to become PSA, and it later acquired Opel-Vauxhall before ultimately merging with Stellantis. It is therefore a very different organisation to the one I joined as a trainee. For all the brands that we have, we are now far more efficient and we probably employ fewer people in the UK than Peugeot did when I joined as a trainee.

The main reason I stayed with the organisation was the amount of opportunity I was given to progress. After two or three years in a particular role, there was always the opportunity to do something different, sometimes at a higher level and sometimes at the same level but in a different part of the company. Gaining that breadth of experience across the whole business was incredibly important in terms of my previous roles as a single brand Managing Director and the Group Managing Director job I’m doing today. To lead a brand, it would be a massive weakness to only have experience of aftersales without understanding the marketing or sales side. Equally, if I only had experience of the sales side, I’d be neglecting or not fully understanding 40% of my profit stream.

As the MD of a national sales company [NSC] in the UK, my main interactions are with customer and dealer, and it is therefore a huge benefit to have spent my career working with dealerships at different levels – from in-dealer through to Regional Director level. Most of my career has been facing outwards, not inwards, so I understand what motivates dealers and how to get the best out of dealerships.

ED: Yes, obviously I started at the entry level and I was fortunate to benefit from what was a particularly good training scheme with Peugeot, which exposed me to working in a dealership. I encounter some trainees today who don’t want that dealership experience but I always tell them it is the best thing they could do and that they will learn far more than in a classroom. A good-quality graduate scheme is one where, when you come out of the scheme, you can add value. The worst thing is to join an organisation where you think you know everything but where you add zero value and have no credibility.

ED: I would say the times have been challenging, more than the brands themselves. The great thing about working in Stellantis is that all the brands have a big heritage. Going back in history, who hasn’t heard of brands like Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Citroën, Peugeot or Vauxhall? It’s a privilege to be given the responsibility of leading them at a point when they’re maybe not on their A game.

Thinking about the first brand I led, I was appointed Managing Director of Citroën UK six weeks before Covid. This might be considered unlucky but it was quite fortuitous because Citroën was not in a good position at the time, having been overtraded for years. Covid gave me the opportunity to look at the business in detail, understand why certain decisions had been made and develop a plan to turn things around. As an engineer, it’s particularly enjoyable to go somewhere that has an issue and being able to fix it.  It’s harder to go into a role where everything is already operating brilliantly.

ED: The way I describe it is to compare the New Zealand rugby union team to the rest of the world. When a New Zealand player is five yards away from the try line, they seem to find a new level of momentum to carry them over. The same goes for sales. When you see your target coming towards you, it’s not the time to relax but to push through.

I also see parallels between the sales process and my engineering background in terms of making make sure that all the key ingredients are right. First, as an NSC, you need to have the right products. That’s not an area I can get involved in so much, but I’m lucky to be part of group that has great products. You want a motivated network, and there are probably three or four things you need to achieve that level of motivation. You must have sound control of the stock and car flow, built around having the right car and the right time that suits the right sales campaign. Finally, it is about the motivation of the sales team. If a brand doesn’t hit its numbers, you don’t shout and scream but you learn from where you went wrong and fix it.

ED: Looking at the people in Stellantis who started around the same time as me, a number of them are doing senior jobs. There is a reason for that, and it comes down to the original recruitment process. You need to have the right person with the right chemistry to start with, and then you provide the right level of opportunity and nurture time. On a personal level, this means giving my own time to nurture and coach people right from graduate trainee level. I would hate to put any of my team in a situation where they are having to knock on doors to get advice.

People have to take their opportunities but, as I’ve said, not every move has to be upwards. Moving sideways can still be progression. People talk about building a pyramid. If you progress upwards in a straight line, when you reach the top, you’re going to wobble because there is very little in terms of pyramid base to keep you stable. The wider your scope of experience in your early career, the stronger you will be.

ED: First and foremost, you need to get the recruitment right. You don’t always recruit the best person but the person with the best chemistry to fit the team. Often, you’re recruiting the kind of person who will grow – and there’s quite a skill to getting that right. When we are recruiting, we will go through the usual competency and ability assessments, but the most important part of the process is having a conversation with the three or four short-listed candidates to understand who best fits my team and who adds a different dimension to it. I don’t want people who will just agree with everything I say but who are prepared to challenge in a positive way.

To get people to the position where we need to be, you have to find the right balance of what the business can do in terms of workload and flexibility. At Stellantis, we have hybrid arrangements, which effectively mean two or three days in the office per week where that is appropriate for the role. That allows you to cast a much bigger recruitment net because you’re not limited to a catchment area around your HQ.

In developing future leaders, we have to make sure that we, as managers at various levels within the organisation, are spending time nurturing our teams. This year, my first-line team have three measurable performance objectives and a fourth one around ‘creating a better us’. This is about making sure the wellbeing and motivation of their team is strong as well as nurturing people to the point where everybody knows who their successor is. We’re not quite there yet as an organisation but I want to get to a scenario where a key priority for managers is making sure they are themselves replaceable, ideally by somebody in their team or otherwise somebody they are partnering with to nurture and coach. If you’re doing that, you are putting something back into the organisation. I have some examples of this working well, and if I can make it more widespread across the organisation, then we’ve cracked it.

Where you learn most is on the job rather than in a classroom. People grow through experience and, frankly, learning from failure. That’s not to say that we want people to go wild and not worry about failing, because failure costs money. But there is a balance that needs to be struck in terms of giving people the confidence not to be so cautious that they never venture beyond what they are used to. We don’t want the electric fence syndrome where people know it will hurt them if they touch it, so nobody goes anywhere near it.

ED: As a sports fan, I would point to the example of Liverpool Football Club winning the Premiership title. That success was not necessarily the result of what has been achieved this year but what was done previously in terms of the way the previous manager, Jürgen Klopp, built the squad before handing it over. Stellantis very rarely goes to market to recruit for senior positions. Instead, we try to have a wide pyramid of strong trainees at the bottom of the company who we can work with a nurture. We will lose some, but if you recruit in sufficient volume and have a sufficient diversity of people at an early career stage, then so long as you look after them, coach them and give them the right opportunities, you will end up with a ready supply.

ED:  In our experience of working with some Chinese brands, they need to be careful they don’t operate like a weed killer that over-feeds the plant, causing it to die because it outgrows itself too quickly. One of the things we made sure about in launching Leapmotor as a joint venture in the UK, for example, was that we had parts availability before we even put a car on the road. That’s not the case for all Chinese brands.

In my book, competition is a good thing. I was recently asked about tariffs and whether the UK should make it more difficult for the Chinese to bring their products into the country. My answer to that was ‘no’ because it will create a lazy industry and a lazy way of managing. The best thing that can happen is that the Chinese push us as hard as they can, because that means we have to be better day by day. That’s what my role is – to make sure that, as a team, we move forward step by step. In business, there are game-changing opportunities that you should grab, but most business success comes from incrementality, from small steps, and that gives you more security as well. We are very careful not to be a weed killer.

ED: One of the big personal challenges I’ve had is that I’m six months into my Stellantis role and I haven’t had a chance yet to do one job. For three months I was covering the Peugeot brand in addition to my current role, and now I’ve got Vauxhall as well. Managing my time has therefore been my main challenge, though things will be sorted shortly.

Looking at the marketplace, we’ve got the Chinese approach to business which, even if I enjoy the competition, is challenging.  And, of course, there is the transition to electric, where my biggest fear as a manufacturer is that we have invested heavily in creating the right EV products for the UK just at a point when I think the population and the political world are softening on whether we should move to electric or not. The worst-case scenario is a period of indecision. One can understand why people haven’t made the transition so far, but the fact that there is no real plan to deliver what is a multi-generational transition in the industry is a very big challenge. You’ve got the legal ‘whip’ that says you’ve got to sell a certain volume of EVs, but the UK is one of the weakest markets in the Western world. There’s also no cohesive plan for charging. Even going down to the basics, why is it that if you can’t afford a driveway, you have to pay 20% VAT to charge your vehicle? How can that be?

In my role, I have to navigate between all these areas because to be non-compliant with the legislation is simply not possible. We were successful in hitting our numbers last year and we will be successful again this year, but it’s a huge challenge. The time and energy we are having to invest to be compliant is time and energy that we are not investing in other things that would be far better in terms of delivering growth, a stronger economy and higher tax receipts, which in turn would enable the country to incentivise customers to make the transition to electric. I’m not against the ZEV mandate. In fact, I’ve spoken positively about it and am one of the few in the industry who’s pushing to keep it in some form, but we do need a better plan.

Thinking of someone with whom I’ve never met, I would go back to Jürgen Klopp for the way he motivated his team and celebrated the wins. I find that hugely inspiring.

Within the business, Vincent Cobée was an inspiring influence. I started in Citroën just a few weeks after he took over as CEO and we developed a very good working relationship. He took the time to discuss things and he also backed me on certain actions that I wanted to do that were quite transformational. That experience has influenced the way I lead today in terms of the way I support and challenge people.

ED: No, because I wouldn’t be able to do it, frankly. I don’t know enough about coaching a sports team to have the credibility. I am a believer in substance, and you need to have a vision. Of course, you have to be able to take people with you and motivate them, but that it is not enough. You can turn a room in an instant with a speech but you can lose the population within a week if there’s no substance behind the speech.

As a leader, you have to have balance those two things. At our national business meeting, I’ve got to inspire the dealers to believe that we are going to succeed in 2025, despite all the challenges. They need to be buzzing as they leave that meeting. But within three weeks, if we’re not delivering on what I said, then I’ve lost them. You have to have the substance behind you.

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