www.ceotodaymagazine.com CEO Today United Kingdom Awards 2023 10 could not run any of our face-to-face professional development courses and we also saw a decline in our membership. That meant restructuring the business. Whilst that unfortunately led to a number of people having to leave, it acted as a catalyst for the acceleration of some of the changes that, frankly, the Institute needed to take. And then, just as the economy was emerging from COVID, Putin invaded Ukraine, and we have seen a huge change in the political environment. So, as with all businesses, it has clearly been a challenging period. But what it has all meant is that we have had to be super-focused on going back to the roots of why the Institute was set up in 1903, and why it received its Royal Charter in 1906, which is about improving the quality of directors. Better directors for a better world. We do this through enabling members to connect with peers facing familiar challenges and helping them to develop their skills and knowledge through our worldclass professional development courses, including our gold standard Chartered Director programme. But what we have also seen during this period is that we have been fortunate to have an unprecedented level of engagement with the UK government, enabling us to influence the people making decisions that touch our directors’ world. The voice of our members was, and continues to be, well heard by UK government ministers – particularly in relation to the middle market of UK business. This is based to a large degree on our deliberate shift towards an evidence-based approach. We do not opine on matters; we evidence our opinion through research, harnessing the data that we gather from our members. Have you seen your own skills grow during this period? I think that in many ways I was pretty well-equipped from my previous roles. Rebranding Grant Thornton globally from a tired 1970s brand into a more vibrant 21st century brand and then working in China taught me a lot about resilience, self-sufficiency and finding becoming the branch chair, before becoming the Chair for Yorkshire and the North East region. Throughout my career I have worked with a lot of different types of organisations but, because accounting firms internationally run as member organisations, I have a good deal of experience of membership organisation and the structures, systems, protocols and approaches that you have to have in order to run an international membership organisation. So, when the Director General role came up in 2019, I was stupid enough to apply! I moved from poacher to gamekeeper, knowing all about Brexit but nothing of the other challenges that were just around the corner. What changes has the IoD gone through since your arrival in 2019? The organisation has undergone fundamental change, not least because of COVID. Overnight, we lost two thirds of our business in March 2020. We simply The voice of our members was, and continues to be, well heard by UK government ministers – particularly in relation to the middle market of UK business.
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