One day he is the public voice of an automotive sector; the next he is helping entry-level employees solve problems. Toby Poston, CEO of the BVRLA, talks to Al Clarke, Chairman of the Ennis & Co Advisory Group, about the different sides to leading a trade association and his unusual pathway to the top job.
AL CLARKE: What was your ambition when you started your career? Did you aspire to a leadership position from the very beginning?
TOBY POSTON: If I’m honest, I would say I was not particularly ambitious as a child. I didn’t have any big ideas about status or money or people reporting to me, but I was very lucky because, from my early teens, I had a clear idea about the job that I wanted to do. I was an avid reader, a confident and quick writer and a nosy bugger, and, after watching correspondents reporting on the TV news, I remember thinking that I’d be good at that. From that moment, my aspiration was simple. I wanted to be a journalist.
I knew it was a competitive environment, and I didn’t have any journalistic contacts, so I just had to apply myself to getting into the industry. After graduating with a history degree, I did some work experience, got a place on the postgraduate diploma course at the Cardiff School of Journalism and ended up securing my first job as a trade journalist before even finishing the course. I spent the next five or six years writing about either road transport or technology, and I absolutely loved it. I took to the job like a duck to water, and I’ll go so far as to say that I was good at it. I just felt grateful to be in a role where I could excel.
AC: Being a journalist is in many ways a solitary profession where you’re often operating as a lone wolf hunting stories. So how did you move from that to becoming a leader of a team?
TP: I guess it was a combination of luck and just being a pushy so-and-so. Even in those early days as a trade journalist, I found myself pushing for promotion on the basis that I was quick, I was reliable, and I was getting some great stories. After four years in the role, I had my first taste of leadership when I was given the opportunity to launch and edit my own magazine and manage a small team, which gave me even more confidence because it showed I had the trust of my bosses.
After being made redundant in 2001, I thought about doing more of the same in a different trade magazine but realised that I needed to push myself out of my comfort zone. I applied successfully for a news editing job with Ariel, the BBC’s weekly internal staff newspaper, which was the start of six years at the BBC. After a year at Ariel, I became a business editor and producer working across different channels and later a reporter and editor for BBC News Online.
I was still ambitious, but trying to progress in a huge, global organisation like the BBC is not easy. The talent pool is massive, and there are a lot of incumbent people who aren’t going anywhere because a job at the BBC is seen as the top of the profession. It was a period of my career where I had to get used to the fact that merit on its own is not always enough and that sometimes you have to go sideways to go forward. I started to question whether I really had the patience to keep pushing to get where I wanted to be. My circumstances then changed when my wife and I had twins. I was increasingly fed up with working unsociable hours for not very much financial reward, and so I took the decision to leave the BBC and cross over from journalism into public relations. After a short period as a freelance PR consultant, I joined the BVRLA as Head of PR and Media in 2008.
Again, I was very lucky. I hesitate to say it, but the organisation was a bit sleepy when I joined it. It was a small trade body for a particular niche of the automotive sector that really didn’t have a huge amount going on, and I was lucky to be bringing a skill set that was all about telling stories and communicating what was going on in the world. I also arrived at the start of a period of unprecedented technological, economic, political and regulatory turbulence in the automotive industry, and so I was fortunate to have the opportunity to ride that wave. My journalistic skills and experience helped me progress because I was used to dealing with turbulence. Working in a 24-hour newsroom, every day was different, and every hour was different. I was also in an environment where I was having to monitor and pick up information, analyse it, dissect it and then deliver it back to a certain audience at scale very rapidly. Applying this to the BVRLA, I had all the experience and confidence I needed to respond to the turbulence. I just had to make sure I had the right resources internally and the right support to do the job.
AC: A trade association is obviously a very different environment from the media. As you progressed within the BVRLA, were you conscious of gaps in your skill set? If so, how did you address them?
TP: One of the areas I definitely needed to develop was my emotional intelligence. When you’re a journalist, you can hide behind your press credentials or the media organisation you’re working for, whereas when you’re working with members, you need to be a lot better at listening. You need to listen with open ears rather than just listening to the parts you want for your news story. You need to show empathy and be patient and concentrate on building coalitions. Being patient was the area where I struggled most early on because I was used to having immediate deadlines and then moving on to the next thing. When you’re working for a trade association, you have to learn that some projects or campaigns might take two or three years to come to fruition, and sometimes you need to compromise for the greater good. Although we live in a fast-moving world in terms of the changes that are taking place in the industry, we as a trade association need to be robust in terms of our internal processes. We’re run with the input of committees; we need a mandate from our members to do things. In many cases, we can’t do anything until we have a consensus, so you can only move as fast as your slowest member.
On the commercial side, I never needed any commercial skills as a journalist. You’re there to be objective in your reporting, and the idea of being commercial is anathema to that. Having said that, I did have a bit of a commercial background because my father owned his own business, and, in my school holidays, I used to help out in various functions such as purchasing, accounts, bought ledger and sales. Given the fact that half of our members are small businesses, I therefore had a natural affiliation and understanding of what makes small businesses tick. As a journalist, I’d also written about how big organisations work, so I had some knowledge of the corporate world.
What really had a big impact on my career was being sent on the Advanced Management Programme at Henley Business School 12 years ago. The course was described as a micro-MBA, and it proved a game-changer for me because it opened me up to traditional management and business theory that I’d never been exposed to before. It taught me about emotional intelligence, it helped me understand my management profile, and it gave me the confidence to look outwards beyond my PR and communications specialism. I’d always thought that I would stay in my communications channel and maybe end up as a Director of Comms or a Director of Corporate Affairs, but doing the course made me realise that there was a route to the top and I had the potential to get there.
Another course that I did two years ago was also a phenomenal experience. It was on the language of leadership at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, and I spent three days way outside my comfort zone singing, dancing and performing with a bunch of actors. It was all about learning how to use your voice and body and to control your breathing, and it really helped me complete the last part of the journey to leadership. As a leader, you can find yourself in the spotlight with all eyes and ears on you, and how you perform can make all the difference. Doing the course gave me the confidence to be comfortable in that kind of situation. That was the final piece of the jigsaw for me.
AC: To summarise your career at BVRLA, you arrived from outside the industry, and you were given opportunities for coaching and professional development that carried you all the way to the top. Would you say that pathway is still available within trade associations?
TP: I think it depends on your board. From what I hear, the boards of some trade associations approach recruitment with quite a predetermined, almost blinkered view of who the right person should be, whether it’s a finance person, a turnaround specialist or whatever. Like any business, trade associations find themselves in different situations with different requirements. They might be looking for a CEO just to carry on the great work of the previous incumbent, or they might be looking for someone to lead a transformation who can make tough decisions. They might be an organisation that has solid underpinnings but just needs some fresh thinking to give it a creative reboot.
In my case, I think my appointment was a combination of needing to sustain success, which I had contributed to in my previous roles, and having a people person with empathy and emotional intelligence who could tell a better story to members. Fortunately, I was able to persuade the board that I had the credentials for the job.
AC: You’ve talked about the leadership skills that you’ve developed from your early days working in the family business and then as you climbed the ladder in the BVRLA. Do you think those skills would have prepared you to be a CEO of any organisation, or are they specific to a trade association?
TP: The BVRLA has 36 employees and a turnover of just over £4 million, so we’re an SME. I’ve never managed more than 36 people, and I haven’t come up through the finance side, so if I’m realistic, it’s unlikely I would be equipped to lead a much larger organisation. Having said that, and as I pointed out in my interview for the CEO role, being a trade association person means that one day you are representing an industry and speaking like an industry boss, and the next day you’re rolling up your sleeves and helping people in your SME solve issues who are at entry level. It’s a strange contrast, and you have to pivot from one aspect of the job to the other.
AC: How do you develop people in this turbulent climate where there is constant change in terms of technology, legislation and all the elements that go with it?
TP: It’s really tricky. We’ve definitely found that in certain areas, particularly our lobbying and the campaigning and regulatory part of our business, it’s harder to recruit good people and keep them. I think that’s mainly because the pressure is so intense, and it’s getting tougher every year. Things are so fast-moving, and the expectations are so high to support the members and deliver change.
One of the things we’ve tried hard to do is to develop operating models that we can plug our new recruits into to ensure continuity – a kind of tried and tested blueprint that sets how we lobby and how we engage in campaigning. At the same time, we have to make sure that their job is not automatic or machine-like. Within the modus operandi that we set for them; we try to give them the freedom to do their job in their own style and bring their own personality and creativity to it.
Like most trade associations, we are all about the people working in the organisation, and 75% of our operating cost is people. We live and die by the quality of our people, so we have to pay more than the average business, and we have to get our recruitment right.
AC: Do you see any gaps in the skills of people coming through?
TP: I’d say the most common gap is the ability to write for different audiences in different circumstances, which is probably just a symptom of how society has changed in terms of the decline of long-form writing, people reading fewer books and the rise of social media where people communicate more in the vernacular. Alongside that, I also see gaps in the ability to handle data and use it effectively to produce insights or metrics. That is an ongoing challenge, and it’s an area where we struggle to find people with the right skills.
Because trade bodies are there to serve a sector, we don’t tend to attract the cut-throat commercial leaders of this world because they know they are not going to get the pay or the excitement they are looking for. The people we attract are more likely to be team players who are motivated by being part of a group and moving in a common direction. We need those kinds of people, but we also need creative people and commercially minded doers who are prepared to make a decision and stand by it. Fortunately, we’ve had some success in recruiting those types of people in the past year, and it has made us realise what we’ve been missing.
AC: In some large automotive organisations, it’s seen as a strength if future leaders spend time in different functions to broaden their skill base. Is this also true in a trade association environment?
TP: I can definitely see the advantages, but we don’t have a lot of it. I know it’s very common in larger organisations, but you don’t tend to see it in organisations like ours because we’re just too busy to be able to rotate people into different departments. We do have a cross-functional team working on particular projects, but we’ve never had a programme where someone from our training team spends a year in our dispute resolution team or in our communications team. It would be wonderful to try, but to be honest, we just don’t have the bandwidth.
AC: If you look back on your career to date, is there a piece of advice you wish you’d received earlier on in your career?
TP: I was very naïve in the early part of my career. I thought that if I was good at something, I would get noticed and would progress naturally. I was in a fortunate position where that did happen in the first part of my career when I was working as a trade journalist, but it definitely didn’t happen at the BBC. What I learnt is that you must take responsibility for yourself and your career. You can’t just sit back, and hope things will happen, particularly if you’re working for a larger organisation. You need to develop sharper elbows – not in a negative sense of undermining the people you work with but by being proactive, whether that’s through networking, gaining experience in other functions or finding ways to highlight the good work you’re doing. I think that is even more important now than it was when I was starting out in the 1990s and 2000s because the world is so much more competitive.
AC: Who has inspired you during your career, and what impact did they have?
TP: I was inspired by a teacher at my school and also my second editor when I was a trade journalist. In both cases, it came from the praise they gave me. They took the time to recognise when I’d done a good job or had tried hard. Praise can be so powerful, and I try to apply that to the way I manage my team. I’ll point out when they’ve got things wrong, but I’m a great believer in the maxim that people remember criticisms far more than praise, so I’ll try to give as much positive praise as I can, but always in an authentic way.
