FEATURE
team and we had an extraordinary life together, but I felt I’d taken it as far as I could. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have further to go, I just wanted to do more – things that weren’t possible in that structure.”
One of the limitations she acknowledges is Mitie CS’s current inability to service global contracts. Just one of a number of showcase clients, Ward’s team lost its contract with Barclays in 2012 due to the lack of a global solution, a loss she describes as ‘gutting’. With a three- week tour of the Americas already pencilled in, Macro Chairman, Bill Heath, overseeing the growth of desert cities in the Middle East, and plans to establish a Macro hub in New York, Ward’s new role certainly has the scope to match her global ambitions.
“Macro had become too serious.”
such as HR, QHSE and help desk, and almost every member of senior management dabbling in operations. The operations stream has now been re-aligned under Adrian Connor, and with the likes of Hugh Henderson and Imran Akram transferring from Macro’s Middle Eastern set up, there’s a concerted effort to share power across a scalable structure. Simple changes with simple intent – winning more contracts.
The option of bringing in support from overseas is one of the elements of Macro that helped convince Ward to leave her front-of-house baby, Mitie Client Services. In her six years with Mitie, she took the start up to a turnover of £22million and a position on The Sunday Times’ Top 100 list of best places to work. “It was so hard to leave Mitie,” she admits. “If you had cut me in half, I’d have bled Client Services. It was an extraordinary
www.tomorrowsfm.com
The foundation of those ambitions can be found by a quick scroll of her CV. Before setting up Live, Love, Learn in 2001 – a corporate change consultancy which fit in with the comings and goings of her young family – Ward spent the final throws of the nineties establishing restaurants for renowned Austrian chef, Wolfgang Puck, in Kuwait, before taking up a role in The Gambia. “Some of the best things that have happened to me in my life, in terms of experience, were abroad,” she recalls. Comically, one of the key lessons was knowing the weight of her words, after finding her gardener (under instruction to water the grass every day) making use of his watering can in the middle of a rainstorm. There was also the broadening experience of ritually slaughtering goats on the doorsteps of a new Kuwaiti restaurant, in order to ward off negative spirits – a far cry from life near Finsbury Circus.
Closer to home though, and it’s the tools she employed at Mitie that are creating a buzz on Moorgate. The moniker of ‘Team Exceptional’ left behind at Mitie lives on, as Ward looks to push out Macro’s new strapline: ‘Every Moment, Macro Impact.’ While an internal
wave of ‘Macromania’ sweeps the company, don’t be surprised to see #macroimpact making its way onto your Twitter feed in the near future. What might appear to some as a slightly sickly comms exercise is a proven technique in the Ward management stable – she points out that one of the biggest compliments she ever received at Mitie was a rival director quoting the Mitie CS strapline, ‘One guest at a time’.
The exercise is also part of the streamlining of Macro’s focus. Alongside ‘Macro Impact’, the ‘Four Cs’ of Client, Colleague, Company and Community now shape the thinking of Macro’s UK team. And for those still doubting the idea, Ward refers back to a ‘getting to know you’ management away day. Her question for her team: “It’s your company, how do you want to be perceived?” Despite a few blank faces initially, the result was ‘Every Moment, Macro Impact’.
Her motivational skills and enthusiasm for the job are undoubtedly key attributes that secured her the position from a shortlist of eight. Ward also feels that her standing as chair of the Women in FM (WiFM) networking group, as well as being a female in a male-dominated industry, played a part in the thinking of the Mace board. She mentions that she had considered stepping down from the WiFM post after getting the new gig, only to be spurred on by the response of the women within Macro to her appointment. “So many women within Macro wrote to me, just to welcome me. They were so excited to have a female ‘champion’, and I felt I needed to be that for the full two years of the WiFM tenure.”
When we meet, Ward arrives straight from a lunchtime meeting with one of the three women she mentors as part of the WiFM programme. When I ask how she has time to fit it all in on top of a hectic work schedule, her response is: “How do I not have time to meet with this woman? Women are a lot more inclusive, collaborative and communicative. Service is far more important in today’s world than it once was – women were born
TOMORROW’S FM | 15
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66
