Not just grit: How employers can help

Words / Hazel Sheffield

People from disadvantaged backgrounds need active support from their employers to help them advance. That’s according to three CMI Companions. They each understand the issues, having come from such backgrounds themselves.

When Teddy Nyahasha CMgr CCMI reached a career plateau in the early 2000s, he turned to the tools he had always used to get ahead. Nyahasha is now the group chief executive of OneFamily, a financial services provider based in Brighton, but then, working as a technical specialist at the newly formed Financial Conduct Authority (then the Financial Services Authority), he saw education as the way to progress.

Teddy had seen the power of education as a young man growing up in Zimbabwe. His father had moved the family to London to pursue a degree; his mother had also shown extraordinary commitment to distance learning despite the barriers of her social status and her sex. So, faced with a career challenge, Teddy applied to Birkbeck University to take a postgraduate diploma in statistics.

But it was when talking to one of his directors that he realised that education alone would never be enough. “Actually there are these other, unwritten rules that you need to understand,” Teddy recalls. “It was a bit of a downbeat moment, because I suddenly had to learn something that I was less sure about.”

Teddy was born outside the UK, but his career progress was still dictated by the British class system. All too often, success stories from disadvantaged backgrounds are put down to strength of character; the idea that “tenacious” or “gritty” people will “drag themselves up” in life.

Teddy Nyahasha CMgr CCMI

But the reality is that individuals from any background who end up at the top benefit from constructive interventions, whether that’s a proactive boss, the sponsorship of more powerful people, access to strong networks, education and, often, a good deal of luck. In the most progressive organisations, the focus is on improving these interventions so that more people from different backgrounds can get into management and leadership positions. That might involve recruitment, training, transparency or communication in everyday business.

In Teddy’s case, he says he spent many years being someone else in order to assimilate. “I was trying to sound right,” he says. “Even something as minor as a joke which I suddenly felt a need to find funny, even though I don’t find it funny. You’re always second-guessing yourself. It took me a while to work through that.”

In the end, Teddy realised that being himself could actually be a good thing. His boss at the time started inviting him to business meetings with those higher up. Teddy discovered, through mentorship, that a successful career in management cannot be learned in books. “You need other attributes, softer skills, and that’s where management comes into play. So, we need to ask: what are the ropes you need to show to someone who might not have had the education to allow them to climb to that peak?”

Select people who can solve your problems

Angela Noon CMgr CCMI, now chief financial officer at Royal Mail, also believes that progressive organisations need to make positive interventions to help people from less well-off backgrounds. One way companies can hire people from a more diverse range of backgrounds is by adjusting their selection process. At graduate fairs at top universities, she says, you might be able to find bright people, but their ability to problem-solve and handle pressure might not be as strong as people from difficult social backgrounds. “Adversity and challenges or thinking for oneself at an early age are invaluable life lessons.”

Angela Noon CMgr CCMI

For example, Siemens (her previous employer) introduced a “commercial academy” to seek out not necessarily just the brightest graduates, but those with social skills and the right values. It also changed its recruitment process in finance in order to capture a wider spectrum of entry-level talent. The company kept some of the more traditional assessment processes involving mathematical reasoning and looking through paragraphs to identify key messages, but added more criteria to assess what candidates believed in, what had influenced them and how they had overcome challenges and dealt with conflict. And finally, Siemens encourages discussions about backgrounds and experiences within the company. “That way, you start to attack unconscious bias – not just in recruitment, but in the day to day. Tackling that makes companies more successful,” Angela explains.

Role models, sponsors and mentors

Allison Kirkby CMgr CCMI says that mentorship and sponsorship from people within her industry have been pivotal to her success. She became chief executive of Telia in May 2020 and is now one of a small handful of women at the helm of a major global telecoms company; others include Keri Gilder at Colt, and Christel Heydemann, slated to be the new head of Orange.

Allison grew up on the south side of Glasgow, with what she describes as “an inner desire for progress beyond Glasgow, equipped with financial independence”, having grown up in a working-class family. Nonetheless, her family believed in the power of education, and she saw the power of hard work in her early role models, including her “very glamorous” godmother, who was both a ballerina and a doctor. “If I hadn’t had those hard-working role models, who knows where I would have ended up,” she says now.

Allison Kirkby CMgr CCMI

Then there were the professional sponsors who have really made the difference: first Jeremy Darroch, formerly chief executive of Sky, who was on the interviewing panel when Allison joined Procter & Gamble. “He put himself on the line in hiring me into P&G, as it was rare for P&G to hire non-graduates, so he was personally invested in making me a success,” she says.

Later, the UK & Ireland country manager at Procter and Gamble encouraged Kirkby to get some exposure to life beyond her functional remit, including moving her out of finance and into general management. “I wasn’t the most obvious candidate to become the managing director of P&G UK & Ireland’s salon professional business, but he spotted that I would be a natural fit for building the customer relationships that were vital to success in that business, so he pushed me out of my comfort zone and away from a functional finance role.”

She says of sponsors: “They advocate for you when you’re not in the room, which is so important for career progression. Great managers need to be great not just at building the business but also in developing their people so that they create the managers and the leaders of the future. For me, building the organisation around and below you is key to building a sustainable business.”

On this point, Teddy believes that COVID-19 has provided an opportunity for managers and leaders to learn more about their workforce and to be curious and empathetic about the career goals of their people. “Part of a manager’s job is to create that atmosphere that enables a conversation,” he says. That’s good for the bottom line.

Angela adds that more diversity equals more brainstorming, more innovation – and a more profitable organisation. But it’s also a key part of how companies can work on their recruitment and retention as they strive to become more inclusive. “The younger generation are asking us [to do it],” she says (speaking in her last few weeks as CFO at Siemens). “It’s their expectation that we are open-minded and liberal, so we are striving to be thought leaders on this.”

Meet the Companions

ALLISON KIRKBY

Allison Kirkby CMgr CCMI is president and chief executive of Telia, the largest digital communications and media company in the Nordic/Baltic region. At 14 though, she was the most successful Avon rep in Glasgow. But when her dad fell terminally ill, she put aside dreams of university and instead became the first female trainee accountant at The Distillers Company, going to college one day per week. After qualifying as an accountant in 1990, she joined Procter & Gamble and stayed with the company for two decades, including a stint in the Balkans, where she saw the benefit of hiring local talent from a full range of economic and academic backgrounds. The company recruited directly from universities in the region and gave its graduate recruits leadership and career opportunities that reminded Allison of her early accounting apprenticeship in Glasgow. Later, when she became CFO at Tele2, Allison inherited an executive trainee programme where talented graduate recruits would shadow C-suite executives for a whole year, before then progressing into roles within the company. This gave her the opportunity to coach and mentor talented young women (she still remains a mentor to many of them), while also serving as a valuable sounding board for them as they grew within the company. She also sits on the board of BT, where she encourages the company to think broadly about the diversity of the talent it recruits, both of a graduate and non-graduate nature.

TEDDY NYAHASHA

Teddy Nyahasha CMgr CCMI is chief executive of OneFamily, a financial services company in Brighton and Hove. He was born in rural Zimbabwe and became an accountant at what was then Zimbabwe’s largest accountancy firm; people of colour made up about five per cent of the partnership. He spent his childhood between London and Zimbabwe, returning to the UK to work at a subsidiary of Coopers & Lybrand in the 1990s. In his early career, Teddy benefited from working at companies with a traditional pyramid management structure, “where you start at the base and there is a pathway created within that environment”.

Later, when he joined the Financial Conduct Authority in 2003, he realised that he couldn’t rely solely on internal structures to further his career. It was only after talking to one of his directors that he realised that getting ahead would be as much about developing softer skills such as networking as it would be about his qualifications on paper. He went on to work for Aviva for six years, becoming financial director. He’s now been at OneFamily for almost six years, where he is passionate about helping young people invest in their future through savings, investments and access to the firm’s education grants.

ANGELA NOON

Angela Noon CMgr CCMI was appointed CFO and executive director of Siemens UK & Ireland in January 2018, after two decades with the company. It’s a long way from her upbringing in a tenement in Glasgow, having left school at 16 and got a job in a car dealership. There, a finance director encouraged her to go back into education to get her A Levels. Later, at university, she studied accountancy. After graduating, she took a summer job in an insurance company and struggled to get a training contract in an accountancy firm. Eventually, one of the partners interviewing her told her straight that despite having a lot of talent, it was simply a fact that they had candidates from better schools with a much better education. So Noon went into industry, first working in a steel plant and later at a packaging manufacturer. The latter was a turning point in her career. It was this diversity of experience that got her into Siemens, when the company was looking for internal auditors who had a commercial background. In March 2022, after 22 years at Siemens, Angela joined Royal Mail, a decision she says was motivated by her desire to stay in the UK with her family.