IQPC strives to be a promote from within business, a business that invests in upcoming talent. As part of this commitment many of our offices run an Annual Management Development Programme, designed to support employees who’ve shown the potential for future growth and equip them with ‘next role’ skills. With participants from across all departments it is an essential part of our succession planning and has 100% backing from the Executive Team.

Our London businesses places a significant and ongoing focus on ensuring their program is best in class.

I met with Joby Turner, IQPC’s Regional Managing Director for Europe and Edward Gumm, IQPC’s UK HR Director to find out more.

 

 

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Esther: Hi Joby, Ed, thank you both for your time today. Maybe you could start by telling me a little more about the programme, what it covers and how it runs.

Edward: The Management Development Programme (MDP) is designed for people who are ready to explore and discover their potential. It is an annual programme with the aim of increasing responsibility and providing greater exposure to our business. Participants receive structured training to accelerate their development and support from a mentor who can provide further insights, plus assist with the implementation of the training theory.

The MDP has 11 modules, each comprising of a monthly training session plus follow up assignments to complete. We predominately focus on the following areas:

1. Leadership
2. People/Team
3. Commercial planning, knowledge and understanding

This multi-faceted programme offers far-reaching and cutting edge business, product, and industry training. It is essential that we invest in our new and future managers to both manage their expectations and equip them with the tools and skills required to run departments or entire business units for IQPC in the future. Our local and global Senior Management Team, plus External Trainers, provide practical training and share their experience and insights to ensure participants are prepared for a career at the top of the conference industry; in a market leading company.

Here are some of the exciting things that our MDP participants get involved with:

• Helping to come up with new business concepts or formats
• Project managing or coordinating the launch of new projects/products
• Leading a review of existing products that are not achieving the required results
• Supporting and implementing the launch of a new product that allows us to create a new type of revenue stream that can be rolled out
• P&L Financial analysis
• Impact on business strategy and goal setting
• Coaching, mentoring and Leadership
• Assisting recruitment activity and attending/conducting interviews

Our goals is to provide participants with everything they need to grow into a fully rounded leader, whether it’s technical skills, industry knowledge or management capability. This then forms the basis for continued professional development throughout their career at IQPC.

Esther: As a leadership team you seem pretty passionate about this, why do you back this initiative so strongly?

Edward: Because thankfully the results speak for themselves. We’ve been running this programme for 7 years now and 50% of our existing managers (across 3 UK businesses) have completed the programme. The two most critical factors to our continued and future growth are our people and our product. The fact that we have no product without great people means that talent development is central to everything we do in the London office.  From PTP’s (Phased Training Plans) for new starters to the MDP we continually focus on how we can identify, nurture and retain top talent.

I am also a firm believer that through demonstrating a genuine interest in the development of our employees we create a much better partnership with enhanced loyalty. Loyal employees are more engaged. Engaged employees are more productive. This in turn means that we are harnessing the link between success and reward.

The ROI from a strong MDP means that we are able to plan for future growth with confidence.

Joby: I absolutely agree with Ed, the MDP is integral to our culture of progress and improvement. If we’re not developing our people, and future managers then we’re not going to grow the business in the medium to long term.  And if we’re not investing in our people how can we expect the quality of our events and results to improve? We have a remarkable back catalog of over a decade of training materials and we also encourage all managers to read voraciously. We need to keep them up to date and find answers to new challenges as well as new ways to grow the business.

I’m proud to say all the UK MDs share this passion and as you can tell from his comments, none more so than our HR Director, Ed, who dedicates his own time and acts as a great coach and mentor to the up and coming managers in the business.

Esther: How do you select which employees will join the programme? Is it about experience or attributes? What characteristics do you look for in future leaders for IQPC?

Edward: With great difficulty!

Each year we ask all UK Managing Directors to put forward employees who they feel would benefit from the programme. To ensure the MDP supports growth on a personal and business level we have two main criteria that guide our decisions:

• The employee is new to a management role within the last 12 months OR
• That we have a plan in place for the employee to be in a management role within the next 12 months

In an ideal world we would prefer our employees to complete the programme before being moving into management. However we are whenever possible, a promote from within business, so sometimes the opportunity arises and individuals need to move faster as the commercial needs dictate.

Alongside the MD nominations we also invite applications from our entire workforce to ensure that we are providing a fair opportunity, but also to ensure we have visibility on the aspirations of all future leaders.

As a Senior Management team we then come together and discuss all of the nominations/applications for the forthcoming year’s MDP. Every single year has been oversubscribed and with a limited number of places it does make it very difficult to decide.

Joby: Some decisions are easy, newly appointed managers for example would always go through the course, beyond that I agree we do at times have to make some difficult calls.

When looking at characteristics a high degree of functional capability is of course essential, but we place a much higher weighting on attitude and potential when we face a decision like this.

Unsurprisingly, a positive “can-do” attitude is essential, as is a resourceful, entrepreneurial approach; they have to have the hunger and ambition, the professional desire and commitment to perform and to grow the business.

But my view is that there’s no one single leadership style that works.  There’s no perfect candidate, and no one is ever a complete leader/manager.  What we are looking for is someone with enough positive characteristics to create an effective leadership style of their own.  Have they got what it takes to create their own team culture and lead it effectively, in their own unique way?  The assessment of someone’s leadership potential comes down to the combination of skills and traits they are bringing to the table and whether or not, collectively, these provide the right ingredients for them to grow into a leader, that can in turn, grow their team and deliver results.  What is their track record of adapting, developing themselves and changing their behaviours? And if we doubt we can change the behaviour, is it a critical success factor, and can we compensate for it in some way?

Esther: Ed I know as part of this process you conduct a lot of 1-2-1 coaching with all the trainees. How does this work? And what sort of feedback have you had from programme graduates; do they engage with this as much as the business does?

Edward: I really enjoy the coaching aspect of the programme, I think it is very important to establish trust so we can identify areas that we need to work on, but most importantly to ensure participants have an open forum to discuss professional challenges and how we can overcome them together. Often we work through commercial plans focused around results and break these down into tangible actions with timelines provided.  The MDP would not work if we did not firmly incorporate personal development with focused outcomes.

I have a monthly meeting with each member of the programme to focus on:

• Current challenges
• Areas of personal development
• Implementations of best practice form our monthly training modules

The participants are the reason why I love running the MDP. Being able to work with people on a 1-2-1 basis is a privilege. It also allows us to inspect implementation and results in a very collaborative way.

And yes the feedback from past graduates has been very positive; they very much appreciate this approach towards their individual development. The real testimony is how many of these people realise their ambitions to move into a leadership role and achieve that personal development.

Esther: So have you seen many of them go onto take bigger roles in the business?

Edward: So many!  As I referenced earlier 50% of all UK managers have been through our MDP.  This includes individuals who are currently in Head of Function/Director level roles.

We have to be realists; it is extremely difficult and risky to hire people straight into leadership roles within any organisation. Therefore our investment into the development of our employees has really helped us to achieve growth plans whilst not diluting the value of our products or financial results. It has actually been a catalyst to enable growth.

Esther: You’ve been running this programme in the UK now for over 7 years, what have you learnt along the way? What changes have you made?

Edward: We have learnt lots and made many changes, in fact the MDP constantly evolves each year.  We have to evolve the programme to ensure that we are equipping our mangers for 2017, not 5 years ago because we have old content and think its ok. At IQPC London we aim to hire and nature genuine Grade A Talent. The people who make it onto our MDP are clearly Grade A, if we are not providing challenging content that assists with personal development or solves real issues; we shouldn’t bother with the programme.  The fact that we are lucky enough to work with such top talent means that we have to push ourselves to ensure that our MDP programme is continuously thought provoking, challenging and engaging.

A couple of the more exiting evolution’s to share were:

• Follow up tasks/assignment should be linked to tasks that participants would usually fulfill, with the emphasis on practical continuous development. It is counter productive to overload these high performing individuals. The MDP should facilitate future development and professional growth, not hinder.
• Part of our MDP revolves around participants working on and submitting a business plan. This has always been a popular task and we have always provided a forum for the top three to present their idea to our Global CEO, CFO and CMO. The change is that we have inserted an extra MDP session where the entire group gets to present their idea back to their fellow participants. This has been extremely well received and spurred on healthy competition!

Joby: Again I completely agree; the programme has evolved significantly over the last 7 years we’ve been running it.  The content has changed and been updated almost every year and we’ve added new sessions as well. To be honest, one of the biggest challenges is knowing what not to include, some of the sessions are arguably a bit too content heavy, because there’s so much we want to cram in!  This year our plan is to take a step towards this though, and dig deeper into the content by making the sessions more and more interactive.

Another learning point has been that we shouldn’t use the MDP as a retention tool alone. If someone is clearly not suited to management, or has no interest in doing so, but wants to attend the training for other reasons, or requests it based on longevity we have to say no and resist the temptation and avoid diluting the focus of the group.

Esther: And what about the business value, how do you justify this investment every year?

Joby: That’s pretty easy to be honest. It’s how we grow the business; you just need to look at results and past attendees to back that up, as well as the length of service and retention of our management team. Investing in the development of our people is something IQPC values incredibly highly. To be honest I’d like to do more still, and I think we can. We’re adding new sessions to the MDP for 2017 and have engaged some fantastic external trainers to complement our own efforts. I see the future of the business getting brighter and brighter year on year the more we invest in this initiative.

Esther: Finally what advise would you give anyone looking to build their management career at IQPC?

Joby: Where to start? Firstly, you need to have complete clarity on how to succeed in your role, what constitutes success, what you need to do specifically, continually and consistently to the highest possible standard. Then you need to be really disciplined and get into the habit of doing these things week in, week out, even when you’ve established yourself and distractions of other new and exciting activities will draw your attention. Do what works.

Secondly, invest in your people! You are a coach, more than a manager. If your team’s careers take off, so will yours; put their needs first. Focus on hiring and developing A-grade people and you’ll make every step of the journey 100 times easier and more successful.

Innovate: don’t think for a moment that last year’s standards are high enough. Technology and markets are accelerating at a staggering rate. We need to move faster still, moving with, in fact even ahead of the times, or our events will fade away; that’s why this business is so fast paced and exciting to work in.

I could talk all day about this, but a few final thoughts:

• Stay positive: we can find solutions to 99% of problems if we put our heads together
• Be humble.  Don’t fall into the trap of only listening to your own opinion, never stop learning
• Stay close to the market and your customers; obsess with taking every opportunity to deliver extreme value

Edward: Have a plan BUT be ready and nimble to evolve with it.

Make a list of what a meaningful career would look like to you. This is a great starting point to help evaluate the skills required to fulfill the role you aspire to. Most importantly, it will form the basis of your training and identify your areas of development.

And last of all – be positive. I have no doubt that a meaningful plan and positive attitude will look after your career for you.

SSON Analytics is the global data analytics centre from the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON), the world’s largest community of shared services, outsourcing and transformation professionals.

SSON Analytics offers visual data insights that are simple, accurate, and digestible to the global shared services and outsourcing community.

Thousands of global business services and outsourcing professionals use our data to understand the shared services landscape in their region through a variety of interactive data tools, and analytics reports and customised data insights.

SSON Analytics was formerly known as Dart Institute and was rebranded as SSON Analytics in October 2016 to better reflect its close relationship with SSON.

Interested to find out more? This video will walk you through our current array of interactive reports and data tools.

 

In the latest Employee Spotlight Interview from Berlin we talk to Benny about the characteristics that epitomize the IQPC team, available learning opportunities and why he enjoys his role in sales

When did your IQPC career begin? 29^th of September 2014

How did you come to work for the business? I did an internship in marketing & sales in an e-commerce company. I decided that sales will be the right way to start my career. After 2 years in sales in e-commerce business, I came along the job advert from IQPC which sounded very interesting. I had never worked in the conference business before and now I’ve been here more than 2 years.

What is your current role and responsibilities at IQPC? I am a  Senior Delegate Sales Manager and I am responsible for planning conference campaigns which includes market segmentation, market research, cold calling & negotiation with delegates. Currently I also work as a mentor for new starters in the German portfolio.

What characteristics would you say describe up your colleagues at IQPC? In general goal orientated, ambitious, organized and team orientated. In sales definitely target driven.

Do you get the chance to socialize with your team mates at work? YES! We are sitting together for lunch, we have after work drinks every Friday and every 3 month we have a team event.

Why did you decide to work at this company? IQPC is a global player in conference business, they have more than 40 years experience and they work globally. For me also interesting was to learn more about different industry field and develop new markets.

Are there opportunities for ongoing training through your career? There are a lot of training on the job. We have every week a team training, we can have external training if we want and I also joined the IQPC 2IC program this year.

What lessons or skills have you learnt during your time here? Campaign planning, high level communication, time management, team work and mentoring skills.

How has your time with IQPC helped you grow and develop? I have received a lot of training in sales and currently training to become a leader someday. I also participate from the experience of my colleagues which is the most important influence you will get.

If you could do any job in IQPC what would it be? Director Delegate Sales or Director Sponsorship Sales.

What do you enjoy most about your role? Every day is different. I am more than happy to talk to delegate and try to convince them to buy a ticket for our conferences to see what big value they will get when they are joining a conference. I also enjoy to mentor new starters and the creativity you have here.

What are some of the challenges or roadblocks you come up against in this role? We need to work on our German portfolio to build more German language events

What metrics are used to measure your success in this role? We work with KPIs which are measured e.g. call time, dials and the number of proposals you have to send out. We also have a revenue target to reach by end of the month. Then we also have regular appraisals which focuses on our skill development

What advice would you give to a new employee starting at IQPC? Be open-minded to new things, use the experience to learn new sales skills and take the opportunity to orientate from employees with more experience in the business.

What would you change about the business if you could? I’d love to see the planning of more German Campaigns for my team to sell!

 

 

This month I met with Emma Beaumont, Managing Director of SSON to talk about the growth of this exciting space and how data analytics, a commitment to excellence and sheer hard work have made SSON the market leading information provider in the Shared Services and Outsourcing space.

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Good morning Emma and thanks for taking some time out to chat with me. To start off I wondered if you could briefly tell me what SSON stands for?

SSON, or the Shared Services & Outsourcing Network to use its full name, is a 21 year old division of IQPC with 130K members worldwide. That makes it both the largest and oldest community of Shared Services and Outsourcing professionals in the world.

A core focus of SSON is the delivery of exceptional conferences and I think it would be accurate to say that SSON is the market leader in this space. Why do you think that is and how have you managed to achieve this?

Undoubtedly SSON is home to the largest, and frankly most well known conferences in this space, which by itself is often considered to be the ultimate benchmark of market leadership. I would counter that view and say that whilst size and brand awareness do matter, a true representation of market leadership is so much more. To my mind, our continued growth and success really boils  down to the quality associated with the onsite delivery of those events. We take the customer experience extremely seriously, that means every event needs to deliver both excellent networking opportunities and value-added content that gets right to the heart of our members challenges. To achieve this we operate under some fairly strict internal policies around factors such as minimum ratio of practitioners to vendors onsite, and of course our famously vehement stance on no onstage sales pitching. We reserve the main stage for pure-play content discussions and that’s how many executives justify taking the time out from their busy schedules to attend.

But SSON is also much more than just an events brand, it’s a community. Can you tell me a little about some of the initiatives that support that community build?

We like to reinvest  our success back into our members experience whenever we can . One great example was the launch of our online practitioner forum (Shared Intelligence) last year. Members told us they needed somewhere private to be able to message/connect with each other and share tips and trade questions away from the vendor community.. so we built them a platform and it’s now available for free to any practitioner who attends an SSO event. GBS Elite is another great example – it caters for literally just a very small % of our members who run GBS organizations globally and needed a small closed-shop environment to meet and talk only with others in the same role.

In 2015 SSON took its first steps in the Analytics world, how and why did this come about? What value does analytics add into the SSON portfolio?

I moved form our London HQ to Asia in 2014 (a nod to the large growth in Shared Services activity and the recent maturity growth spurt the APAC region has been experiencing). Singapore has been attracting a lot of data analytics activity for the last few years, and so we undertook a feasibility study and decided to open SSON’s first global data analytics center here. We also pitched the Singapore government for a grant to help towards the cost (which we were awarded) but largely this whole exercise has been funded by our very forward-thinking CEO.

It’s very early days to actually start quantifying value for the portfolio, and I’m not sure the full value will ever be completely trackable, but every day I come across customer feedback that reassures me we have set ourselves light years ahead of the competition by accessing this data and unveiling these previously unknown industry insights. The biggest eye-opener for me has been the number of big shop consultancies and thought leaders who have engaged SSON Analytics to help them find answers that their own data couldn’t answer. We are even undertaking a climate risk data project with NASA as our data is helping them to understand how weather patterns can help with predicting BCP in the US.  It took over a year to consolidate the proprietary data from all IQPC offices around the world so we’ve only just started to offer the data services commercially to the world. Time will tell, but I’m optimistic that we are offering the world something that no-one else in this space seems to be able to..

It seems like it’s quite a different business to events, do you need a different profile of skills in the team?

Yes and no. Half of the SSON Analytics team have a technical background (developers, web crawlers, data scientists and solution architects) and these roles were very different to any I had previously needed to hire for IQPC. The other half, the “business” team focus on analyzing the insights coming out of the data, reading between the lines, finding the “story” and then marketing that information to the members. The skills in this part of the data centre are much more akin to marketing and production skills that we see elsewhere across IQPC offices.

(Click here to read more about our SSON Analytics journey)

And had this changed the culture from a standard IQPC office?

Yes, It couldn’t not really as we’re a small team, essentially running a start-up company (albeit with strong parent backing) and that means everyone has to pull together on daily projects to meet our ultimate goal. There is a high level of brainstorming needed all the time as we are constantly being asked new data questions the market wants answers to.  We rely a lot on the team to find new data sources and solutions to every day data challenges. Creative thinking and initiative are pretty much musts!  In that sense we operate very much like an IQPC event team does. I think the biggest difference is that we have to think on our feet constantly and need to operate on much faster turnarounds to come up with the goods for the customer. If you think IQPC runs at a fast pace (and it does) then the data centre is possibly a sprint by comparison.

So what is the vision for the future? What would you like SSON to achieve in the next few years? Are there opportunities for growth?

Ultimately true success for DART (SSON’s data centre) looks like 3 things: 1. A stand alone, profitable business that financially supports itself on its own revenue channels. 2. Driving recognized, track-able, fiscal value to IQPC’s other channels (events and digital portals) 3. Industry acknowledgement that we are now not just a network and events organisation but a true research house driving content into the industry that the market benchmarks against. (For me this last point will have been achieved the day our phone rings and a competitive event organizer asks SSON to present our research on their stage…. watch this space.)

Do you think SSON’s journey is indicative of where the conference industry as a whole is heading?

I think the conference industry as a whole is evolving at an extremely rapid pace, and sitting back and operating BAU is simply not an option anymore to stay ahead of the game. IQPC is very fortunate to have a CEO and board that recognize that, and one that is willing and happy to invest in necessary support functions (such as digital portals and analytics centres) that frankly are necessary to survive the tremendous digital shift this industry is undergoing. Networking events will always play an important role in customers needs, but critically the success of those events will need to be supported by a digital, data-driven framework to enhance and elongate the customer experience. Ten years from now, or possibly even five, my best guess is that the event companies at front of the race, will be those that have morphed to become research houses with multiple digital channels. Home not just to customers databases but real, industry analytics which feed rich, unrivaled content into their conference programmes and f2f agendas, keeping them not just a relevant source of info to their market, but an essential one.

Now can you tell me a little bit about yourself, how long have you worked for SSON and IQPC? What has your career journey been like?

Almost 14 years. After finishing my law degree the only thing I knew was that I definitely didn’t want to be a lawyer.. The reason I’ve stayed so long is the fact the job has kept changing and growing and the opportunities to drive new strategies and idea really are supported here, and not just paid lip service. I cant imagine this level of autonomy existing inside many other companies in the world. IQPC has to be very rare in that sense.

And what do you love about your job and the company?

The people. Both internally and externally. Outside of SSON  the world of Shared services is very incestuous.. truly everyone knows everyone and I have come to love working with these very passionate and clever bunch! I rarely attend a conference and come back with anything less than 3 very solid ideas I want to implement inside our own business.. That proves how smart our members are. I blatantly copy their strategies everyday! Internally, there is a core group of IQPC leaders around the world (they know who they are) who have helped me to grow and develop the confidence and skill set I have today as a person and as a business woman.  I am truly grateful to have colleagues and mentors like this around me to learn from and bounce ideas off. This sort of genuine support structure in an employee environment is something that I not only value, but have come to treasure over the years.

When you first joined IQPC, did you ever imagine this is where you would be now?

In short, No! I can honestly say I had zero idea where this job would lead when I took it. I liked the sound of a production role and it sounded more fun than being a lawyer.. I also wanted  a job where I got to travel the world a bit. I guess that last one gets a massive tick too thinking about it.

Finally what advice would you give to people looking to start a career in either events or analytics?

Get to know your topic. Read everything. Make at least one new industry connection every day (at least one f2f per week). Make it your business to know everyone who is recognized as an influencer in your space and more importantly make sure THEY KNOW YOU.  Listen. Take notes and get to the facts as fast as you can. The hand that holds the data rules the world..  Above all else, take yourself and your own career seriously. If you don’t, you can be absolutely sure no-one else will.

Thanks Emma, an absolute pleasure as always!