Partnering with people to optimise organisational performance
Since 2001
What I Offer
Backed up by my personal observations and actual experience with clients, I believe that the key to a Company’s success lies primarily in its ability to attract and retain enough of the “right people”. Whether someone is the “right person” is as much art as science and depends commensurately on character traits, innate capabilities and “fit” as it does specific knowledge, experience or skill. I assist clients, with most of whom I have well-established long-standing relationships, to:
Select Talent
Hiring a new person is always a risk, so here I partner with line managers, from Boards to senior leadership, to make optimum hiring decisions.
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This service is distinct from sourcing of potential hires. While I advise clients on where they might look for potential people to recruit, I do not source myself. My role is to assist clients to select the “optimum fit” candidate through any combination of the following:
Screening interviews
In these cases I typically interview a group of people that have been paper-screened by the client and report back on how well each candidate matches the competencies that have been identified for that particular role as well as how each candidate will suit that team/ organisation.
Panel interviews
My role is often to sit on and moderate panel interviews. Panel interviews generally involve a presentation by candidates followed be Q&A and are typically the final step in the interview section of the hiring process.
End-to-end management of the hiring process
Clients want to ensure that anyone with whom they engage for a vacant role, particularly executive posts, has a positive experience, irrespective of whether they are hired or not. My role here is to partner with the hiring manager and work with all stakeholders to ensure a smooth and well-paced process.
Settle Talent
Here I meet with new hires 3-6 months post joining for check-in chats.
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Typically Line Managers like to find out early on how things are going with their new hires. While they do this day-to-day they often find it useful for an independent party to come in and chat to their new person so that any potential difficulties can be nipped in the bud and proactively addressed.
An extension of this service is conflict resolution. I have been asked by CEOs and senior leadership to intervene to resolve conflict between individuals on the Board or within the executive team. How I work is unique to each situation and the desired outcomes for that particular set of circumstances, but is always based on my guiding principle of dialogue which is the most potent source of informed individual and thus organisational change.
Exit Talent
I conduct in-depth exit interviews with people leaving client organisations, in order to help build retention intelligence.
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When people leave any system, be it an employer, a country, a religion, or any relationship, it is seldom simple. I meet with people – generally in the last week or two before they leave – for between 1.5 and 2 hours to unpack in detail their experiences while with the organisation. It becomes my role to translate what people say in a way that a) is constructive and useful and b) maintains relationships. A detailed report is produced and discussed with the Line Manager. Typically HR Business Partners are also part of this feedback loop.
CEOs in particular value aggregated feedback as people generally say the same things when they leave organisations, albeit in different ways. Then senior leadership can make adjustments to improve overall talent retention as they see fit.
There is documented benefit for those leaving the system aswell. Exiting people feel treated with respect and gratitude when someone takes the time to meet with them so they can honestly share their experiences while employed. This helps in creating lifelong advocates for the organisation irrespective of a person’s reason for leaving.
My Guiding Principles
As human beings, we are naturally creative and resourceful
Every organisation exists to deliver value, and this can best be achieved by adopting long term, creatively developmental attitudes and practices around people
Dialogue as the most potent source of informed individual and thus organisational change
Appropriateness rather than “the right answer”
About Me
Having spent the first 6 years of my career in corporate actuarial, my route to working in the field of organisational effectiveness from a people point of view was kick-started through me being offered a fortunate opportunity to start up the HR function at an expanding firm of consulting actuaries.
Based in beautiful Cape Town, South Africa (who would want to live anywhere else?) I work across industries. That said, much of my experience lies in the Financial Services sector for which I have a special affinity – as one of my clients likes to tell me “you can leave actuarial, but it never quite leaves you”!
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Thus for the past 25 years+ I have been able to do work that resonates deeply with my guiding principles and where I can work innovatively with human energy to help create truly effective organisations through the people that are engaged there.
Since stepping out of permanent corporate HR back in 2001 and setting up PilotLight, I have partnered with clients across the HR Value Chain, with specific focus on Talent Attraction, Young Leader Development Programmes and Enterprise Change Management Leadership for large-scale projects where I took end-to-end accountability for the people aspects of the change.
With the online opportunities offered by the otherwise thoroughly undesirable Covid-pandemic, from 2021 my scope of practice is now focused on the three niched areas I am particularly interested in and where clients are increasingly seeing benefit.
Through my extensive network I am also able to effectively connect clients to skilled specialist associates working in other aspects of the Human Resources value chain: Strategy Development, Organisation Design & Development, Talent Sourcing, Learning & Career Development, Change Management, Employee Engagement, Remuneration & Benefits, and Regulatory Requirements.
A Selection of My Clients
PilotLight – The Name
The idea for the name “PilotLight” came when I first set up in independent practice in 2001 and is from the UK based organization which was founded in 1996 by Jane Tewson (www.pilotlight.org.uk). Pilotlight transforms the lives of disadvantaged people by offering charities and social enterprises access to the strategic business support they need to become more efficient, effective and sustainable. They do this by harnessing and matching the talents of their members – called Pilotlighters – to charities through various programmes.
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In the early 1980s Jane founded Charity Projects, which lead to the development of Comic Relief. Comic Relief aimed to encourage more people to give money to charity by positioning it as interactive and fun – hence the well-known Red-nose day.
Jane then went on to found Pilotlight on the principle that whereas money clearly plays a pivotal role in helping improve problems in societies, it is not the only thing that can be used. Often people’s time, energy, understanding and commitment is integral to optimising solutions. A current initiative is ONE20 which promotes the idea that everyone gives 1/20th of their time (that’s 2-hours a week or 1-day a month) to some sort of community-based not-for-profit activity.
The idea of people committing themselves physically (as opposed to writing a cheque) I believe will create meaningful awareness of issues needing attention in our communities, forge bonds and nurture a holistic approach to living with others. Another positive spin-off from getting knowledge-workers to physically work in the community is to relieve the psychological pressures and emotional traumas of today’s rat race. So, to focus some of people’s energies on outside interests also helps restore this balance and provides a sense of personal contribution and achievement.
Please see my community work for what I have been engaged with since 2001.
My Community Work
“Something made greater by ourselves in turn makes us greater” – Maya Angelou
Pilotlight was started in 2001 with the founding commitment to spend 1/20th of my time (that’s 2-hours a week or 1-day a month) on non-income generating work in the community. Amongst other initiatives I have:
Conducted mock interviews for Harambee, the Youth Employment Accelerator. Since its inception in 2011 Harambee has pathwayed over 160 000 young people into work.
Acted as one-to-one and syndicate mentor for students from the Tertiary School in Business Administration (TSIBA), a free-to-student tertiary level institution that offers an enriched Bachelor in Business Administration (BBA) to students from constrained communities.
Additional Community Work
Designed and ran three 1-day workshops for delegates graduating from the Insurance Preparedness Project. This project was piloted by INSETA (Insurance Sector Education and Training Authority) and gave 50 matriculants from disadvantaged communities in the Western Cape 6 months of full-time insurance and basic business training. Graduates were then placed in entry-level positions with employers in the Insurance Sector.
Co-facilitated a 2-day visioning workshop for a community high school.
Provided organisational design consulting for Ikamva Labantu – a registered NGO.
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