#86 Becoming a Non Executive Director with Anne Watson

Have you ever considered becoming a non executive director? Not sure what it involves, or how to make it happen? On this week's show we talk to Anne Watson. Anne is one of the UK’s leading experts on becoming a Non Executive Director, and she gives us a great insight into the do's and dont's of becoming a non executive director. Anne’s career to date. Anne claims to have lived a long time! Her first tip for having a successful career is longevity! Her starting point was as a head-hunter for 30 years. She was highly motivated to join the head hunting profession, because her husband and Anne had just bought a house and the mortgage rate rocketed, if you recall, in 1981. There is nothing quite like a rocketing mortgage rate to make you feel like you want to be a working mother! Anne ran a business and sold it to a PLC in 1998. This was very liberating. The sale meant she had made a lot of money, which allowed Anne to do lots of exciting things. Anne wrote a few books, she lived in Belgium for a while, she developed a few women’s networks. Her clients also kept coming back saying do a bit more work for them too. One of these clients offered her a role. She became this clients’ Global HR Director. Anne cunningly and instantly hired a qualified HR Manager. “to save her from running the business off a cliff and causing problems”. She had the most wonderful time. It was a global organisation, with factories in China, Mexico, Hungary and East Kilbride, along with design centres all over the world. She developed an e-learning platform for them so that people were connected. The business was sold, as it was private equity backed. During that time, Anne learned as much about how people manage at board level as she did about how to motivate, develop and manage a workforce of 2,000 people of 14 different nationalities. For Anne, the most intriguing bit was watching what happened at Board level. This segued to her current role at In Touch Networks. How to become a Non Executive Director with Anne Watson Head-hunting What should we all be mindful of when selecting people? It has got a lot more difficult. The internet. Now, when candidates are in front of Anne they are significantly more polished than they used to be. They have a lot more knowledge about how to answer difficult questions, how to present yourself properly. But, that isn’t what you want as a recruiter, because the candidate has a lot of qualifications, lots of success, ticks against the right attributes etc. What you REALLY want to know is how are you going to behave when you are inside my business. Therefore, it is all about behaviour. Anne’s best tip for anyone recruiting somebody is yes, to go through all the competency based questions, but then have a cunning array of questions that will indicate to you: How do people respond under pressure? Are they ready to share and help? How collaborative are they? What are they like in terms of their decision making? These questions will help you figure out whether they are likely to succeed for you and whether they will be liked. Anne likes to have a scenario. She’ll say… ’Picture this, and then lay out a scenario…’ What do you do? What steps do you take? Watch out for those who are calm under pressure. Emotion tends to step into the way of logical thinking. So how do you quickly respond? Give them a question where the candidate feels a bit of the pressure. It’s slightly artificial, but it is better than saying tell me how you respond to pressure. The Operational Assessor training designed for interviewing new people joining The Post Office mirrored Anne’s scenario approach by looking for Intellectual Application – the breadth of thinking through the scenario Imagination – the degree to which they founded new ideas to resolve the scenario and Practical Judgment – the way a candidate chooses between two alternatives. Often, people in recruiting are lazy.