Exec Conference, Macaroons & Trading Places
Published 23 Nov 2018 by Phil Ponsonby
Hello everyone and welcome to this week's blog,
Miss Macaroon
Last week I was invited to visit Rosie Ginday, the founder of Miss Macaroon at their headquarters when they hosted Sophie, the Countess of Wessex. As you may remember in my previous blog, I met Rosie Ginday at Countryfile Live when we talked about the Happerley Project, which Miss Macaroon is a member of.
Miss Macaroon is a local business based in Birmingham, Rosie founded the company with the ultimate aim of "to help youngsters break into a highly competitive industry while providing moments of sublime indulgence for my customers, who through buying our macaroons, are helping many young people to achieve their lifetime goals."
Executive Conference
This week the executive team and I have been together for 3 days where we have been through each of the trading groups budgets and plans for next year. We also looked at the five year outlook and considered the pace of change and likely challenges which will emerge over the longer-term horizon. Central to this has been the Board’s imagined future (connecting colleagues, members, businesses, communities and partners). The budgets have to be completed and ready for the audit committee of the Board in mid-January. We still have work to do, and in a background of Brexit uncertainty, this is not an easy process!
Our Executive Team
Society Board Meeting
We had a busy agenda at the Society's regular Board meeting on Monday night, topics included our strategy and plans for the Information Technology (IT), Health & Safety monitoring and improvement, as well as, no surprise, Brexit Contingency planning!
It was an important meeting for the Board's democratic structure as the President and two Vice-Presidents were appointed for the next year, as well as Director appointments to the various governance committees. Helen Wiseman was reappointed as President, Vivian Woodell was reappointed as one of the two Vice Presidents and will now be joined by Heather Richardson who was newly appointed. It was also a pleasure for the Board to welcome newly elected Director Kathy Peterson to her very first meeting.
Talking of Brexit you may have seen me on the regional BBC news last Friday (see video below) or heard me on radio Coventry & Warwickshire talking about the withdrawal agreement and what we are looking for as a business with different trading operations. I have been clear that we want as little as possible disruption in our supply chains, the ability to recruit from the rest of Europe and protection for our members and customers in terms of price increases resulting from import tariffs.
Trading Places
Earlier in the week Bev Capewell (People Development Manager, Childcare) spent the day with myself as part of our new Trading Places programme. Trading Places has been set up by our Learning & Development team as a tool to enable managers to go and see how other managers operate in different areas of the business and what they do.
Bev Capewell - Childcare
I really enjoyed my day with Bev, and I'm going to let her describe her experience for you:
"Trading Places gives a great opportunity to trade places with other Manager colleagues across the Society to support your own personal professional development The Trading Places programme has been created as part of the Team Midcounties Management Development programme.
The aim of the programme is to provide a ‘self-service’ platform for managers to ‘trade places’ with managers in other areas of the business to share good management practice, develop skills and knowledge, provide an opportunity to create strong working relationships and development networks across the Trading Groups.
I decided to enrol onto the Trading Places programme, as one of my personal performance review objectives was to have a more strategic viewpoint and to understand the Society as a whole. There are lots of profiles of Managers, Senior Managers and Leadership /Executive colleagues across the Society on the platform. I could really see the value of this programme so I jumped in and asked our CEO Phil if he wanted to trade places and he accepted. So on the 16th of November I spent the morning with Phil. I had a great morning with Phil and others of the Executive Team observing everything Strategic and then had time with Phil where I got to ask lots of questions. Phil is going to trade too and will be attending the next Society L&D meeting with me in January This opportunity was enlightening and it really has really supported my personal career development.
I really hope this has inspired other Manager colleagues to enrol and engage with the Trading Places programme. What have you got to lose?Nothing except development!"
That’s it for this week’s blog, please let me know if you’ve got any thoughts on what I've been up to. I’m sure you all already know what to do if you want to get in touch, simply leave me a comment below. I hope you all have a great week and I look forward to sharing more with you next Friday.