Vicky Ferrier on Writing Herself Into Being: Mid-Career Reckoning, Courage and Leading for Good | Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Description

Vicky Ferrier on Writing Herself Into Being  - Mid-Career Reckoning, Courage, and Leading for Good

What if your mid-career reckoning became an awakening — a chance to realign your strengths, values and purpose?

In this episode, Ruth Kearns Wollmann speaks with Vicky Ferrier, Chief People and Commercial Officer at Konsileo — a commercial insurance firm with no managers. Vicky shares insights from her rich and varied career. In particular, she shares how she navigated the messy middle of her career, rediscovered what truly mattered, and began writing her way into a future she could believe in.

From self-doubt to self-authorship, from leadership principles to finding the right people, this is an honest and uplifting conversation about growth, identity, and leading for good — at work and in life.

Vicky also supports young leaders globally through her work with WYSE, a UN-affiliated leadership development charity.

Key Topics:

Pivotal moments and mid-career questioning
Leading without hierarchy
Courage, humility, and imagination
Writing as a tool for clarity and growth

🔗 Links :

Learn more about Ruth’s coaching work: yourpathtosuccess.ch

Connect with Ruth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthkearnswollmann/

🎧 Listen now and be inspired to write your next chapter.

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Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to Your Path to Success with me, Ruth Kearns-Volman. It's a podcast designed to inspire, encourage, and equip you on your personal leadership journey. Today's guest is Vicky Ferrier, Chief People and Commercial Officer at Konsileo, a commercial insurance broker with no managers. Sound unusual? It is, and that's part of what makes Vicky's story so compelling. In this role, She operates right at the intersection of people and performance, helping unleash individuals' leadership so that they can do good work that makes a real difference, both commercially and personally. But as you'll hear, that clarity came over time. This wasn't the career she imagined when she started out. In our conversation, Vicky shares what influenced her early choices, how she navigated the messy middle of her career, a season of questioning, re-evaluation. and rediscovery, and what she discovered about herself along the way. She speaks candidly about identity, alignment, and what it meant to write herself into being. It's a story of courage, reflection, and reinvention, and I'm delighted to share it with you. Let's dive in. So here we go. Well, welcome, Vicky. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Speaker #1
Thanks, Ruth. Happy to be here.
Speaker #0
Yeah, well, this is going to be a lot of fun because when we were working at P&G so many years ago, I knew you as Vicky from finance, someone who had a lot of personality, a lot of passion. And, you know, if I look at your job title today, you're chief commercial and people officer. How does that work? Finance and people?
Speaker #1
Yeah, well, very naturally, I believe. It's a combination of two things I think really are important from a value creation perspective, the human dimension and the commercial dimension. So when I was originally offered this role, which we created essentially in the organisation, it didn't exist. It felt very natural to bring those two parts together for me. But I guess that moving from being a chartered accountant in the public sector, where I started my career in my early 20s. through Procter & Gamble, through investor relations, through a bit of HR to here. It makes sense to me, but it's not necessarily so obvious to, I'm sure many accountants in the world would not see the connection, but I absolutely do.
Speaker #0
Yeah. So let's unpack it a bit because that's what I love about this podcast. We get to talk about your journey and everybody's journey is different. How did you start off as an accountant? How did that come about?
Speaker #1
My dad was an accountant. So a complete lack of imagination on my part. I think that goes to one of my big leadership principles is about having imagination. But yeah, I think people become what they can see. And whilst I did English literature at university and very much so myself going down a path of marketing or journalism, something that would require some kind of storytelling element to it. I became a chartered accountant in the public sector. Again very much driven yes by my dad being an accountant but this sense of mission that I had to do good to do good work to support my community I saw a career path at that age being more around charity work you know something CEO one of the big charities that's where my head was then it was fortuitous that when I qualified there happened to be at that time I don't know if it still exists, but there was... a movement around people who had qualified and moving, you know, seeing that as a new, almost like a graduation point, kind of starting again. Yeah, you qualify as a chartered accountant, but let's take a step back. Did you really want to be an accountant? And there was a headhunter here in Scotland who gathered all these lost souls, lost accountants that had become accountants by default kind of thing. And there was a careers fair at the Glen Eagles Hotel, the Glen Eagles Hotel. And that's the only reason I, not the only reason, but a big attraction for me going was because it was at the Glen Eagles Hotel. I came from an incredibly working class background, never had the opportunity to go to Glen Eagles. So, and it was included in overnight stay, which was unbelievable. And there was people there like Goldman Sachs, a lot of the big insurance and financial services employers in Scotland and P&G. And the P&G people I met, I just connected to. straight away. Claire Sheridan being one of them, shout out to her, and really just really found, oh my tribe, these are my people and that was what took me to joining PNG.
Speaker #0
And what was it, do you think, that the connection?
Speaker #1
I loved the energy that they had. They were all from the finance function, but they seemed to me to have that greater connection to the business, to not just the commercial side of the business, but the human side, the brand side, the sales side. It just seemed to me like a real connecting function that they were playing. which I felt was missing in a lot of the experience I'd had. Yeah,
Speaker #0
it was a bit of a broader overview, more strategic in a way.
Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker #0
So tell me a bit about your time at P&G. How long were you there?
Speaker #1
Nine years. Loved it. Loved every minute of it. Another friend, Matthew Tipple, once said that his experience of moving from his sort of more working class background, going to Cambridge University was one of the most formative of his life, but Procter & Gamble was the most formative of mine. Again, it was finding... one's tribe those people that just had a sense of energy a sense of possibility of mission of wanting to have to do good work and have impact and I love I just loved every minute of it I didn't follow a very traditional route which is probably why I only stayed nine years because I got to the point where I really had to decide if I was going to continue on a finance career path and I'd been recommended I'd done different things I did a year in marketing, doing a couple of different projects. One of them was looking at the potential of the black hair care opportunity. And I did a little spell in ADD, advertising development design, which I absolutely loved. I think that was probably one of the toughest areas in the business to get into. But if I could live my life again, I think that would be the sort of role I'd absolutely love to do. But being mentored by Chris de la Puente at the time, who was the general manager that I was reporting into, he gave some very wise advice, which was, look, there's hundreds of people in marketing that are incredibly talented. And yes, you might make it, but your USP is this finance person that can reach into the other areas of the business with some credibility and build relationships and build an understanding and connection of the whole system. and do that from a finance grounding rather than joining into another function. So it felt that I'd had this really wonderful nine years where I did lots of different projects, particularly in the M&A space. So I was involved with the acquisition of Clairol and Wella and Gillette, big, big companies into P&G and particularly into beauty and hair care. And had different aspects within them as well. I did divestiture of certain brands that were non-strategic that came with Wella. I did quite a lot of the sort of the human side of the integration on Gillette, as well as the trade terms. So there's kind of quite interesting roles. And that highlighted to me the whole area of investor relations. So a good friend of mine, Alison Kirkby, who I'm sure lots of people will know, Chief Executive BT now. she had moved into investor relations and I'd through speaking to her realized that I think if there was any sweet spot in a company that would be perfect for me it would be investor relations because it's marketing it's marketing the company it's talking which I love to do storytelling around the fortunes of the company but from a grounding of finance and understanding the real kind of way in which the company creates value for shareholders so that that was where I realized my absolute sweet spot was from a sort of career traditional career path point of view and so I kind of just put it out out there I guess that that's what I was looking for and SAB Miller beer company brewing company was at that time sadly no longer in existence it's been subsumed into a larger organization now but back then they were recruiting Procter & Gamble people because they saw the opportunity. of brand management in the beer category and I moved into the IR team there so that was a little whistle stop tour around P&G and how I eventually got to Investor Relations.
Speaker #0
Yeah so obviously for many of us who were at P&G one of the big things that we learned there was about ourselves about our personal leadership and so on what do you feel you learned during that time?
Speaker #1
Yeah personal leadership. Massive. I think we all recognise that P&G recruits for personal leadership, but it's not something we necessarily appreciate whilst we're in the goldfish bowl. When we're outside of it, we recognise that that is not the norm. It's not normal for people to have such a strong sense of their own sense of personal leadership, personal mission, the drive to get things done, the drive to have an impact. That's absolutely key. The second personally was that idea of storytelling and about leadership being about telling stories of possibility and I you know I'd done English literature at university but very early in my career at P&G I'd read an article in the Financial Times about the finance function being the key storytellers in an organisation which I felt was quite controversial in P&G given the importance of marketing and brands to P&G in terms of storytelling but I created a little course for the function and called finance as storytellers. And that helped create that red thread through my experience that made sense to me anyway, of why someone who'd loved stories and English and fell in love with the psychoanalytic theory of the books of Toni Morrison or whatever could then become an accountant. And then the third one was really around values and purpose. And I'm not sure if people know this, but I was listening to a podcast with Carol Sanford, who's now passed, unfortunately, many years ago. And she was a consultant with P&G in the 60s and 70s, when P&G was really at the forefront of the thought, the concept that companies have a purpose, a corporate entity has a purpose. And I was moving into organisations that were really just in the 90s, 2000s, 2010, who were kind of thinking about this for the first time. And we'd all been in that and we'd not been, we weren't indoctrinated by it. It was just part of our experience there. So that sense of being part of something that was meaningful and impactful and changing the lives of the world's consumers was something that really lived with me and lives with me today in the work that I'm doing.
Speaker #0
Yeah, certainly for me, I know that I worked in Consumer Insights and the fact that our purpose was about improving people's lives and that there was a belief in the company that if we did the right thing by the consumer, then the consumer would reward us with buying our products. That was a big driver for me from a values point of view and wanting to really improve things for people yeah so that resonates strongly with me. So what about what you learned about your weaknesses while you were there or during this period of your career?
Speaker #1
Oh gosh so many so so much to learn. Impatience massive massive one I think there is a slight downside to the experience many can have at P&G in the sense of assignments and moving every sort of two or three years, right, or even less. And I think that then created this hunger and drive to, okay, done it now, 18 months, two years, what's next? When in the sort of next decade of my career, some people have accused me of being on to the next shiny thing. I don't personally think that's true. I think I'm continuously trying to just join the dots and deepen my... experience across systems however the accusation is is probably got some truth in it in terms of that kind of next new thing I think there was a part of me that felt a deep deep sort of in a sort of heavy shouldered kind of way responsibility to know and to have the answers which I don't think has to be the case in P&G but it certainly it activated a part of me that was more perfectionist and more as I say, kind of taken that weight of responsibility of the world on my shoulders, which I've since learned that really what clearly what works is working in teams and leveraging the strengths of others, et cetera. And that's taken me some time to learn. And I think it didn't necessarily bring out the best of me in terms of maybe a slight sense of arrogance or knowing it all at parts of my career, which I'm not particularly proud of. So that would be the ones I think that would spring to mind.
Speaker #0
I want to come back to the impatience. Is there ever a time where you feel like your impatience has tripped you up? Because again, by the way, impatience is kind of the flip side of drive. You know, sometimes we want to move things forward, but if it's pushed too far, it can sometimes trip us up, can't it?
Speaker #1
Oh, yes, absolutely. The first move I made from P&G into SCB Miller, I should have stayed. I was headhunted to move into a company. In my defense, it was in Scotland, so it represented an opportunity to move home, which is quite rare. It was a company just promoted into the FTSE 100. So again, quite a rare opportunity to be able to head up an investor relations and external comms team in Scotland. However, I'd been in SAB at that point for three years. I definitely didn't. know everything. I could have spent at least another year, a couple of years in the IR team and really deepening my expertise. It was an award-winning team. It was very, very well resourced. I think there was about five or six of us in the team. And going from that well-resourced sort of footsie, I think it was a top 10 company. into a newly promoted into the FTSE 100 with very little in way of resource and a very small team. I think I hadn't, I didn't have enough of a grounding in investor relations at that point to be able to create an entire function around myself. I was still learning and that proved to be like a very difficult move for me, which was purely driven, purely, okay it was in scotland etc so there was a lot of attractiveness about it, but it was an ego-driven move and it was this impatient desire to move up the hierarchy move you know to a more status better job title more money kind of role so that's my big if i was looking at a cv from a cv point of view big regret I don't regret it terribly because we all have experiences that form us etc and that was definitely one of them but that would be the That would be the place where I'd go back to myself at age 37 or 40, wherever I was, and just say, calm down. It'll come, it'll happen. Just do good work. Yeah.
Speaker #0
You know, it's a point in our lives, isn't it, when we're sort of getting towards 40, where there's a lot going on and we learn a lot. And often people experience some questioning in their careers. How was that period for you?
Speaker #1
Dark. yeah it was it was tough it was really tough my my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer and that was that was difficult we'd moved to I'm from Scotland live in Edinburgh now my parents had moved from Edinburgh to the south to London to be closer to us when we had children then I'd moved back to Scotland but you know after about three or four years of them been down there and there was a whole there was a whole bunch of things that came to the surface at that time as as it does when when one is looking at losing a parent particularly you know she was 60 so it wasn't she wasn't particularly old, very vibrant yoga swimmer you know kind of this vibrant individual who'd had a lot of mental health issues through her life as well which I hadn't spoken about to anyone other than in a highly cognitive way as a sort of you know yeah nothing nothing much below the surface so it was real I guess it was a sense of a sort of reckoning, like, OK, so what are you going to do with your life now? Like you were this individual who wanted to be a chief executive of a charity or whatever. And what the heck, you know, you've ended up in the, you know, in beer. And then in the Weir group, I was in oil fracking and minerals and stuff, you know, it's kind of sort of like, what the heck? It was definitely went on for more than a few years. I mean, I know this is very normal for most people to have this period in their career. The challenge is when you're in it, you don't know when you're going to get out the other side.
Speaker #0
What was your process and what did you learn through that?
Speaker #1
I wrote a lot. I think that was definitely me going back to the love that I had. I mean, I'm from an age where I still wrote all my university essays out longhand. I didn't even write them on a word processor. So I did a lot of writing. And I was always told that you can't self... therapize so give yourself therapy but I felt through writing that I did that and I think I was just continually going down a layer and down a layer and down there to the point that got slightly ridiculous I wouldn't necessarily recommend that but it was very good for me it was very typical of me to get very thorough and very deep and very intense and treated it like a PhD I treated myself like a PhD I've got four or five notebooks of that and it's there's quite remarkable material in there. It was like writing myself into being and I just felt utterly burnt out. So that led me actually, I took a call from an ex-P&G friend, Ben Fletcher, who was the finance director at Boots and bless him, he popped up to Edinburgh on a store visit and we just spent a few hours chatting actually like about all of these experiences I'd had and he persuaded me and I was easily persuaded that joining Boots would be would be really good in a sort of this it was the start of this hybrid role so I was finance director for the UK stores but I was also head of learning and development for the finance function and we together we sort of envisaged this creating this finance function that would be very similar to a P&G style finance function that worked in this sort of triumvirate. with marketing and sales to sort of commercially lead the business and develop the leadership capacity of the finance function so that that was very good it didn't last very long because ben was moved internally or made a move internally and then his replacement didn't see the mission, the vision that we were trying to create. But it allowed me to do some work that then led me to my next move, which was for six years, I had a business with a wonderful individual who's one of the sort of my real kind of mentors in my life, Michael Cahill, who'd been at UBS, been in investment banking, had been a financial analyst. So I knew him from the days of being in investor relations. He trained me in the city and company valuation. and we created a company together, which was really, it was in retrospect, it was really around trying to create a movement within, particularly within the finance function, but we ended up working with all functions, marketing, sales, IT, CEOs, around consciously leading for value creation and joining the dots from what you do inside the company and how that's reflected in the share price. And that was that was amazing work absolutely fantastic work not that many people even at a very senior level really appreciate and are able to join the dots the share price is doing this but this is actually what's driving it it's not driving it the activity that we're doing today is not necessarily driver it's decisions that we made two three years ago and financial leadership is almost always at at the nucleus of why the share price is what it is it's either not enough of it stopping big contracts being signed etc with one company that that should never have been signed or or or too too little of it so yeah that was fantastic work really really really interesting. So I want to pause there because you talked a lot, there was a lot going on and it sounds like there was this part where you know writing for you was a way of making sense of the story. Ben came along and helped you kind of reconnect with putting together, it was the beginning of putting together this finance with the bigger picture and also people. So there was a kind of a turn somewhere in finding or putting words back to the meaning for you. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker #0
How did that then eventually get you to where you are now? Because now you're in this role, which is. if I understand correctly, a bit of a sweet spot there between the people part and the finance part, the big picture finance, commercial part, the big picture.
Speaker #1
Yeah. So one of the things I learned from Michael, and I think this is so important for all small businesses, is we had a number of sort of concepts and ideas that were really at the heart of what we were delivering, what we wanted to deliver for our clients. And we, rather than just kind of talk about these ideas yeah you know like the neurological levels of change if you know that model from Robert Dilts um in NLP or Nancy Klein's time to think work in terms of listening or more prosaically around value creation and his his work around what he calls evaluation villa and how value is created in organizations. We had these ideas but rather than just talk about them we learned together so we did courses together, we did week-long programs with people, we did stuff values, we did lots and lots of things to learn together so we were really aligned and coming from the same sort of root and heritage if you like, to really ensure we were on the same page around these various concepts we did a lot of learning together so that experience of learning together with my business partner to what's on the surface of it looked like training for CFOs to understand value creation really went quite deep, which is sort of a theme, that was what kind of created ah there's a in the world of these companies that are doing something very very different you know no managers entrepreneurial business units self-management and I got into that tribe if you like there's a woman called Lisa Gill who was quite new into that world at the time as well I got speaking to her, she has a podcast and shout out to Lisa on her podcast leadermorphosis, and that that connection led me to Frederick Laloux and his book reinventing organizations I supported the translation of his book into the illustrated version. And then when Konsileo were looking for a new board member, a non-exec, Lisa recommended me to Konsileo. And when the founder, CEO came knocking, John, I was kind of, you know, insurance, what the heck? You know, that's just not, I know nothing about commercial insurance, broking, financial services, not a sector that I'd ever really saw myself in. I was in retail. At the time, I'd gone from books into the very group. Retail felt a sweet spot, or at least retail consumer goods. beauty care that kind of space and I just didn't see the connection but then when I got to understand what concilio was trying to achieve more around self-management that's when it all clicked and that's when I guess going back to the personal leadership that we learned at P&G and that sense of mission and drive and purpose that all came together really in concilio.
Speaker #0
So now you're there, how does that excite you for the future, this concept? Well, first of all, maybe explain a little bit practically how it works on a day-to-day basis. And how does that excite you, the potential of it for other organisations excite you?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so it works. We're a relatively small organisation, about 190 people now, growing very rapidly. And our employee workforce is predominantly insurance brokers. And in a typical insurance broking firm, you'd have many, many layers of management. You'd have a regional manager. responsible for a region you'd have little offices across you know Yorkshire whatever and people would be kind of set targets sales targets essentially from on high down there'd be Monday morning meetings where people would have to account for their their activity and time and how they were progressing versus their sales targets and what John who had been at Allianz for a big chunk of his career recognised is that there was a way in which to get back. to the real craft of insurance broking, this kind of relationship between an insurance broker and their client and the community and the advisory and real kind of human-to-human connection that was being lost as lots of insurance brokers were being moved into call centres because the premium, the income was deemed too low to merit that human-to-human relationship. So what we have is insurance brokers who have... No boss, they have the freedom to essentially run their own little businesses. They're fully employees, but they have the freedom to essentially run their businesses how they want. But we support that very much with both from a human perspective. So we have 40 coaches in our business who are peers and a very well structured coaching framework. And then we also have technology, which I think is the most exciting thing that we have in our organisation, which I think we could transplant. any organization on the planet technology underpins everything including the human relationships so we have a a broken platform which all of the stuff that people have to do to create policies on the platform of course we have that and it's our own bespoke platform but that platform is also the home of all of our coaching relationships the the way in which we support any kind of human to human interaction. For example, we have about 60 plus thousand relationships across the organisation where people are, oh, I've got this client in, you know, Aberdeenshire. But I live in Aberdeen, but I've not got the knowledge of the particular industry, maybe fisheries industry or something. Someone down in Kent has got that experience, right? Let's come together and serve that client. Again, it sounds kind of not that exciting, but the industry doesn't work in that way. Each office is separate. You've got your targets. You would never reach out to someone else. in order to help to help you deliver your targets so we've got this thing called the collaboration center which facilitates all of these 60 000 plus relationships the entire system works to enable the contract between people so like oh i've got you know i've got this client if you can help me on x then you know I'll give you 20 of the income or 30 or 40 and people will have multiple relationships like that across the company and that is then supported by P&L, which is live on the system that they can see so they can understand exactly how they're doing. And then there's a real sort of appreciation of fairness and the value exchange. So people who work in our organisation get 49% of all of the income that they write after a certain, you know, the certain criteria that need to be met clearly. So it's a very well thought through framework structure system in response to an industry that is. it's kind of killing the human part of the experience or the the sort of the dignity and the professional people move into insurance many people fall into like us accountants but when they're in it they realize that the the value that they're providing in their communities and the way in which they're supporting the small business economy which is 99% of the UK's economy is really meaningful yeah and that's been kind of wiped out in the rest of the industry.
Speaker #0
Yeah. Well. And it's exciting in a way because, well, you sound excited to have to be able to tackle these challenges. That's part of who you are, isn't it? To tackle these things from a big picture perspective and how you can join the dots, as you said a few times.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I think it's joining the dots. And it's also the biggest joy I have is when, you know, one of our brokers just before Christmas got his first third level of. bonus which is can be quite chunky for some of our brokers because they get 49% of everything they write and it was the first time he'd achieved that and it was £2,000 and he phoned me up and he just tears in his eyes my family are going to have a better Christmas and it's like, oh love it, this is this is what we're doing so I think I started off my career thinking that you could only have that impact if you worked in the charity sector but you can have that impact anywhere and helping our brokers to connect into something that they're really good at doing it in a way that is really protecting and advising their clients well and and we believe of course better than our competitors and serving their communities and being rewarded fairly for that that feels like really good work to me yeah it's it's interesting because as you're talking I'm thinking about why I do what I do
Speaker #0
And I tend to say that I love to unleash people's potential. I believe it's by everybody's potential being released that together we'll solve the world's biggest problems. Yes. And I think when you, when I heard you talk about an individual broker, when you see the impact you're having on individuals, is when it, when each person is released into what they can do and how we can do it in a way that, that is good work, like you say, that is. working towards human thriving and thriving of the planet and so on. I think it's just wonderful to see it. Before we close, I want to come back to that because I'm talking about human potential now. We haven't talked about your passion for individual leadership potential and the work you're doing with WYSE. Do you want to share a little bit about that?
Speaker #1
That has been one of the best things I've ever got involved in. Dr. Andrew McDowell, he's been part of WYSE, which is a UN affiliated charity for 30 plus years he i worked with him for a number of years he's the first person to bring self-management into the health care system so this sort of smooshing together of executive coaching in a clinical setting and helping clinicians to support their patients to be self-managing as opposed to that tell so very you know very closely aligned with personal that sense of personal leadership the charity he's been associated with wise supports young people age 18 to 35 in a very extended personal leadership programme of 12 days, four times a year in different locations around the world. And it's directed towards individuals who are already doing good work in their community. And it's activating even more that sense of personal leadership and mission, the sense of who I am and what I'm going to do in the world, how I'm going to express that intent and that mission. I wish I'd found it myself years ago and been in one of their programmes, but now I get to do it once a year, spend two weeks, a really tough gig in Italy, in a fantastic villa with a swimming pool and with 40 fabulous young people with a staff team of about 15. It's a learning journey for me as much as for the participants. It's just fabulous. There's nothing like it. I don't believe in the world. And it really plays into... all of the threads I think that are important to me around that sort of sense of mission, personal leadership, activating it, imagination, being able to see it through other people's actions and things they're doing. I mean, I'm interested in all of the young people and what they achieve. So it's wonderful to be part of it.
Speaker #0
I don't know about you, but every time I'm involved in, I'm not involved in that, but in similar things with people, it gives me so much hope for the future. I know we live in a very I don't want to over-exaggerate because there have been other periods of history where people have lived very difficult things that we've not had to suffer. But when you look at the things going on in the world, it's easy to lose hope. But when you look at the potential in people, when you look at people who are passionate for doing good and making change, it gives me a lot of energy.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker #0
So just as we close, would you be able to just maybe summarise for us, what are the key leadership principles that have really guided you throughout your journey?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so the activation of personal leadership in that sense of the being and the doing, how do we put ourselves into what we do? How do we direct that towards whatever we call purpose? It doesn't have to be a stated purpose. It can be a sense of purpose, a feeling, just a feeling that we're connecting to doing work that matters. That's really, really key. Imagination. I think I started this by talking about I became an accountant because my dad was an accountant. I think if we can see it, we can be it. And I think if we can imagine it, we can become it. We can do it. I think writing. writing for me has been that way of kind of bringing things into existence and that's kind of having that sense of imagination another one would be tenacity that sense of being able to just keep keep going even through dark times even when you feel lost or you feel really disconnected to who you are and who you're trying to become but just just keep going kind of have that idea that you know the whole steve jobs slightly cliched quote around joining the dots you can't join them you know you can only join them looking backwards not forward but you can know that there's dots you can know that there will be dots that will join up eventually you just don't know exactly how they're going to join up which is great that's the wonder of life isn't it so yeah having that sort of sense of tenacity and then the um sense of conversations really mattering and having tough conversations there's a great quote i did a sort of one day thing with the poet david white which uh he said that the next epoch of your existence is always through the doorway of a conversation. And I kind of hold that sort of every day. You know, if there's a tough moment in the board or the exec team, and we always have that sense of someone's not saying something here. There's music and there's words and they're not quite matching. So that sense of being bold enough, being brave enough, courageous enough to have the conversation that matters and it's tough, whether that's with yourself.
Speaker #0
Exactly.
Speaker #1
Your spouse, your family, your businesses, etc. that would be the fourth one for me.
Speaker #0
Well it's been a wonderful conversation and thank you so much for sharing your journey the good bits and the tough bits because we all need to know that someone else has been there before us and we're not alone if you have one encouragement to give to someone who is going through a backstop period of your career in the middle this messy middle as I call it what would you say to them
Speaker #1
I would say buy yourself a nice pen and a lovely notebook and just start writing. Big believer in the write it down, make it happen mentality. I've gone as far as writing job descriptions for myself in the past, et cetera. And some of that has come into reality. So yeah, capture everything. And you'll be astounded when you look back at who you were, who you are becoming. It's all there. And I think that can be an incredible resource to support you through your leadership journey.
Speaker #0
Yeah, as you said, if you can imagine it, you can believe it. You can make it happen almost. Write it down. You're kind of making something come to life that you didn't think was possible.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So thank you so much. It's been a wonderful conversation.
Speaker #1
Thank you, Ruth. I've enjoyed it.
Speaker #0
Hopefully we'll be in touch. I've got some ideas of things I want to bounce off you already.
Speaker #1
Likewise. Thanks, Ruth.
Speaker #0
I hope you found Vicky's story as thought-provoking as I did. If there's one powerful takeaway for me, it's the idea that sometimes we don't find clarity, we write our way into it. So here's a simple invitation for you. Take Vicky's advice and write your future as though it already exists. That might be a job description for your dream role, an end of year celebration speech, or even the words you'd love someone to say about you when you move on. Let your imagination lead. and see what surfaces. And if you're feeling stuck, unsure what's next or how to move forward, remember you don't have to figure it out alone. And I'd certainly love to help if I can. You can get in touch or book a free discovery call at yourpathtosuccess.ch. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep walking your own personal path to success.

About Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Your Path to Success is here to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey.

On this podcast you'll hear:
💡 Personal stories and life lessons from accomplished leaders
💡 Honest conversations about the moments that tested them — and what they learned
💡 Practical, evidence-based ways to grow your own leadership impact and presence, from the inside out

Ruth Kearns Wollmann is an ICF-accredited professional coach and leadership development facilitator with a background as a cognitive psychologist, business executive and organisational leader in corporate and non-profit organisations.

She believes the leaders who make the greatest impact are those who lead from a centred, integrated place — understanding their own patterns, hopes and fears deeply enough to respond rather than react under pressure.

Ruth partners with established and emerging leaders ready to lead differently: breaking through their own ceiling, becoming a secure base for others, and making their greatest impact yet from a place of strength, authenticity and purpose.

To find out more about Ruth's work with individuals and organisations, visit yourpathtosuccess.ch

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Your Path to Success is here to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey.

To find out more about Ruth's work with individuals and organisations, visit yourpathtosuccess.ch

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

Vicky Ferrier on Writing Herself Into Being  - Mid-Career Reckoning, Courage, and Leading for Good

What if your mid-career reckoning became an awakening — a chance to realign your strengths, values and purpose?

Vicky also supports young leaders globally through her work with WYSE, a UN-affiliated leadership development charity.

Key Topics:

Pivotal moments and mid-career questioning
Leading without hierarchy
Courage, humility, and imagination
Writing as a tool for clarity and growth

🔗 Links :

Learn more about Ruth’s coaching work: yourpathtosuccess.ch

Connect with Ruth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthkearnswollmann/

🎧 Listen now and be inspired to write your next chapter.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to Your Path to Success with me, Ruth Kearns-Volman. It's a podcast designed to inspire, encourage, and equip you on your personal leadership journey. Today's guest is Vicky Ferrier, Chief People and Commercial Officer at Konsileo, a commercial insurance broker with no managers. Sound unusual? It is, and that's part of what makes Vicky's story so compelling. In this role, She operates right at the intersection of people and performance, helping unleash individuals' leadership so that they can do good work that makes a real difference, both commercially and personally. But as you'll hear, that clarity came over time. This wasn't the career she imagined when she started out. In our conversation, Vicky shares what influenced her early choices, how she navigated the messy middle of her career, a season of questioning, re-evaluation. and rediscovery, and what she discovered about herself along the way. She speaks candidly about identity, alignment, and what it meant to write herself into being. It's a story of courage, reflection, and reinvention, and I'm delighted to share it with you. Let's dive in. So here we go. Well, welcome, Vicky. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Speaker #1
Thanks, Ruth. Happy to be here.
Speaker #0
Yeah, well, this is going to be a lot of fun because when we were working at P&G so many years ago, I knew you as Vicky from finance, someone who had a lot of personality, a lot of passion. And, you know, if I look at your job title today, you're chief commercial and people officer. How does that work? Finance and people?
Speaker #1
Yeah, well, very naturally, I believe. It's a combination of two things I think really are important from a value creation perspective, the human dimension and the commercial dimension. So when I was originally offered this role, which we created essentially in the organisation, it didn't exist. It felt very natural to bring those two parts together for me. But I guess that moving from being a chartered accountant in the public sector, where I started my career in my early 20s. through Procter & Gamble, through investor relations, through a bit of HR to here. It makes sense to me, but it's not necessarily so obvious to, I'm sure many accountants in the world would not see the connection, but I absolutely do.
Speaker #0
Yeah. So let's unpack it a bit because that's what I love about this podcast. We get to talk about your journey and everybody's journey is different. How did you start off as an accountant? How did that come about?
Speaker #1
My dad was an accountant. So a complete lack of imagination on my part. I think that goes to one of my big leadership principles is about having imagination. But yeah, I think people become what they can see. And whilst I did English literature at university and very much so myself going down a path of marketing or journalism, something that would require some kind of storytelling element to it. I became a chartered accountant in the public sector. Again very much driven yes by my dad being an accountant but this sense of mission that I had to do good to do good work to support my community I saw a career path at that age being more around charity work you know something CEO one of the big charities that's where my head was then it was fortuitous that when I qualified there happened to be at that time I don't know if it still exists, but there was... a movement around people who had qualified and moving, you know, seeing that as a new, almost like a graduation point, kind of starting again. Yeah, you qualify as a chartered accountant, but let's take a step back. Did you really want to be an accountant? And there was a headhunter here in Scotland who gathered all these lost souls, lost accountants that had become accountants by default kind of thing. And there was a careers fair at the Glen Eagles Hotel, the Glen Eagles Hotel. And that's the only reason I, not the only reason, but a big attraction for me going was because it was at the Glen Eagles Hotel. I came from an incredibly working class background, never had the opportunity to go to Glen Eagles. So, and it was included in overnight stay, which was unbelievable. And there was people there like Goldman Sachs, a lot of the big insurance and financial services employers in Scotland and P&G. And the P&G people I met, I just connected to. straight away. Claire Sheridan being one of them, shout out to her, and really just really found, oh my tribe, these are my people and that was what took me to joining PNG.
Speaker #0
And what was it, do you think, that the connection?
Speaker #1
I loved the energy that they had. They were all from the finance function, but they seemed to me to have that greater connection to the business, to not just the commercial side of the business, but the human side, the brand side, the sales side. It just seemed to me like a real connecting function that they were playing. which I felt was missing in a lot of the experience I'd had. Yeah,
Speaker #0
it was a bit of a broader overview, more strategic in a way.
Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker #0
So tell me a bit about your time at P&G. How long were you there?
Speaker #1
Nine years. Loved it. Loved every minute of it. Another friend, Matthew Tipple, once said that his experience of moving from his sort of more working class background, going to Cambridge University was one of the most formative of his life, but Procter & Gamble was the most formative of mine. Again, it was finding... one's tribe those people that just had a sense of energy a sense of possibility of mission of wanting to have to do good work and have impact and I love I just loved every minute of it I didn't follow a very traditional route which is probably why I only stayed nine years because I got to the point where I really had to decide if I was going to continue on a finance career path and I'd been recommended I'd done different things I did a year in marketing, doing a couple of different projects. One of them was looking at the potential of the black hair care opportunity. And I did a little spell in ADD, advertising development design, which I absolutely loved. I think that was probably one of the toughest areas in the business to get into. But if I could live my life again, I think that would be the sort of role I'd absolutely love to do. But being mentored by Chris de la Puente at the time, who was the general manager that I was reporting into, he gave some very wise advice, which was, look, there's hundreds of people in marketing that are incredibly talented. And yes, you might make it, but your USP is this finance person that can reach into the other areas of the business with some credibility and build relationships and build an understanding and connection of the whole system. and do that from a finance grounding rather than joining into another function. So it felt that I'd had this really wonderful nine years where I did lots of different projects, particularly in the M&A space. So I was involved with the acquisition of Clairol and Wella and Gillette, big, big companies into P&G and particularly into beauty and hair care. And had different aspects within them as well. I did divestiture of certain brands that were non-strategic that came with Wella. I did quite a lot of the sort of the human side of the integration on Gillette, as well as the trade terms. So there's kind of quite interesting roles. And that highlighted to me the whole area of investor relations. So a good friend of mine, Alison Kirkby, who I'm sure lots of people will know, Chief Executive BT now. she had moved into investor relations and I'd through speaking to her realized that I think if there was any sweet spot in a company that would be perfect for me it would be investor relations because it's marketing it's marketing the company it's talking which I love to do storytelling around the fortunes of the company but from a grounding of finance and understanding the real kind of way in which the company creates value for shareholders so that that was where I realized my absolute sweet spot was from a sort of career traditional career path point of view and so I kind of just put it out out there I guess that that's what I was looking for and SAB Miller beer company brewing company was at that time sadly no longer in existence it's been subsumed into a larger organization now but back then they were recruiting Procter & Gamble people because they saw the opportunity. of brand management in the beer category and I moved into the IR team there so that was a little whistle stop tour around P&G and how I eventually got to Investor Relations.
Speaker #0
Yeah so obviously for many of us who were at P&G one of the big things that we learned there was about ourselves about our personal leadership and so on what do you feel you learned during that time?
Speaker #1
Yeah personal leadership. Massive. I think we all recognise that P&G recruits for personal leadership, but it's not something we necessarily appreciate whilst we're in the goldfish bowl. When we're outside of it, we recognise that that is not the norm. It's not normal for people to have such a strong sense of their own sense of personal leadership, personal mission, the drive to get things done, the drive to have an impact. That's absolutely key. The second personally was that idea of storytelling and about leadership being about telling stories of possibility and I you know I'd done English literature at university but very early in my career at P&G I'd read an article in the Financial Times about the finance function being the key storytellers in an organisation which I felt was quite controversial in P&G given the importance of marketing and brands to P&G in terms of storytelling but I created a little course for the function and called finance as storytellers. And that helped create that red thread through my experience that made sense to me anyway, of why someone who'd loved stories and English and fell in love with the psychoanalytic theory of the books of Toni Morrison or whatever could then become an accountant. And then the third one was really around values and purpose. And I'm not sure if people know this, but I was listening to a podcast with Carol Sanford, who's now passed, unfortunately, many years ago. And she was a consultant with P&G in the 60s and 70s, when P&G was really at the forefront of the thought, the concept that companies have a purpose, a corporate entity has a purpose. And I was moving into organisations that were really just in the 90s, 2000s, 2010, who were kind of thinking about this for the first time. And we'd all been in that and we'd not been, we weren't indoctrinated by it. It was just part of our experience there. So that sense of being part of something that was meaningful and impactful and changing the lives of the world's consumers was something that really lived with me and lives with me today in the work that I'm doing.
Speaker #0
Yeah, certainly for me, I know that I worked in Consumer Insights and the fact that our purpose was about improving people's lives and that there was a belief in the company that if we did the right thing by the consumer, then the consumer would reward us with buying our products. That was a big driver for me from a values point of view and wanting to really improve things for people yeah so that resonates strongly with me. So what about what you learned about your weaknesses while you were there or during this period of your career?
Speaker #1
Oh gosh so many so so much to learn. Impatience massive massive one I think there is a slight downside to the experience many can have at P&G in the sense of assignments and moving every sort of two or three years, right, or even less. And I think that then created this hunger and drive to, okay, done it now, 18 months, two years, what's next? When in the sort of next decade of my career, some people have accused me of being on to the next shiny thing. I don't personally think that's true. I think I'm continuously trying to just join the dots and deepen my... experience across systems however the accusation is is probably got some truth in it in terms of that kind of next new thing I think there was a part of me that felt a deep deep sort of in a sort of heavy shouldered kind of way responsibility to know and to have the answers which I don't think has to be the case in P&G but it certainly it activated a part of me that was more perfectionist and more as I say, kind of taken that weight of responsibility of the world on my shoulders, which I've since learned that really what clearly what works is working in teams and leveraging the strengths of others, et cetera. And that's taken me some time to learn. And I think it didn't necessarily bring out the best of me in terms of maybe a slight sense of arrogance or knowing it all at parts of my career, which I'm not particularly proud of. So that would be the ones I think that would spring to mind.
Speaker #0
I want to come back to the impatience. Is there ever a time where you feel like your impatience has tripped you up? Because again, by the way, impatience is kind of the flip side of drive. You know, sometimes we want to move things forward, but if it's pushed too far, it can sometimes trip us up, can't it?
Speaker #1
Oh, yes, absolutely. The first move I made from P&G into SCB Miller, I should have stayed. I was headhunted to move into a company. In my defense, it was in Scotland, so it represented an opportunity to move home, which is quite rare. It was a company just promoted into the FTSE 100. So again, quite a rare opportunity to be able to head up an investor relations and external comms team in Scotland. However, I'd been in SAB at that point for three years. I definitely didn't. know everything. I could have spent at least another year, a couple of years in the IR team and really deepening my expertise. It was an award-winning team. It was very, very well resourced. I think there was about five or six of us in the team. And going from that well-resourced sort of footsie, I think it was a top 10 company. into a newly promoted into the FTSE 100 with very little in way of resource and a very small team. I think I hadn't, I didn't have enough of a grounding in investor relations at that point to be able to create an entire function around myself. I was still learning and that proved to be like a very difficult move for me, which was purely driven, purely, okay it was in scotland etc so there was a lot of attractiveness about it, but it was an ego-driven move and it was this impatient desire to move up the hierarchy move you know to a more status better job title more money kind of role so that's my big if i was looking at a cv from a cv point of view big regret I don't regret it terribly because we all have experiences that form us etc and that was definitely one of them but that would be the That would be the place where I'd go back to myself at age 37 or 40, wherever I was, and just say, calm down. It'll come, it'll happen. Just do good work. Yeah.
Speaker #0
You know, it's a point in our lives, isn't it, when we're sort of getting towards 40, where there's a lot going on and we learn a lot. And often people experience some questioning in their careers. How was that period for you?
Speaker #1
Dark. yeah it was it was tough it was really tough my my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer and that was that was difficult we'd moved to I'm from Scotland live in Edinburgh now my parents had moved from Edinburgh to the south to London to be closer to us when we had children then I'd moved back to Scotland but you know after about three or four years of them been down there and there was a whole there was a whole bunch of things that came to the surface at that time as as it does when when one is looking at losing a parent particularly you know she was 60 so it wasn't she wasn't particularly old, very vibrant yoga swimmer you know kind of this vibrant individual who'd had a lot of mental health issues through her life as well which I hadn't spoken about to anyone other than in a highly cognitive way as a sort of you know yeah nothing nothing much below the surface so it was real I guess it was a sense of a sort of reckoning, like, OK, so what are you going to do with your life now? Like you were this individual who wanted to be a chief executive of a charity or whatever. And what the heck, you know, you've ended up in the, you know, in beer. And then in the Weir group, I was in oil fracking and minerals and stuff, you know, it's kind of sort of like, what the heck? It was definitely went on for more than a few years. I mean, I know this is very normal for most people to have this period in their career. The challenge is when you're in it, you don't know when you're going to get out the other side.
Speaker #0
What was your process and what did you learn through that?
Speaker #1
I wrote a lot. I think that was definitely me going back to the love that I had. I mean, I'm from an age where I still wrote all my university essays out longhand. I didn't even write them on a word processor. So I did a lot of writing. And I was always told that you can't self... therapize so give yourself therapy but I felt through writing that I did that and I think I was just continually going down a layer and down a layer and down there to the point that got slightly ridiculous I wouldn't necessarily recommend that but it was very good for me it was very typical of me to get very thorough and very deep and very intense and treated it like a PhD I treated myself like a PhD I've got four or five notebooks of that and it's there's quite remarkable material in there. It was like writing myself into being and I just felt utterly burnt out. So that led me actually, I took a call from an ex-P&G friend, Ben Fletcher, who was the finance director at Boots and bless him, he popped up to Edinburgh on a store visit and we just spent a few hours chatting actually like about all of these experiences I'd had and he persuaded me and I was easily persuaded that joining Boots would be would be really good in a sort of this it was the start of this hybrid role so I was finance director for the UK stores but I was also head of learning and development for the finance function and we together we sort of envisaged this creating this finance function that would be very similar to a P&G style finance function that worked in this sort of triumvirate. with marketing and sales to sort of commercially lead the business and develop the leadership capacity of the finance function so that that was very good it didn't last very long because ben was moved internally or made a move internally and then his replacement didn't see the mission, the vision that we were trying to create. But it allowed me to do some work that then led me to my next move, which was for six years, I had a business with a wonderful individual who's one of the sort of my real kind of mentors in my life, Michael Cahill, who'd been at UBS, been in investment banking, had been a financial analyst. So I knew him from the days of being in investor relations. He trained me in the city and company valuation. and we created a company together, which was really, it was in retrospect, it was really around trying to create a movement within, particularly within the finance function, but we ended up working with all functions, marketing, sales, IT, CEOs, around consciously leading for value creation and joining the dots from what you do inside the company and how that's reflected in the share price. And that was that was amazing work absolutely fantastic work not that many people even at a very senior level really appreciate and are able to join the dots the share price is doing this but this is actually what's driving it it's not driving it the activity that we're doing today is not necessarily driver it's decisions that we made two three years ago and financial leadership is almost always at at the nucleus of why the share price is what it is it's either not enough of it stopping big contracts being signed etc with one company that that should never have been signed or or or too too little of it so yeah that was fantastic work really really really interesting. So I want to pause there because you talked a lot, there was a lot going on and it sounds like there was this part where you know writing for you was a way of making sense of the story. Ben came along and helped you kind of reconnect with putting together, it was the beginning of putting together this finance with the bigger picture and also people. So there was a kind of a turn somewhere in finding or putting words back to the meaning for you. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker #0
How did that then eventually get you to where you are now? Because now you're in this role, which is. if I understand correctly, a bit of a sweet spot there between the people part and the finance part, the big picture finance, commercial part, the big picture.
Speaker #1
Yeah. So one of the things I learned from Michael, and I think this is so important for all small businesses, is we had a number of sort of concepts and ideas that were really at the heart of what we were delivering, what we wanted to deliver for our clients. And we, rather than just kind of talk about these ideas yeah you know like the neurological levels of change if you know that model from Robert Dilts um in NLP or Nancy Klein's time to think work in terms of listening or more prosaically around value creation and his his work around what he calls evaluation villa and how value is created in organizations. We had these ideas but rather than just talk about them we learned together so we did courses together, we did week-long programs with people, we did stuff values, we did lots and lots of things to learn together so we were really aligned and coming from the same sort of root and heritage if you like, to really ensure we were on the same page around these various concepts we did a lot of learning together so that experience of learning together with my business partner to what's on the surface of it looked like training for CFOs to understand value creation really went quite deep, which is sort of a theme, that was what kind of created ah there's a in the world of these companies that are doing something very very different you know no managers entrepreneurial business units self-management and I got into that tribe if you like there's a woman called Lisa Gill who was quite new into that world at the time as well I got speaking to her, she has a podcast and shout out to Lisa on her podcast leadermorphosis, and that that connection led me to Frederick Laloux and his book reinventing organizations I supported the translation of his book into the illustrated version. And then when Konsileo were looking for a new board member, a non-exec, Lisa recommended me to Konsileo. And when the founder, CEO came knocking, John, I was kind of, you know, insurance, what the heck? You know, that's just not, I know nothing about commercial insurance, broking, financial services, not a sector that I'd ever really saw myself in. I was in retail. At the time, I'd gone from books into the very group. Retail felt a sweet spot, or at least retail consumer goods. beauty care that kind of space and I just didn't see the connection but then when I got to understand what concilio was trying to achieve more around self-management that's when it all clicked and that's when I guess going back to the personal leadership that we learned at P&G and that sense of mission and drive and purpose that all came together really in concilio.
Speaker #0
So now you're there, how does that excite you for the future, this concept? Well, first of all, maybe explain a little bit practically how it works on a day-to-day basis. And how does that excite you, the potential of it for other organisations excite you?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so it works. We're a relatively small organisation, about 190 people now, growing very rapidly. And our employee workforce is predominantly insurance brokers. And in a typical insurance broking firm, you'd have many, many layers of management. You'd have a regional manager. responsible for a region you'd have little offices across you know Yorkshire whatever and people would be kind of set targets sales targets essentially from on high down there'd be Monday morning meetings where people would have to account for their their activity and time and how they were progressing versus their sales targets and what John who had been at Allianz for a big chunk of his career recognised is that there was a way in which to get back. to the real craft of insurance broking, this kind of relationship between an insurance broker and their client and the community and the advisory and real kind of human-to-human connection that was being lost as lots of insurance brokers were being moved into call centres because the premium, the income was deemed too low to merit that human-to-human relationship. So what we have is insurance brokers who have... No boss, they have the freedom to essentially run their own little businesses. They're fully employees, but they have the freedom to essentially run their businesses how they want. But we support that very much with both from a human perspective. So we have 40 coaches in our business who are peers and a very well structured coaching framework. And then we also have technology, which I think is the most exciting thing that we have in our organisation, which I think we could transplant. any organization on the planet technology underpins everything including the human relationships so we have a a broken platform which all of the stuff that people have to do to create policies on the platform of course we have that and it's our own bespoke platform but that platform is also the home of all of our coaching relationships the the way in which we support any kind of human to human interaction. For example, we have about 60 plus thousand relationships across the organisation where people are, oh, I've got this client in, you know, Aberdeenshire. But I live in Aberdeen, but I've not got the knowledge of the particular industry, maybe fisheries industry or something. Someone down in Kent has got that experience, right? Let's come together and serve that client. Again, it sounds kind of not that exciting, but the industry doesn't work in that way. Each office is separate. You've got your targets. You would never reach out to someone else. in order to help to help you deliver your targets so we've got this thing called the collaboration center which facilitates all of these 60 000 plus relationships the entire system works to enable the contract between people so like oh i've got you know i've got this client if you can help me on x then you know I'll give you 20 of the income or 30 or 40 and people will have multiple relationships like that across the company and that is then supported by P&L, which is live on the system that they can see so they can understand exactly how they're doing. And then there's a real sort of appreciation of fairness and the value exchange. So people who work in our organisation get 49% of all of the income that they write after a certain, you know, the certain criteria that need to be met clearly. So it's a very well thought through framework structure system in response to an industry that is. it's kind of killing the human part of the experience or the the sort of the dignity and the professional people move into insurance many people fall into like us accountants but when they're in it they realize that the the value that they're providing in their communities and the way in which they're supporting the small business economy which is 99% of the UK's economy is really meaningful yeah and that's been kind of wiped out in the rest of the industry.
Speaker #0
Yeah. Well. And it's exciting in a way because, well, you sound excited to have to be able to tackle these challenges. That's part of who you are, isn't it? To tackle these things from a big picture perspective and how you can join the dots, as you said a few times.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I think it's joining the dots. And it's also the biggest joy I have is when, you know, one of our brokers just before Christmas got his first third level of. bonus which is can be quite chunky for some of our brokers because they get 49% of everything they write and it was the first time he'd achieved that and it was £2,000 and he phoned me up and he just tears in his eyes my family are going to have a better Christmas and it's like, oh love it, this is this is what we're doing so I think I started off my career thinking that you could only have that impact if you worked in the charity sector but you can have that impact anywhere and helping our brokers to connect into something that they're really good at doing it in a way that is really protecting and advising their clients well and and we believe of course better than our competitors and serving their communities and being rewarded fairly for that that feels like really good work to me yeah it's it's interesting because as you're talking I'm thinking about why I do what I do
Speaker #0
And I tend to say that I love to unleash people's potential. I believe it's by everybody's potential being released that together we'll solve the world's biggest problems. Yes. And I think when you, when I heard you talk about an individual broker, when you see the impact you're having on individuals, is when it, when each person is released into what they can do and how we can do it in a way that, that is good work, like you say, that is. working towards human thriving and thriving of the planet and so on. I think it's just wonderful to see it. Before we close, I want to come back to that because I'm talking about human potential now. We haven't talked about your passion for individual leadership potential and the work you're doing with WYSE. Do you want to share a little bit about that?
Speaker #1
That has been one of the best things I've ever got involved in. Dr. Andrew McDowell, he's been part of WYSE, which is a UN affiliated charity for 30 plus years he i worked with him for a number of years he's the first person to bring self-management into the health care system so this sort of smooshing together of executive coaching in a clinical setting and helping clinicians to support their patients to be self-managing as opposed to that tell so very you know very closely aligned with personal that sense of personal leadership the charity he's been associated with wise supports young people age 18 to 35 in a very extended personal leadership programme of 12 days, four times a year in different locations around the world. And it's directed towards individuals who are already doing good work in their community. And it's activating even more that sense of personal leadership and mission, the sense of who I am and what I'm going to do in the world, how I'm going to express that intent and that mission. I wish I'd found it myself years ago and been in one of their programmes, but now I get to do it once a year, spend two weeks, a really tough gig in Italy, in a fantastic villa with a swimming pool and with 40 fabulous young people with a staff team of about 15. It's a learning journey for me as much as for the participants. It's just fabulous. There's nothing like it. I don't believe in the world. And it really plays into... all of the threads I think that are important to me around that sort of sense of mission, personal leadership, activating it, imagination, being able to see it through other people's actions and things they're doing. I mean, I'm interested in all of the young people and what they achieve. So it's wonderful to be part of it.
Speaker #0
I don't know about you, but every time I'm involved in, I'm not involved in that, but in similar things with people, it gives me so much hope for the future. I know we live in a very I don't want to over-exaggerate because there have been other periods of history where people have lived very difficult things that we've not had to suffer. But when you look at the things going on in the world, it's easy to lose hope. But when you look at the potential in people, when you look at people who are passionate for doing good and making change, it gives me a lot of energy.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker #0
So just as we close, would you be able to just maybe summarise for us, what are the key leadership principles that have really guided you throughout your journey?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so the activation of personal leadership in that sense of the being and the doing, how do we put ourselves into what we do? How do we direct that towards whatever we call purpose? It doesn't have to be a stated purpose. It can be a sense of purpose, a feeling, just a feeling that we're connecting to doing work that matters. That's really, really key. Imagination. I think I started this by talking about I became an accountant because my dad was an accountant. I think if we can see it, we can be it. And I think if we can imagine it, we can become it. We can do it. I think writing. writing for me has been that way of kind of bringing things into existence and that's kind of having that sense of imagination another one would be tenacity that sense of being able to just keep keep going even through dark times even when you feel lost or you feel really disconnected to who you are and who you're trying to become but just just keep going kind of have that idea that you know the whole steve jobs slightly cliched quote around joining the dots you can't join them you know you can only join them looking backwards not forward but you can know that there's dots you can know that there will be dots that will join up eventually you just don't know exactly how they're going to join up which is great that's the wonder of life isn't it so yeah having that sort of sense of tenacity and then the um sense of conversations really mattering and having tough conversations there's a great quote i did a sort of one day thing with the poet david white which uh he said that the next epoch of your existence is always through the doorway of a conversation. And I kind of hold that sort of every day. You know, if there's a tough moment in the board or the exec team, and we always have that sense of someone's not saying something here. There's music and there's words and they're not quite matching. So that sense of being bold enough, being brave enough, courageous enough to have the conversation that matters and it's tough, whether that's with yourself.
Speaker #0
Exactly.
Speaker #1
Your spouse, your family, your businesses, etc. that would be the fourth one for me.
Speaker #0
Well it's been a wonderful conversation and thank you so much for sharing your journey the good bits and the tough bits because we all need to know that someone else has been there before us and we're not alone if you have one encouragement to give to someone who is going through a backstop period of your career in the middle this messy middle as I call it what would you say to them
Speaker #1
I would say buy yourself a nice pen and a lovely notebook and just start writing. Big believer in the write it down, make it happen mentality. I've gone as far as writing job descriptions for myself in the past, et cetera. And some of that has come into reality. So yeah, capture everything. And you'll be astounded when you look back at who you were, who you are becoming. It's all there. And I think that can be an incredible resource to support you through your leadership journey.
Speaker #0
Yeah, as you said, if you can imagine it, you can believe it. You can make it happen almost. Write it down. You're kind of making something come to life that you didn't think was possible.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So thank you so much. It's been a wonderful conversation.
Speaker #1
Thank you, Ruth. I've enjoyed it.
Speaker #0
Hopefully we'll be in touch. I've got some ideas of things I want to bounce off you already.
Speaker #1
Likewise. Thanks, Ruth.
Speaker #0
I hope you found Vicky's story as thought-provoking as I did. If there's one powerful takeaway for me, it's the idea that sometimes we don't find clarity, we write our way into it. So here's a simple invitation for you. Take Vicky's advice and write your future as though it already exists. That might be a job description for your dream role, an end of year celebration speech, or even the words you'd love someone to say about you when you move on. Let your imagination lead. and see what surfaces. And if you're feeling stuck, unsure what's next or how to move forward, remember you don't have to figure it out alone. And I'd certainly love to help if I can. You can get in touch or book a free discovery call at yourpathtosuccess.ch. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep walking your own personal path to success.

About Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Your Path to Success is here to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey.

To find out more about Ruth's work with individuals and organisations, visit yourpathtosuccess.ch

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Your Path to Success is here to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey.

To find out more about Ruth's work with individuals and organisations, visit yourpathtosuccess.ch

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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Vicky Ferrier on Writing Herself Into Being  - Mid-Career Reckoning, Courage, and Leading for Good

What if your mid-career reckoning became an awakening — a chance to realign your strengths, values and purpose?

Vicky also supports young leaders globally through her work with WYSE, a UN-affiliated leadership development charity.

Key Topics:

Pivotal moments and mid-career questioning
Leading without hierarchy
Courage, humility, and imagination
Writing as a tool for clarity and growth

🔗 Links :

Learn more about Ruth’s coaching work: yourpathtosuccess.ch

Connect with Ruth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthkearnswollmann/

🎧 Listen now and be inspired to write your next chapter.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to Your Path to Success with me, Ruth Kearns-Volman. It's a podcast designed to inspire, encourage, and equip you on your personal leadership journey. Today's guest is Vicky Ferrier, Chief People and Commercial Officer at Konsileo, a commercial insurance broker with no managers. Sound unusual? It is, and that's part of what makes Vicky's story so compelling. In this role, She operates right at the intersection of people and performance, helping unleash individuals' leadership so that they can do good work that makes a real difference, both commercially and personally. But as you'll hear, that clarity came over time. This wasn't the career she imagined when she started out. In our conversation, Vicky shares what influenced her early choices, how she navigated the messy middle of her career, a season of questioning, re-evaluation. and rediscovery, and what she discovered about herself along the way. She speaks candidly about identity, alignment, and what it meant to write herself into being. It's a story of courage, reflection, and reinvention, and I'm delighted to share it with you. Let's dive in. So here we go. Well, welcome, Vicky. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Speaker #1
Thanks, Ruth. Happy to be here.
Speaker #0
Yeah, well, this is going to be a lot of fun because when we were working at P&G so many years ago, I knew you as Vicky from finance, someone who had a lot of personality, a lot of passion. And, you know, if I look at your job title today, you're chief commercial and people officer. How does that work? Finance and people?
Speaker #1
Yeah, well, very naturally, I believe. It's a combination of two things I think really are important from a value creation perspective, the human dimension and the commercial dimension. So when I was originally offered this role, which we created essentially in the organisation, it didn't exist. It felt very natural to bring those two parts together for me. But I guess that moving from being a chartered accountant in the public sector, where I started my career in my early 20s. through Procter & Gamble, through investor relations, through a bit of HR to here. It makes sense to me, but it's not necessarily so obvious to, I'm sure many accountants in the world would not see the connection, but I absolutely do.
Speaker #0
Yeah. So let's unpack it a bit because that's what I love about this podcast. We get to talk about your journey and everybody's journey is different. How did you start off as an accountant? How did that come about?
Speaker #1
My dad was an accountant. So a complete lack of imagination on my part. I think that goes to one of my big leadership principles is about having imagination. But yeah, I think people become what they can see. And whilst I did English literature at university and very much so myself going down a path of marketing or journalism, something that would require some kind of storytelling element to it. I became a chartered accountant in the public sector. Again very much driven yes by my dad being an accountant but this sense of mission that I had to do good to do good work to support my community I saw a career path at that age being more around charity work you know something CEO one of the big charities that's where my head was then it was fortuitous that when I qualified there happened to be at that time I don't know if it still exists, but there was... a movement around people who had qualified and moving, you know, seeing that as a new, almost like a graduation point, kind of starting again. Yeah, you qualify as a chartered accountant, but let's take a step back. Did you really want to be an accountant? And there was a headhunter here in Scotland who gathered all these lost souls, lost accountants that had become accountants by default kind of thing. And there was a careers fair at the Glen Eagles Hotel, the Glen Eagles Hotel. And that's the only reason I, not the only reason, but a big attraction for me going was because it was at the Glen Eagles Hotel. I came from an incredibly working class background, never had the opportunity to go to Glen Eagles. So, and it was included in overnight stay, which was unbelievable. And there was people there like Goldman Sachs, a lot of the big insurance and financial services employers in Scotland and P&G. And the P&G people I met, I just connected to. straight away. Claire Sheridan being one of them, shout out to her, and really just really found, oh my tribe, these are my people and that was what took me to joining PNG.
Speaker #0
And what was it, do you think, that the connection?
Speaker #1
I loved the energy that they had. They were all from the finance function, but they seemed to me to have that greater connection to the business, to not just the commercial side of the business, but the human side, the brand side, the sales side. It just seemed to me like a real connecting function that they were playing. which I felt was missing in a lot of the experience I'd had. Yeah,
Speaker #0
it was a bit of a broader overview, more strategic in a way.
Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker #0
So tell me a bit about your time at P&G. How long were you there?
Speaker #1
Nine years. Loved it. Loved every minute of it. Another friend, Matthew Tipple, once said that his experience of moving from his sort of more working class background, going to Cambridge University was one of the most formative of his life, but Procter & Gamble was the most formative of mine. Again, it was finding... one's tribe those people that just had a sense of energy a sense of possibility of mission of wanting to have to do good work and have impact and I love I just loved every minute of it I didn't follow a very traditional route which is probably why I only stayed nine years because I got to the point where I really had to decide if I was going to continue on a finance career path and I'd been recommended I'd done different things I did a year in marketing, doing a couple of different projects. One of them was looking at the potential of the black hair care opportunity. And I did a little spell in ADD, advertising development design, which I absolutely loved. I think that was probably one of the toughest areas in the business to get into. But if I could live my life again, I think that would be the sort of role I'd absolutely love to do. But being mentored by Chris de la Puente at the time, who was the general manager that I was reporting into, he gave some very wise advice, which was, look, there's hundreds of people in marketing that are incredibly talented. And yes, you might make it, but your USP is this finance person that can reach into the other areas of the business with some credibility and build relationships and build an understanding and connection of the whole system. and do that from a finance grounding rather than joining into another function. So it felt that I'd had this really wonderful nine years where I did lots of different projects, particularly in the M&A space. So I was involved with the acquisition of Clairol and Wella and Gillette, big, big companies into P&G and particularly into beauty and hair care. And had different aspects within them as well. I did divestiture of certain brands that were non-strategic that came with Wella. I did quite a lot of the sort of the human side of the integration on Gillette, as well as the trade terms. So there's kind of quite interesting roles. And that highlighted to me the whole area of investor relations. So a good friend of mine, Alison Kirkby, who I'm sure lots of people will know, Chief Executive BT now. she had moved into investor relations and I'd through speaking to her realized that I think if there was any sweet spot in a company that would be perfect for me it would be investor relations because it's marketing it's marketing the company it's talking which I love to do storytelling around the fortunes of the company but from a grounding of finance and understanding the real kind of way in which the company creates value for shareholders so that that was where I realized my absolute sweet spot was from a sort of career traditional career path point of view and so I kind of just put it out out there I guess that that's what I was looking for and SAB Miller beer company brewing company was at that time sadly no longer in existence it's been subsumed into a larger organization now but back then they were recruiting Procter & Gamble people because they saw the opportunity. of brand management in the beer category and I moved into the IR team there so that was a little whistle stop tour around P&G and how I eventually got to Investor Relations.
Speaker #0
Yeah so obviously for many of us who were at P&G one of the big things that we learned there was about ourselves about our personal leadership and so on what do you feel you learned during that time?
Speaker #1
Yeah personal leadership. Massive. I think we all recognise that P&G recruits for personal leadership, but it's not something we necessarily appreciate whilst we're in the goldfish bowl. When we're outside of it, we recognise that that is not the norm. It's not normal for people to have such a strong sense of their own sense of personal leadership, personal mission, the drive to get things done, the drive to have an impact. That's absolutely key. The second personally was that idea of storytelling and about leadership being about telling stories of possibility and I you know I'd done English literature at university but very early in my career at P&G I'd read an article in the Financial Times about the finance function being the key storytellers in an organisation which I felt was quite controversial in P&G given the importance of marketing and brands to P&G in terms of storytelling but I created a little course for the function and called finance as storytellers. And that helped create that red thread through my experience that made sense to me anyway, of why someone who'd loved stories and English and fell in love with the psychoanalytic theory of the books of Toni Morrison or whatever could then become an accountant. And then the third one was really around values and purpose. And I'm not sure if people know this, but I was listening to a podcast with Carol Sanford, who's now passed, unfortunately, many years ago. And she was a consultant with P&G in the 60s and 70s, when P&G was really at the forefront of the thought, the concept that companies have a purpose, a corporate entity has a purpose. And I was moving into organisations that were really just in the 90s, 2000s, 2010, who were kind of thinking about this for the first time. And we'd all been in that and we'd not been, we weren't indoctrinated by it. It was just part of our experience there. So that sense of being part of something that was meaningful and impactful and changing the lives of the world's consumers was something that really lived with me and lives with me today in the work that I'm doing.
Speaker #0
Yeah, certainly for me, I know that I worked in Consumer Insights and the fact that our purpose was about improving people's lives and that there was a belief in the company that if we did the right thing by the consumer, then the consumer would reward us with buying our products. That was a big driver for me from a values point of view and wanting to really improve things for people yeah so that resonates strongly with me. So what about what you learned about your weaknesses while you were there or during this period of your career?
Speaker #1
Oh gosh so many so so much to learn. Impatience massive massive one I think there is a slight downside to the experience many can have at P&G in the sense of assignments and moving every sort of two or three years, right, or even less. And I think that then created this hunger and drive to, okay, done it now, 18 months, two years, what's next? When in the sort of next decade of my career, some people have accused me of being on to the next shiny thing. I don't personally think that's true. I think I'm continuously trying to just join the dots and deepen my... experience across systems however the accusation is is probably got some truth in it in terms of that kind of next new thing I think there was a part of me that felt a deep deep sort of in a sort of heavy shouldered kind of way responsibility to know and to have the answers which I don't think has to be the case in P&G but it certainly it activated a part of me that was more perfectionist and more as I say, kind of taken that weight of responsibility of the world on my shoulders, which I've since learned that really what clearly what works is working in teams and leveraging the strengths of others, et cetera. And that's taken me some time to learn. And I think it didn't necessarily bring out the best of me in terms of maybe a slight sense of arrogance or knowing it all at parts of my career, which I'm not particularly proud of. So that would be the ones I think that would spring to mind.
Speaker #0
I want to come back to the impatience. Is there ever a time where you feel like your impatience has tripped you up? Because again, by the way, impatience is kind of the flip side of drive. You know, sometimes we want to move things forward, but if it's pushed too far, it can sometimes trip us up, can't it?
Speaker #1
Oh, yes, absolutely. The first move I made from P&G into SCB Miller, I should have stayed. I was headhunted to move into a company. In my defense, it was in Scotland, so it represented an opportunity to move home, which is quite rare. It was a company just promoted into the FTSE 100. So again, quite a rare opportunity to be able to head up an investor relations and external comms team in Scotland. However, I'd been in SAB at that point for three years. I definitely didn't. know everything. I could have spent at least another year, a couple of years in the IR team and really deepening my expertise. It was an award-winning team. It was very, very well resourced. I think there was about five or six of us in the team. And going from that well-resourced sort of footsie, I think it was a top 10 company. into a newly promoted into the FTSE 100 with very little in way of resource and a very small team. I think I hadn't, I didn't have enough of a grounding in investor relations at that point to be able to create an entire function around myself. I was still learning and that proved to be like a very difficult move for me, which was purely driven, purely, okay it was in scotland etc so there was a lot of attractiveness about it, but it was an ego-driven move and it was this impatient desire to move up the hierarchy move you know to a more status better job title more money kind of role so that's my big if i was looking at a cv from a cv point of view big regret I don't regret it terribly because we all have experiences that form us etc and that was definitely one of them but that would be the That would be the place where I'd go back to myself at age 37 or 40, wherever I was, and just say, calm down. It'll come, it'll happen. Just do good work. Yeah.
Speaker #0
You know, it's a point in our lives, isn't it, when we're sort of getting towards 40, where there's a lot going on and we learn a lot. And often people experience some questioning in their careers. How was that period for you?
Speaker #1
Dark. yeah it was it was tough it was really tough my my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer and that was that was difficult we'd moved to I'm from Scotland live in Edinburgh now my parents had moved from Edinburgh to the south to London to be closer to us when we had children then I'd moved back to Scotland but you know after about three or four years of them been down there and there was a whole there was a whole bunch of things that came to the surface at that time as as it does when when one is looking at losing a parent particularly you know she was 60 so it wasn't she wasn't particularly old, very vibrant yoga swimmer you know kind of this vibrant individual who'd had a lot of mental health issues through her life as well which I hadn't spoken about to anyone other than in a highly cognitive way as a sort of you know yeah nothing nothing much below the surface so it was real I guess it was a sense of a sort of reckoning, like, OK, so what are you going to do with your life now? Like you were this individual who wanted to be a chief executive of a charity or whatever. And what the heck, you know, you've ended up in the, you know, in beer. And then in the Weir group, I was in oil fracking and minerals and stuff, you know, it's kind of sort of like, what the heck? It was definitely went on for more than a few years. I mean, I know this is very normal for most people to have this period in their career. The challenge is when you're in it, you don't know when you're going to get out the other side.
Speaker #0
What was your process and what did you learn through that?
Speaker #1
I wrote a lot. I think that was definitely me going back to the love that I had. I mean, I'm from an age where I still wrote all my university essays out longhand. I didn't even write them on a word processor. So I did a lot of writing. And I was always told that you can't self... therapize so give yourself therapy but I felt through writing that I did that and I think I was just continually going down a layer and down a layer and down there to the point that got slightly ridiculous I wouldn't necessarily recommend that but it was very good for me it was very typical of me to get very thorough and very deep and very intense and treated it like a PhD I treated myself like a PhD I've got four or five notebooks of that and it's there's quite remarkable material in there. It was like writing myself into being and I just felt utterly burnt out. So that led me actually, I took a call from an ex-P&G friend, Ben Fletcher, who was the finance director at Boots and bless him, he popped up to Edinburgh on a store visit and we just spent a few hours chatting actually like about all of these experiences I'd had and he persuaded me and I was easily persuaded that joining Boots would be would be really good in a sort of this it was the start of this hybrid role so I was finance director for the UK stores but I was also head of learning and development for the finance function and we together we sort of envisaged this creating this finance function that would be very similar to a P&G style finance function that worked in this sort of triumvirate. with marketing and sales to sort of commercially lead the business and develop the leadership capacity of the finance function so that that was very good it didn't last very long because ben was moved internally or made a move internally and then his replacement didn't see the mission, the vision that we were trying to create. But it allowed me to do some work that then led me to my next move, which was for six years, I had a business with a wonderful individual who's one of the sort of my real kind of mentors in my life, Michael Cahill, who'd been at UBS, been in investment banking, had been a financial analyst. So I knew him from the days of being in investor relations. He trained me in the city and company valuation. and we created a company together, which was really, it was in retrospect, it was really around trying to create a movement within, particularly within the finance function, but we ended up working with all functions, marketing, sales, IT, CEOs, around consciously leading for value creation and joining the dots from what you do inside the company and how that's reflected in the share price. And that was that was amazing work absolutely fantastic work not that many people even at a very senior level really appreciate and are able to join the dots the share price is doing this but this is actually what's driving it it's not driving it the activity that we're doing today is not necessarily driver it's decisions that we made two three years ago and financial leadership is almost always at at the nucleus of why the share price is what it is it's either not enough of it stopping big contracts being signed etc with one company that that should never have been signed or or or too too little of it so yeah that was fantastic work really really really interesting. So I want to pause there because you talked a lot, there was a lot going on and it sounds like there was this part where you know writing for you was a way of making sense of the story. Ben came along and helped you kind of reconnect with putting together, it was the beginning of putting together this finance with the bigger picture and also people. So there was a kind of a turn somewhere in finding or putting words back to the meaning for you. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker #0
How did that then eventually get you to where you are now? Because now you're in this role, which is. if I understand correctly, a bit of a sweet spot there between the people part and the finance part, the big picture finance, commercial part, the big picture.
Speaker #1
Yeah. So one of the things I learned from Michael, and I think this is so important for all small businesses, is we had a number of sort of concepts and ideas that were really at the heart of what we were delivering, what we wanted to deliver for our clients. And we, rather than just kind of talk about these ideas yeah you know like the neurological levels of change if you know that model from Robert Dilts um in NLP or Nancy Klein's time to think work in terms of listening or more prosaically around value creation and his his work around what he calls evaluation villa and how value is created in organizations. We had these ideas but rather than just talk about them we learned together so we did courses together, we did week-long programs with people, we did stuff values, we did lots and lots of things to learn together so we were really aligned and coming from the same sort of root and heritage if you like, to really ensure we were on the same page around these various concepts we did a lot of learning together so that experience of learning together with my business partner to what's on the surface of it looked like training for CFOs to understand value creation really went quite deep, which is sort of a theme, that was what kind of created ah there's a in the world of these companies that are doing something very very different you know no managers entrepreneurial business units self-management and I got into that tribe if you like there's a woman called Lisa Gill who was quite new into that world at the time as well I got speaking to her, she has a podcast and shout out to Lisa on her podcast leadermorphosis, and that that connection led me to Frederick Laloux and his book reinventing organizations I supported the translation of his book into the illustrated version. And then when Konsileo were looking for a new board member, a non-exec, Lisa recommended me to Konsileo. And when the founder, CEO came knocking, John, I was kind of, you know, insurance, what the heck? You know, that's just not, I know nothing about commercial insurance, broking, financial services, not a sector that I'd ever really saw myself in. I was in retail. At the time, I'd gone from books into the very group. Retail felt a sweet spot, or at least retail consumer goods. beauty care that kind of space and I just didn't see the connection but then when I got to understand what concilio was trying to achieve more around self-management that's when it all clicked and that's when I guess going back to the personal leadership that we learned at P&G and that sense of mission and drive and purpose that all came together really in concilio.
Speaker #0
So now you're there, how does that excite you for the future, this concept? Well, first of all, maybe explain a little bit practically how it works on a day-to-day basis. And how does that excite you, the potential of it for other organisations excite you?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so it works. We're a relatively small organisation, about 190 people now, growing very rapidly. And our employee workforce is predominantly insurance brokers. And in a typical insurance broking firm, you'd have many, many layers of management. You'd have a regional manager. responsible for a region you'd have little offices across you know Yorkshire whatever and people would be kind of set targets sales targets essentially from on high down there'd be Monday morning meetings where people would have to account for their their activity and time and how they were progressing versus their sales targets and what John who had been at Allianz for a big chunk of his career recognised is that there was a way in which to get back. to the real craft of insurance broking, this kind of relationship between an insurance broker and their client and the community and the advisory and real kind of human-to-human connection that was being lost as lots of insurance brokers were being moved into call centres because the premium, the income was deemed too low to merit that human-to-human relationship. So what we have is insurance brokers who have... No boss, they have the freedom to essentially run their own little businesses. They're fully employees, but they have the freedom to essentially run their businesses how they want. But we support that very much with both from a human perspective. So we have 40 coaches in our business who are peers and a very well structured coaching framework. And then we also have technology, which I think is the most exciting thing that we have in our organisation, which I think we could transplant. any organization on the planet technology underpins everything including the human relationships so we have a a broken platform which all of the stuff that people have to do to create policies on the platform of course we have that and it's our own bespoke platform but that platform is also the home of all of our coaching relationships the the way in which we support any kind of human to human interaction. For example, we have about 60 plus thousand relationships across the organisation where people are, oh, I've got this client in, you know, Aberdeenshire. But I live in Aberdeen, but I've not got the knowledge of the particular industry, maybe fisheries industry or something. Someone down in Kent has got that experience, right? Let's come together and serve that client. Again, it sounds kind of not that exciting, but the industry doesn't work in that way. Each office is separate. You've got your targets. You would never reach out to someone else. in order to help to help you deliver your targets so we've got this thing called the collaboration center which facilitates all of these 60 000 plus relationships the entire system works to enable the contract between people so like oh i've got you know i've got this client if you can help me on x then you know I'll give you 20 of the income or 30 or 40 and people will have multiple relationships like that across the company and that is then supported by P&L, which is live on the system that they can see so they can understand exactly how they're doing. And then there's a real sort of appreciation of fairness and the value exchange. So people who work in our organisation get 49% of all of the income that they write after a certain, you know, the certain criteria that need to be met clearly. So it's a very well thought through framework structure system in response to an industry that is. it's kind of killing the human part of the experience or the the sort of the dignity and the professional people move into insurance many people fall into like us accountants but when they're in it they realize that the the value that they're providing in their communities and the way in which they're supporting the small business economy which is 99% of the UK's economy is really meaningful yeah and that's been kind of wiped out in the rest of the industry.
Speaker #0
Yeah. Well. And it's exciting in a way because, well, you sound excited to have to be able to tackle these challenges. That's part of who you are, isn't it? To tackle these things from a big picture perspective and how you can join the dots, as you said a few times.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I think it's joining the dots. And it's also the biggest joy I have is when, you know, one of our brokers just before Christmas got his first third level of. bonus which is can be quite chunky for some of our brokers because they get 49% of everything they write and it was the first time he'd achieved that and it was £2,000 and he phoned me up and he just tears in his eyes my family are going to have a better Christmas and it's like, oh love it, this is this is what we're doing so I think I started off my career thinking that you could only have that impact if you worked in the charity sector but you can have that impact anywhere and helping our brokers to connect into something that they're really good at doing it in a way that is really protecting and advising their clients well and and we believe of course better than our competitors and serving their communities and being rewarded fairly for that that feels like really good work to me yeah it's it's interesting because as you're talking I'm thinking about why I do what I do
Speaker #0
And I tend to say that I love to unleash people's potential. I believe it's by everybody's potential being released that together we'll solve the world's biggest problems. Yes. And I think when you, when I heard you talk about an individual broker, when you see the impact you're having on individuals, is when it, when each person is released into what they can do and how we can do it in a way that, that is good work, like you say, that is. working towards human thriving and thriving of the planet and so on. I think it's just wonderful to see it. Before we close, I want to come back to that because I'm talking about human potential now. We haven't talked about your passion for individual leadership potential and the work you're doing with WYSE. Do you want to share a little bit about that?
Speaker #1
That has been one of the best things I've ever got involved in. Dr. Andrew McDowell, he's been part of WYSE, which is a UN affiliated charity for 30 plus years he i worked with him for a number of years he's the first person to bring self-management into the health care system so this sort of smooshing together of executive coaching in a clinical setting and helping clinicians to support their patients to be self-managing as opposed to that tell so very you know very closely aligned with personal that sense of personal leadership the charity he's been associated with wise supports young people age 18 to 35 in a very extended personal leadership programme of 12 days, four times a year in different locations around the world. And it's directed towards individuals who are already doing good work in their community. And it's activating even more that sense of personal leadership and mission, the sense of who I am and what I'm going to do in the world, how I'm going to express that intent and that mission. I wish I'd found it myself years ago and been in one of their programmes, but now I get to do it once a year, spend two weeks, a really tough gig in Italy, in a fantastic villa with a swimming pool and with 40 fabulous young people with a staff team of about 15. It's a learning journey for me as much as for the participants. It's just fabulous. There's nothing like it. I don't believe in the world. And it really plays into... all of the threads I think that are important to me around that sort of sense of mission, personal leadership, activating it, imagination, being able to see it through other people's actions and things they're doing. I mean, I'm interested in all of the young people and what they achieve. So it's wonderful to be part of it.
Speaker #0
I don't know about you, but every time I'm involved in, I'm not involved in that, but in similar things with people, it gives me so much hope for the future. I know we live in a very I don't want to over-exaggerate because there have been other periods of history where people have lived very difficult things that we've not had to suffer. But when you look at the things going on in the world, it's easy to lose hope. But when you look at the potential in people, when you look at people who are passionate for doing good and making change, it gives me a lot of energy.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker #0
So just as we close, would you be able to just maybe summarise for us, what are the key leadership principles that have really guided you throughout your journey?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so the activation of personal leadership in that sense of the being and the doing, how do we put ourselves into what we do? How do we direct that towards whatever we call purpose? It doesn't have to be a stated purpose. It can be a sense of purpose, a feeling, just a feeling that we're connecting to doing work that matters. That's really, really key. Imagination. I think I started this by talking about I became an accountant because my dad was an accountant. I think if we can see it, we can be it. And I think if we can imagine it, we can become it. We can do it. I think writing. writing for me has been that way of kind of bringing things into existence and that's kind of having that sense of imagination another one would be tenacity that sense of being able to just keep keep going even through dark times even when you feel lost or you feel really disconnected to who you are and who you're trying to become but just just keep going kind of have that idea that you know the whole steve jobs slightly cliched quote around joining the dots you can't join them you know you can only join them looking backwards not forward but you can know that there's dots you can know that there will be dots that will join up eventually you just don't know exactly how they're going to join up which is great that's the wonder of life isn't it so yeah having that sort of sense of tenacity and then the um sense of conversations really mattering and having tough conversations there's a great quote i did a sort of one day thing with the poet david white which uh he said that the next epoch of your existence is always through the doorway of a conversation. And I kind of hold that sort of every day. You know, if there's a tough moment in the board or the exec team, and we always have that sense of someone's not saying something here. There's music and there's words and they're not quite matching. So that sense of being bold enough, being brave enough, courageous enough to have the conversation that matters and it's tough, whether that's with yourself.
Speaker #0
Exactly.
Speaker #1
Your spouse, your family, your businesses, etc. that would be the fourth one for me.
Speaker #0
Well it's been a wonderful conversation and thank you so much for sharing your journey the good bits and the tough bits because we all need to know that someone else has been there before us and we're not alone if you have one encouragement to give to someone who is going through a backstop period of your career in the middle this messy middle as I call it what would you say to them
Speaker #1
I would say buy yourself a nice pen and a lovely notebook and just start writing. Big believer in the write it down, make it happen mentality. I've gone as far as writing job descriptions for myself in the past, et cetera. And some of that has come into reality. So yeah, capture everything. And you'll be astounded when you look back at who you were, who you are becoming. It's all there. And I think that can be an incredible resource to support you through your leadership journey.
Speaker #0
Yeah, as you said, if you can imagine it, you can believe it. You can make it happen almost. Write it down. You're kind of making something come to life that you didn't think was possible.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So thank you so much. It's been a wonderful conversation.
Speaker #1
Thank you, Ruth. I've enjoyed it.
Speaker #0
Hopefully we'll be in touch. I've got some ideas of things I want to bounce off you already.
Speaker #1
Likewise. Thanks, Ruth.
Speaker #0
I hope you found Vicky's story as thought-provoking as I did. If there's one powerful takeaway for me, it's the idea that sometimes we don't find clarity, we write our way into it. So here's a simple invitation for you. Take Vicky's advice and write your future as though it already exists. That might be a job description for your dream role, an end of year celebration speech, or even the words you'd love someone to say about you when you move on. Let your imagination lead. and see what surfaces. And if you're feeling stuck, unsure what's next or how to move forward, remember you don't have to figure it out alone. And I'd certainly love to help if I can. You can get in touch or book a free discovery call at yourpathtosuccess.ch. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep walking your own personal path to success.

About Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Your Path to Success is here to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey.

To find out more about Ruth's work with individuals and organisations, visit yourpathtosuccess.ch

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Your Path to Success is here to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey.

To find out more about Ruth's work with individuals and organisations, visit yourpathtosuccess.ch

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Description

Vicky Ferrier on Writing Herself Into Being  - Mid-Career Reckoning, Courage, and Leading for Good

What if your mid-career reckoning became an awakening — a chance to realign your strengths, values and purpose?

Vicky also supports young leaders globally through her work with WYSE, a UN-affiliated leadership development charity.

Key Topics:

Pivotal moments and mid-career questioning
Leading without hierarchy
Courage, humility, and imagination
Writing as a tool for clarity and growth

🔗 Links :

Learn more about Ruth’s coaching work: yourpathtosuccess.ch

Connect with Ruth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthkearnswollmann/

🎧 Listen now and be inspired to write your next chapter.

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
Welcome to Your Path to Success with me, Ruth Kearns-Volman. It's a podcast designed to inspire, encourage, and equip you on your personal leadership journey. Today's guest is Vicky Ferrier, Chief People and Commercial Officer at Konsileo, a commercial insurance broker with no managers. Sound unusual? It is, and that's part of what makes Vicky's story so compelling. In this role, She operates right at the intersection of people and performance, helping unleash individuals' leadership so that they can do good work that makes a real difference, both commercially and personally. But as you'll hear, that clarity came over time. This wasn't the career she imagined when she started out. In our conversation, Vicky shares what influenced her early choices, how she navigated the messy middle of her career, a season of questioning, re-evaluation. and rediscovery, and what she discovered about herself along the way. She speaks candidly about identity, alignment, and what it meant to write herself into being. It's a story of courage, reflection, and reinvention, and I'm delighted to share it with you. Let's dive in. So here we go. Well, welcome, Vicky. It's great to have you on the podcast.
Speaker #1
Thanks, Ruth. Happy to be here.
Speaker #0
Yeah, well, this is going to be a lot of fun because when we were working at P&G so many years ago, I knew you as Vicky from finance, someone who had a lot of personality, a lot of passion. And, you know, if I look at your job title today, you're chief commercial and people officer. How does that work? Finance and people?
Speaker #1
Yeah, well, very naturally, I believe. It's a combination of two things I think really are important from a value creation perspective, the human dimension and the commercial dimension. So when I was originally offered this role, which we created essentially in the organisation, it didn't exist. It felt very natural to bring those two parts together for me. But I guess that moving from being a chartered accountant in the public sector, where I started my career in my early 20s. through Procter & Gamble, through investor relations, through a bit of HR to here. It makes sense to me, but it's not necessarily so obvious to, I'm sure many accountants in the world would not see the connection, but I absolutely do.
Speaker #0
Yeah. So let's unpack it a bit because that's what I love about this podcast. We get to talk about your journey and everybody's journey is different. How did you start off as an accountant? How did that come about?
Speaker #1
My dad was an accountant. So a complete lack of imagination on my part. I think that goes to one of my big leadership principles is about having imagination. But yeah, I think people become what they can see. And whilst I did English literature at university and very much so myself going down a path of marketing or journalism, something that would require some kind of storytelling element to it. I became a chartered accountant in the public sector. Again very much driven yes by my dad being an accountant but this sense of mission that I had to do good to do good work to support my community I saw a career path at that age being more around charity work you know something CEO one of the big charities that's where my head was then it was fortuitous that when I qualified there happened to be at that time I don't know if it still exists, but there was... a movement around people who had qualified and moving, you know, seeing that as a new, almost like a graduation point, kind of starting again. Yeah, you qualify as a chartered accountant, but let's take a step back. Did you really want to be an accountant? And there was a headhunter here in Scotland who gathered all these lost souls, lost accountants that had become accountants by default kind of thing. And there was a careers fair at the Glen Eagles Hotel, the Glen Eagles Hotel. And that's the only reason I, not the only reason, but a big attraction for me going was because it was at the Glen Eagles Hotel. I came from an incredibly working class background, never had the opportunity to go to Glen Eagles. So, and it was included in overnight stay, which was unbelievable. And there was people there like Goldman Sachs, a lot of the big insurance and financial services employers in Scotland and P&G. And the P&G people I met, I just connected to. straight away. Claire Sheridan being one of them, shout out to her, and really just really found, oh my tribe, these are my people and that was what took me to joining PNG.
Speaker #0
And what was it, do you think, that the connection?
Speaker #1
I loved the energy that they had. They were all from the finance function, but they seemed to me to have that greater connection to the business, to not just the commercial side of the business, but the human side, the brand side, the sales side. It just seemed to me like a real connecting function that they were playing. which I felt was missing in a lot of the experience I'd had. Yeah,
Speaker #0
it was a bit of a broader overview, more strategic in a way.
Speaker #1
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker #0
So tell me a bit about your time at P&G. How long were you there?
Speaker #1
Nine years. Loved it. Loved every minute of it. Another friend, Matthew Tipple, once said that his experience of moving from his sort of more working class background, going to Cambridge University was one of the most formative of his life, but Procter & Gamble was the most formative of mine. Again, it was finding... one's tribe those people that just had a sense of energy a sense of possibility of mission of wanting to have to do good work and have impact and I love I just loved every minute of it I didn't follow a very traditional route which is probably why I only stayed nine years because I got to the point where I really had to decide if I was going to continue on a finance career path and I'd been recommended I'd done different things I did a year in marketing, doing a couple of different projects. One of them was looking at the potential of the black hair care opportunity. And I did a little spell in ADD, advertising development design, which I absolutely loved. I think that was probably one of the toughest areas in the business to get into. But if I could live my life again, I think that would be the sort of role I'd absolutely love to do. But being mentored by Chris de la Puente at the time, who was the general manager that I was reporting into, he gave some very wise advice, which was, look, there's hundreds of people in marketing that are incredibly talented. And yes, you might make it, but your USP is this finance person that can reach into the other areas of the business with some credibility and build relationships and build an understanding and connection of the whole system. and do that from a finance grounding rather than joining into another function. So it felt that I'd had this really wonderful nine years where I did lots of different projects, particularly in the M&A space. So I was involved with the acquisition of Clairol and Wella and Gillette, big, big companies into P&G and particularly into beauty and hair care. And had different aspects within them as well. I did divestiture of certain brands that were non-strategic that came with Wella. I did quite a lot of the sort of the human side of the integration on Gillette, as well as the trade terms. So there's kind of quite interesting roles. And that highlighted to me the whole area of investor relations. So a good friend of mine, Alison Kirkby, who I'm sure lots of people will know, Chief Executive BT now. she had moved into investor relations and I'd through speaking to her realized that I think if there was any sweet spot in a company that would be perfect for me it would be investor relations because it's marketing it's marketing the company it's talking which I love to do storytelling around the fortunes of the company but from a grounding of finance and understanding the real kind of way in which the company creates value for shareholders so that that was where I realized my absolute sweet spot was from a sort of career traditional career path point of view and so I kind of just put it out out there I guess that that's what I was looking for and SAB Miller beer company brewing company was at that time sadly no longer in existence it's been subsumed into a larger organization now but back then they were recruiting Procter & Gamble people because they saw the opportunity. of brand management in the beer category and I moved into the IR team there so that was a little whistle stop tour around P&G and how I eventually got to Investor Relations.
Speaker #0
Yeah so obviously for many of us who were at P&G one of the big things that we learned there was about ourselves about our personal leadership and so on what do you feel you learned during that time?
Speaker #1
Yeah personal leadership. Massive. I think we all recognise that P&G recruits for personal leadership, but it's not something we necessarily appreciate whilst we're in the goldfish bowl. When we're outside of it, we recognise that that is not the norm. It's not normal for people to have such a strong sense of their own sense of personal leadership, personal mission, the drive to get things done, the drive to have an impact. That's absolutely key. The second personally was that idea of storytelling and about leadership being about telling stories of possibility and I you know I'd done English literature at university but very early in my career at P&G I'd read an article in the Financial Times about the finance function being the key storytellers in an organisation which I felt was quite controversial in P&G given the importance of marketing and brands to P&G in terms of storytelling but I created a little course for the function and called finance as storytellers. And that helped create that red thread through my experience that made sense to me anyway, of why someone who'd loved stories and English and fell in love with the psychoanalytic theory of the books of Toni Morrison or whatever could then become an accountant. And then the third one was really around values and purpose. And I'm not sure if people know this, but I was listening to a podcast with Carol Sanford, who's now passed, unfortunately, many years ago. And she was a consultant with P&G in the 60s and 70s, when P&G was really at the forefront of the thought, the concept that companies have a purpose, a corporate entity has a purpose. And I was moving into organisations that were really just in the 90s, 2000s, 2010, who were kind of thinking about this for the first time. And we'd all been in that and we'd not been, we weren't indoctrinated by it. It was just part of our experience there. So that sense of being part of something that was meaningful and impactful and changing the lives of the world's consumers was something that really lived with me and lives with me today in the work that I'm doing.
Speaker #0
Yeah, certainly for me, I know that I worked in Consumer Insights and the fact that our purpose was about improving people's lives and that there was a belief in the company that if we did the right thing by the consumer, then the consumer would reward us with buying our products. That was a big driver for me from a values point of view and wanting to really improve things for people yeah so that resonates strongly with me. So what about what you learned about your weaknesses while you were there or during this period of your career?
Speaker #1
Oh gosh so many so so much to learn. Impatience massive massive one I think there is a slight downside to the experience many can have at P&G in the sense of assignments and moving every sort of two or three years, right, or even less. And I think that then created this hunger and drive to, okay, done it now, 18 months, two years, what's next? When in the sort of next decade of my career, some people have accused me of being on to the next shiny thing. I don't personally think that's true. I think I'm continuously trying to just join the dots and deepen my... experience across systems however the accusation is is probably got some truth in it in terms of that kind of next new thing I think there was a part of me that felt a deep deep sort of in a sort of heavy shouldered kind of way responsibility to know and to have the answers which I don't think has to be the case in P&G but it certainly it activated a part of me that was more perfectionist and more as I say, kind of taken that weight of responsibility of the world on my shoulders, which I've since learned that really what clearly what works is working in teams and leveraging the strengths of others, et cetera. And that's taken me some time to learn. And I think it didn't necessarily bring out the best of me in terms of maybe a slight sense of arrogance or knowing it all at parts of my career, which I'm not particularly proud of. So that would be the ones I think that would spring to mind.
Speaker #0
I want to come back to the impatience. Is there ever a time where you feel like your impatience has tripped you up? Because again, by the way, impatience is kind of the flip side of drive. You know, sometimes we want to move things forward, but if it's pushed too far, it can sometimes trip us up, can't it?
Speaker #1
Oh, yes, absolutely. The first move I made from P&G into SCB Miller, I should have stayed. I was headhunted to move into a company. In my defense, it was in Scotland, so it represented an opportunity to move home, which is quite rare. It was a company just promoted into the FTSE 100. So again, quite a rare opportunity to be able to head up an investor relations and external comms team in Scotland. However, I'd been in SAB at that point for three years. I definitely didn't. know everything. I could have spent at least another year, a couple of years in the IR team and really deepening my expertise. It was an award-winning team. It was very, very well resourced. I think there was about five or six of us in the team. And going from that well-resourced sort of footsie, I think it was a top 10 company. into a newly promoted into the FTSE 100 with very little in way of resource and a very small team. I think I hadn't, I didn't have enough of a grounding in investor relations at that point to be able to create an entire function around myself. I was still learning and that proved to be like a very difficult move for me, which was purely driven, purely, okay it was in scotland etc so there was a lot of attractiveness about it, but it was an ego-driven move and it was this impatient desire to move up the hierarchy move you know to a more status better job title more money kind of role so that's my big if i was looking at a cv from a cv point of view big regret I don't regret it terribly because we all have experiences that form us etc and that was definitely one of them but that would be the That would be the place where I'd go back to myself at age 37 or 40, wherever I was, and just say, calm down. It'll come, it'll happen. Just do good work. Yeah.
Speaker #0
You know, it's a point in our lives, isn't it, when we're sort of getting towards 40, where there's a lot going on and we learn a lot. And often people experience some questioning in their careers. How was that period for you?
Speaker #1
Dark. yeah it was it was tough it was really tough my my mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer and that was that was difficult we'd moved to I'm from Scotland live in Edinburgh now my parents had moved from Edinburgh to the south to London to be closer to us when we had children then I'd moved back to Scotland but you know after about three or four years of them been down there and there was a whole there was a whole bunch of things that came to the surface at that time as as it does when when one is looking at losing a parent particularly you know she was 60 so it wasn't she wasn't particularly old, very vibrant yoga swimmer you know kind of this vibrant individual who'd had a lot of mental health issues through her life as well which I hadn't spoken about to anyone other than in a highly cognitive way as a sort of you know yeah nothing nothing much below the surface so it was real I guess it was a sense of a sort of reckoning, like, OK, so what are you going to do with your life now? Like you were this individual who wanted to be a chief executive of a charity or whatever. And what the heck, you know, you've ended up in the, you know, in beer. And then in the Weir group, I was in oil fracking and minerals and stuff, you know, it's kind of sort of like, what the heck? It was definitely went on for more than a few years. I mean, I know this is very normal for most people to have this period in their career. The challenge is when you're in it, you don't know when you're going to get out the other side.
Speaker #0
What was your process and what did you learn through that?
Speaker #1
I wrote a lot. I think that was definitely me going back to the love that I had. I mean, I'm from an age where I still wrote all my university essays out longhand. I didn't even write them on a word processor. So I did a lot of writing. And I was always told that you can't self... therapize so give yourself therapy but I felt through writing that I did that and I think I was just continually going down a layer and down a layer and down there to the point that got slightly ridiculous I wouldn't necessarily recommend that but it was very good for me it was very typical of me to get very thorough and very deep and very intense and treated it like a PhD I treated myself like a PhD I've got four or five notebooks of that and it's there's quite remarkable material in there. It was like writing myself into being and I just felt utterly burnt out. So that led me actually, I took a call from an ex-P&G friend, Ben Fletcher, who was the finance director at Boots and bless him, he popped up to Edinburgh on a store visit and we just spent a few hours chatting actually like about all of these experiences I'd had and he persuaded me and I was easily persuaded that joining Boots would be would be really good in a sort of this it was the start of this hybrid role so I was finance director for the UK stores but I was also head of learning and development for the finance function and we together we sort of envisaged this creating this finance function that would be very similar to a P&G style finance function that worked in this sort of triumvirate. with marketing and sales to sort of commercially lead the business and develop the leadership capacity of the finance function so that that was very good it didn't last very long because ben was moved internally or made a move internally and then his replacement didn't see the mission, the vision that we were trying to create. But it allowed me to do some work that then led me to my next move, which was for six years, I had a business with a wonderful individual who's one of the sort of my real kind of mentors in my life, Michael Cahill, who'd been at UBS, been in investment banking, had been a financial analyst. So I knew him from the days of being in investor relations. He trained me in the city and company valuation. and we created a company together, which was really, it was in retrospect, it was really around trying to create a movement within, particularly within the finance function, but we ended up working with all functions, marketing, sales, IT, CEOs, around consciously leading for value creation and joining the dots from what you do inside the company and how that's reflected in the share price. And that was that was amazing work absolutely fantastic work not that many people even at a very senior level really appreciate and are able to join the dots the share price is doing this but this is actually what's driving it it's not driving it the activity that we're doing today is not necessarily driver it's decisions that we made two three years ago and financial leadership is almost always at at the nucleus of why the share price is what it is it's either not enough of it stopping big contracts being signed etc with one company that that should never have been signed or or or too too little of it so yeah that was fantastic work really really really interesting. So I want to pause there because you talked a lot, there was a lot going on and it sounds like there was this part where you know writing for you was a way of making sense of the story. Ben came along and helped you kind of reconnect with putting together, it was the beginning of putting together this finance with the bigger picture and also people. So there was a kind of a turn somewhere in finding or putting words back to the meaning for you. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker #0
How did that then eventually get you to where you are now? Because now you're in this role, which is. if I understand correctly, a bit of a sweet spot there between the people part and the finance part, the big picture finance, commercial part, the big picture.
Speaker #1
Yeah. So one of the things I learned from Michael, and I think this is so important for all small businesses, is we had a number of sort of concepts and ideas that were really at the heart of what we were delivering, what we wanted to deliver for our clients. And we, rather than just kind of talk about these ideas yeah you know like the neurological levels of change if you know that model from Robert Dilts um in NLP or Nancy Klein's time to think work in terms of listening or more prosaically around value creation and his his work around what he calls evaluation villa and how value is created in organizations. We had these ideas but rather than just talk about them we learned together so we did courses together, we did week-long programs with people, we did stuff values, we did lots and lots of things to learn together so we were really aligned and coming from the same sort of root and heritage if you like, to really ensure we were on the same page around these various concepts we did a lot of learning together so that experience of learning together with my business partner to what's on the surface of it looked like training for CFOs to understand value creation really went quite deep, which is sort of a theme, that was what kind of created ah there's a in the world of these companies that are doing something very very different you know no managers entrepreneurial business units self-management and I got into that tribe if you like there's a woman called Lisa Gill who was quite new into that world at the time as well I got speaking to her, she has a podcast and shout out to Lisa on her podcast leadermorphosis, and that that connection led me to Frederick Laloux and his book reinventing organizations I supported the translation of his book into the illustrated version. And then when Konsileo were looking for a new board member, a non-exec, Lisa recommended me to Konsileo. And when the founder, CEO came knocking, John, I was kind of, you know, insurance, what the heck? You know, that's just not, I know nothing about commercial insurance, broking, financial services, not a sector that I'd ever really saw myself in. I was in retail. At the time, I'd gone from books into the very group. Retail felt a sweet spot, or at least retail consumer goods. beauty care that kind of space and I just didn't see the connection but then when I got to understand what concilio was trying to achieve more around self-management that's when it all clicked and that's when I guess going back to the personal leadership that we learned at P&G and that sense of mission and drive and purpose that all came together really in concilio.
Speaker #0
So now you're there, how does that excite you for the future, this concept? Well, first of all, maybe explain a little bit practically how it works on a day-to-day basis. And how does that excite you, the potential of it for other organisations excite you?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so it works. We're a relatively small organisation, about 190 people now, growing very rapidly. And our employee workforce is predominantly insurance brokers. And in a typical insurance broking firm, you'd have many, many layers of management. You'd have a regional manager. responsible for a region you'd have little offices across you know Yorkshire whatever and people would be kind of set targets sales targets essentially from on high down there'd be Monday morning meetings where people would have to account for their their activity and time and how they were progressing versus their sales targets and what John who had been at Allianz for a big chunk of his career recognised is that there was a way in which to get back. to the real craft of insurance broking, this kind of relationship between an insurance broker and their client and the community and the advisory and real kind of human-to-human connection that was being lost as lots of insurance brokers were being moved into call centres because the premium, the income was deemed too low to merit that human-to-human relationship. So what we have is insurance brokers who have... No boss, they have the freedom to essentially run their own little businesses. They're fully employees, but they have the freedom to essentially run their businesses how they want. But we support that very much with both from a human perspective. So we have 40 coaches in our business who are peers and a very well structured coaching framework. And then we also have technology, which I think is the most exciting thing that we have in our organisation, which I think we could transplant. any organization on the planet technology underpins everything including the human relationships so we have a a broken platform which all of the stuff that people have to do to create policies on the platform of course we have that and it's our own bespoke platform but that platform is also the home of all of our coaching relationships the the way in which we support any kind of human to human interaction. For example, we have about 60 plus thousand relationships across the organisation where people are, oh, I've got this client in, you know, Aberdeenshire. But I live in Aberdeen, but I've not got the knowledge of the particular industry, maybe fisheries industry or something. Someone down in Kent has got that experience, right? Let's come together and serve that client. Again, it sounds kind of not that exciting, but the industry doesn't work in that way. Each office is separate. You've got your targets. You would never reach out to someone else. in order to help to help you deliver your targets so we've got this thing called the collaboration center which facilitates all of these 60 000 plus relationships the entire system works to enable the contract between people so like oh i've got you know i've got this client if you can help me on x then you know I'll give you 20 of the income or 30 or 40 and people will have multiple relationships like that across the company and that is then supported by P&L, which is live on the system that they can see so they can understand exactly how they're doing. And then there's a real sort of appreciation of fairness and the value exchange. So people who work in our organisation get 49% of all of the income that they write after a certain, you know, the certain criteria that need to be met clearly. So it's a very well thought through framework structure system in response to an industry that is. it's kind of killing the human part of the experience or the the sort of the dignity and the professional people move into insurance many people fall into like us accountants but when they're in it they realize that the the value that they're providing in their communities and the way in which they're supporting the small business economy which is 99% of the UK's economy is really meaningful yeah and that's been kind of wiped out in the rest of the industry.
Speaker #0
Yeah. Well. And it's exciting in a way because, well, you sound excited to have to be able to tackle these challenges. That's part of who you are, isn't it? To tackle these things from a big picture perspective and how you can join the dots, as you said a few times.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I think it's joining the dots. And it's also the biggest joy I have is when, you know, one of our brokers just before Christmas got his first third level of. bonus which is can be quite chunky for some of our brokers because they get 49% of everything they write and it was the first time he'd achieved that and it was £2,000 and he phoned me up and he just tears in his eyes my family are going to have a better Christmas and it's like, oh love it, this is this is what we're doing so I think I started off my career thinking that you could only have that impact if you worked in the charity sector but you can have that impact anywhere and helping our brokers to connect into something that they're really good at doing it in a way that is really protecting and advising their clients well and and we believe of course better than our competitors and serving their communities and being rewarded fairly for that that feels like really good work to me yeah it's it's interesting because as you're talking I'm thinking about why I do what I do
Speaker #0
And I tend to say that I love to unleash people's potential. I believe it's by everybody's potential being released that together we'll solve the world's biggest problems. Yes. And I think when you, when I heard you talk about an individual broker, when you see the impact you're having on individuals, is when it, when each person is released into what they can do and how we can do it in a way that, that is good work, like you say, that is. working towards human thriving and thriving of the planet and so on. I think it's just wonderful to see it. Before we close, I want to come back to that because I'm talking about human potential now. We haven't talked about your passion for individual leadership potential and the work you're doing with WYSE. Do you want to share a little bit about that?
Speaker #1
That has been one of the best things I've ever got involved in. Dr. Andrew McDowell, he's been part of WYSE, which is a UN affiliated charity for 30 plus years he i worked with him for a number of years he's the first person to bring self-management into the health care system so this sort of smooshing together of executive coaching in a clinical setting and helping clinicians to support their patients to be self-managing as opposed to that tell so very you know very closely aligned with personal that sense of personal leadership the charity he's been associated with wise supports young people age 18 to 35 in a very extended personal leadership programme of 12 days, four times a year in different locations around the world. And it's directed towards individuals who are already doing good work in their community. And it's activating even more that sense of personal leadership and mission, the sense of who I am and what I'm going to do in the world, how I'm going to express that intent and that mission. I wish I'd found it myself years ago and been in one of their programmes, but now I get to do it once a year, spend two weeks, a really tough gig in Italy, in a fantastic villa with a swimming pool and with 40 fabulous young people with a staff team of about 15. It's a learning journey for me as much as for the participants. It's just fabulous. There's nothing like it. I don't believe in the world. And it really plays into... all of the threads I think that are important to me around that sort of sense of mission, personal leadership, activating it, imagination, being able to see it through other people's actions and things they're doing. I mean, I'm interested in all of the young people and what they achieve. So it's wonderful to be part of it.
Speaker #0
I don't know about you, but every time I'm involved in, I'm not involved in that, but in similar things with people, it gives me so much hope for the future. I know we live in a very I don't want to over-exaggerate because there have been other periods of history where people have lived very difficult things that we've not had to suffer. But when you look at the things going on in the world, it's easy to lose hope. But when you look at the potential in people, when you look at people who are passionate for doing good and making change, it gives me a lot of energy.
Speaker #1
Yeah, I agree.
Speaker #0
So just as we close, would you be able to just maybe summarise for us, what are the key leadership principles that have really guided you throughout your journey?
Speaker #1
Yeah, so the activation of personal leadership in that sense of the being and the doing, how do we put ourselves into what we do? How do we direct that towards whatever we call purpose? It doesn't have to be a stated purpose. It can be a sense of purpose, a feeling, just a feeling that we're connecting to doing work that matters. That's really, really key. Imagination. I think I started this by talking about I became an accountant because my dad was an accountant. I think if we can see it, we can be it. And I think if we can imagine it, we can become it. We can do it. I think writing. writing for me has been that way of kind of bringing things into existence and that's kind of having that sense of imagination another one would be tenacity that sense of being able to just keep keep going even through dark times even when you feel lost or you feel really disconnected to who you are and who you're trying to become but just just keep going kind of have that idea that you know the whole steve jobs slightly cliched quote around joining the dots you can't join them you know you can only join them looking backwards not forward but you can know that there's dots you can know that there will be dots that will join up eventually you just don't know exactly how they're going to join up which is great that's the wonder of life isn't it so yeah having that sort of sense of tenacity and then the um sense of conversations really mattering and having tough conversations there's a great quote i did a sort of one day thing with the poet david white which uh he said that the next epoch of your existence is always through the doorway of a conversation. And I kind of hold that sort of every day. You know, if there's a tough moment in the board or the exec team, and we always have that sense of someone's not saying something here. There's music and there's words and they're not quite matching. So that sense of being bold enough, being brave enough, courageous enough to have the conversation that matters and it's tough, whether that's with yourself.
Speaker #0
Exactly.
Speaker #1
Your spouse, your family, your businesses, etc. that would be the fourth one for me.
Speaker #0
Well it's been a wonderful conversation and thank you so much for sharing your journey the good bits and the tough bits because we all need to know that someone else has been there before us and we're not alone if you have one encouragement to give to someone who is going through a backstop period of your career in the middle this messy middle as I call it what would you say to them
Speaker #1
I would say buy yourself a nice pen and a lovely notebook and just start writing. Big believer in the write it down, make it happen mentality. I've gone as far as writing job descriptions for myself in the past, et cetera. And some of that has come into reality. So yeah, capture everything. And you'll be astounded when you look back at who you were, who you are becoming. It's all there. And I think that can be an incredible resource to support you through your leadership journey.
Speaker #0
Yeah, as you said, if you can imagine it, you can believe it. You can make it happen almost. Write it down. You're kind of making something come to life that you didn't think was possible.
Speaker #1
Yeah.
Speaker #0
So thank you so much. It's been a wonderful conversation.
Speaker #1
Thank you, Ruth. I've enjoyed it.
Speaker #0
Hopefully we'll be in touch. I've got some ideas of things I want to bounce off you already.
Speaker #1
Likewise. Thanks, Ruth.
Speaker #0
I hope you found Vicky's story as thought-provoking as I did. If there's one powerful takeaway for me, it's the idea that sometimes we don't find clarity, we write our way into it. So here's a simple invitation for you. Take Vicky's advice and write your future as though it already exists. That might be a job description for your dream role, an end of year celebration speech, or even the words you'd love someone to say about you when you move on. Let your imagination lead. and see what surfaces. And if you're feeling stuck, unsure what's next or how to move forward, remember you don't have to figure it out alone. And I'd certainly love to help if I can. You can get in touch or book a free discovery call at yourpathtosuccess.ch. Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep walking your own personal path to success.

About Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Your Path to Success is here to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey.

To find out more about Ruth's work with individuals and organisations, visit yourpathtosuccess.ch

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

About Your Path to Success with Ruth Kearns Wollmann: Inspirational Leadership Stories

Your Path to Success is here to inspire, encourage and equip you on your leadership journey.

To find out more about Ruth's work with individuals and organisations, visit yourpathtosuccess.ch

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

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