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Cardiff Business Club Event review: Aileen Richards, Independent Non-Executive Director of the WRU
Date Posted: 17 January 2017Cardiff Business Club Interview: Aileen Richards, Non Executive Director at the Welsh Rugby Union.
Aileen Richards (AR) was interviewed for and on behalf of Cardiff Business Club by Paul MacKenzie-Cummins (PMC), managing director at Clearly PR & Marketing Communications.
PMC: How did your role with the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) come about?
AR: I knew that I wanted to semi-retire, not fully retire. And I knew that I wanted to do some Board work and it was through a mutual business acquaintance and Odgers Berndtson that I learned of the WRU’s plan to find someone to join the Board. I was naturally interested, applied for the role and got it.
PMC: What does your role with the WRU entail?
AR: As one of two independent Board members, I don’t have any specific remit as such. There is a misconception among many that I am here to promote women’s interest in the game, but that is not the case.
I am representing everybody’s interests. What I do do is bring a fresh perspective and to share the experiences I have gained working for one of the biggest of global brands.
PMC: Your appointment to the Board was enthusiastically welcomed, where you aware of the media and general interest surrounding you given that you were based in Washington DC at the time?
AR: The response was incredible and it wasn’t just here in Wales – it was global. It made news not just in Wales and the rest of the UK, but as far afield as the US and New Zealand.
I do think that we underestimate the power of ‘Brand Wales’, which goes above and beyond simply being ‘Brand rugby Wales.’ Despite having been in a senior role for a company like Mars for three decades, I have never experienced anything even close to the level of media attention that my appointment generated.
PMC: The focus was very much on you as being the first female member of the Board, did that come with a sense of added pressure and responsibility?
AR: I have been a trailblazing female for a number of years during my career, I was the only female the executive board at Mars for instance. Yes it does carry with it extra responsibility but at the WRU the most important thing is to be a great independent non-executive.
The second most important thing for me is to find other women in rugby – being the first woman on the Board is one thing, finding the second and then third one is the critical element we need to focus on. It isn’t until we have achieved this can we be considered truly diverse and representative.
PMC: Figures from Chwarae Teg state that just 2% of chief executives in Wales’s top 100 businesses are female. What do Welsh businesses need to do to improve the number of women occupying senior roles?
AR: It is all very well increasing female representation at Board level, but it needs to be done at executive level too. That is the pipeline – the feeder. Yes you can parachute women into roles from outside the organisation, but this is usually just a short-term solution and is not sustainable.
By creating a pipeline of female talent business leaders you then have a pool of top executive female talent that they can delve into when the need arises. Mentoring women and focusing on their development will certainly help. But we shouldn’t get too fixated on quotas – I don’t believe in them.
50 per cent of the managers at Mars in the UK are female, yet 25 years ago that figure stood at just 10%. So the business invested in their development when they were in their twenties and today it is these people who now occupy many of the most senior roles in the business; succession planning doesn’t happen overnight.
PMC: Wales is fast-becoming a destination of choice for many people, but sometimes it does struggle to attract top talent – particularly at a senior level. How can Wales position itself as a place where people can realise their career ambitions?
AR: One of the fresh eyes observations I have made about Cardiff, is that it has developed into what can only be described as an unbelievably great city. I truly believe that it can match any major city outside London.
By having a more talent diaspora mentality [where we seek to position Cardiff and Wales as an alternative to the likes of Surrey and Berkshire for Welsh Londoners seeking to escape the capital], we can appeal to the talent base that was once here and encourage them to want to come back.
PMC: Having led the HR function at Mars, and with responsibility for over 80,000 employees worldwide, how were you able to fully engage everyone with the business on such an enormous scale?
AR: Simply put, you need to be strategically aligned and operationally decentralised. You set policy, you set philosophy and you set ethics and you work with talent by nurturing and developing it.
You don’t determine to engage one location with another. Rather, if you are looking to engage people in China, for instance, it is the leaders in China who need to do the engaging, not us sat in Washington DC. Our role is to set the framework and strategy; it is the role of the leaders in each respective territory to engage their teams.
PMC: What do you consider to be the greatest leadership challenge you have had to overcome in your career?
AR: Talent is – and should always be – the biggest challenge we as leaders face and anyone who thinks otherwise is either lying or has their head in the sand. Retaining people and having a tradition of promoting from within is a challenge that has proven to be even more so with each new acquisition the company made.
Acquisition is great for the business as a whole but it presents a number of HR challenges; existing members of staff, some of whom may have been with the newly acquired business for some time, often become so ingrained with the old culture that they struggle to adapt to the new one and so they leave.
We faced this problem many times and when the board of Mars couldn’t understand why these workers weren’t happy with the new way of doing things, I would simply point out that everyone who is working with Mars chose to do so – these people didn’t have that choice. It is not the same.
PMC: What would you say has been your most successful period in your career?
AR: The things that I am most proud of will never be on my CV, one of them is that I provided three potential successors to the Board. All three were people who I had been developing and nurturing within the business over a period of several years – in one instance it was 25 years.
Another key achievement was getting Mars recognised as one of the top 25 global companies to work for in the world rankings – an accolade only achieved through internal validation, where 30% of the company’s entire workforce were independently surveyed.
The other greatest achievement I would say is when we reached the point that 40% of all managers on a global level and 50% in the UK were female. It became a benchmark not just for our business but for other corporations too. But it still isn’t enough.
PMC: Who have been key influencers in your career?
AR: When I was on the European leadership team, I had a great CEO who used to tell me not to worry about things that are not under my control. He taught me to be calm and to remember that the job is to leave things in a better way than which we found them and to import stress and export serenity.
As a young executive, I thought I could take on the world but I learned that the role of a senior executive is to provide air cover for people, so that they can continue to do the hard work on the ground. People throughout my career saw in me what I wasn’t able to see in myself.
PMC: What would you pinpoint as the key traits of an effective leader?
AR: First, choosing the right management team who you can trust to do the job you need doing. Second, surround yourself with a diverse team with complimentary skills to your own. Third, be clear on what your vision and strategy is and be relentless.
It takes a lot of courage and persistence to remain true to what you believe in when the naysayers try to bring you down. Vision, strategy and talent – the why, what and who that all business leaders need to be mindful of.