eve-olution newsletter June 2007
Special Report from Serco Conference led by Tracey Carr
WISe network event: 6 June 2007
Eighty Serco women learnt how to influence people better
Grant Rumbles, Group Operations Director, told the delegates at last week's WISe (Women in Serco) conference that to be successful, you must be yourself. The event concentrated on helping the 80 delegates improve their communications and influencing skills. Attendees learnt how to understand their own communication style better, how to recognise other people's styles and learnt different approaches to influencing and achieving positive outcomes.
If you didn't come you missed a great event. If you did, here is a reminder of what happened.
Speaking at the conference, Lucy Adams, HR Director and WISe Chair, said: "We recognise that to meet our business goals, we need to encourage more women to progress into senior roles but to do that we need to remove any barriers that stop women progressing and realising their full potential."
WISe was developed to encourage and support a positive environment for the recruitment and retention of women within our business. It also aims to help women reach their full potential.
"Breaking into senior leadership roles is hard," said Lucy, "but I hope events like these will encourage women in Serco to come up through the ranks."
Grant Rumbles demonstrated the Executive team's commitment to WISe when he opened the conference.
"Diversity, including gender diversity, is firmly on the executive's agenda," he said. "For our people to excel our workforce needs to reflect our community. This is the essence of a new global diversity strategy the Executive team are currently reviewing."
Grant believes that for talented people to progress into senior roles, influencing and communicating skills are essential. But above everything, the message he asked women to take away from this event, was that to be successful you must be yourself.
Tracey Carr, from eve-olution, a management and leadership development company, led the core session and echoed Grant's advice, saying that the key to influencing people is to first understand your own style.
"Successful women in business realise that the 'ultimate relationship' is the one with themselves," she said. "In order to lead others you must first know how to lead yourself."
Steph Mason, Contract Support Manager Culdrose, said: "I work in a very male-dominated environment and the gender diversity is me. But I have learned how to improve my influencing skills and how to engage in certain circumstances. For example, I don't like public speaking and get very nervous. Tracey taught us how to attach positive thoughts to a repetitive action whilst we are talking or presenting. I feel a lot more confident now."
Research has shown that women need to link their values to their work and yet very few have spent any real time in understanding what their values are. Through a fun and proven system, Tracey helped delegates identify their values.
Her tip of the day was for delegates to work out their top three values and base all their decisions on them.
Suki Mehmi, Integrated Services Human Resources Lead, said: "We talked about the importance of values and how they support our working and personal environment. My top three values are independence, recognition and motivation. Once everyone identified their values, Tracey explained how living those values will help you be the person you want to be, help you accomplish your goals and help you lead and influence others. That was something positive that everyone took away with them."
One of the most useful pieces of advice to delegates was how to handle criticism. "Women find it very hard to handle criticism because they take it personally," said Tracey. "Ask yourself if that person was qualified to hand out the criticism, what their motive might have been, how accurate it was and how you could have responded in a way that was better for you and delivered a more positive outcome."
Where do we go next?
Some of the models Tracey talked about were based on NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). If you are interested in understanding more about it you could read any number of books or have a look at:
http://www.anthonyrobbins.com/Home/Home.aspx
"The sight of a woman in the British boardroom is rare enough; that of one in the managing director's chair is almost as exotic as a pair of nesting ospreys." These words were written by the late Carol Kennedy in a March 1984 article for Director.
To read the full article, go to:
http://www.director.co.uk/MAGAZINE/2007/6%20Jun/women_60_11.html
This conference is only the beginning. To maintain the momentum we need to look to the future. Serco will be running more of these events for women later this year.