I JON GRIMES I
Jon Grimes Head of People and Leadership Development Hello, I’m Jon Grimes. I’m British and live with my two children in the ancient town of Warwick, in the UK. Warwick dates back to 914 AD and was originally built on the banks of the River Avon to defend the country from the invading Danes, but these days more likely to welcome them as tourists! I’ve worked for DNV for the last 12 years, originally being recruited into the Loughborough office to help with the integration of Noble Denton and Garrad Hassan into the GL organisation, but quickly ended up working in Hamburg for the next five years, before working in Høvik for the last seven years. I think of myself as the eternal optimist, but with a pragmatic drive to get things moving WHERE DID I COME FROM My career started in Retail Line Management, having joined Sainsbury’s, a major food retailer in the UK, as a Management Trainee. I spent five years running successful teams and departments with significant P&L responsibility at an early age, working around the UK in numerous roles. In a career move worthy of the DNV career model, and taking my leadership experience from these roles, I seized upon an opportunity to join one of their Regional Training teams. I spent a number of years designing and running training programmes developing some of Sainsbury’s 10,000 leaders in their style and skills. This eventually led to me heading Behavioural and Process training for the Sainsbury’s Group, based in London for over 140,000 colleagues in retail, banking, supply chain and logistics. From there I next moved to E.ON, a little known brand in the UK at the time, who had just acquired a number of power generation, energy distribution and retail businesses in the UK and had grand plans to rebrand them, and to make their mark in the UK. There I headed up their Learning and Development function, helping their Board Teams to define their Purpose, Vision and Values, and helping the organisation to better communicate with each other through dialogue skills and improving processes through the implementation of LEAN methodology.
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MY ROLE AROUND HERE In my view, I have one of the best roles in DNV. Being the Head of People and Leadership Development offers me the perfect mix of supporting the business in achieving its goals, by supporting its people to be brilliant. Who wouldn’t want a role like that? With our new strategy, I have the wonderful task of looking into our Employee Experience, defining what it is to work here, what makes it so unique, and looking for ways to keep enhancing this. Quite a legacy to help maintain and indeed improve, but also a great opportunity for us to look at who we are and what we should be, given our plans for the future. An employee experience encompasses so many pieces, it’s impossible to define this for each individual, but there are some traits that define DNV as an organisation, and these are the ones we are looking to recognise and develop. For many years my team have delivered some of the now famous face to face Journey programmes for our leaders. Given our situation over the last 12 months, and taking the opportunity to change, we now run these virtually and still welcome around 400 learners onto these programmes every year from around the world.
