“If you’ve got the right skill set, behaviours and leadership competencies, you do not need to have a technical HR background to be a great HRD.” – Susan Martindale, Group HR Director at Mitchells & Butlers speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Susan Martindale at Mitchells & Butlers Plc (M&B), who joined Bass plc as a graduate and has developed her career in marketing, procurement and operations before transitioning into HR. Susan rejoined M&B in 2000 as a Retail Operations Director, a role she held for eight years with responsibility across a number of brands before being promoted to Divisional Operations director. Following a colleague’s retirement Susan moved from operations to become Purchasing Director in 2009.
Susan’s career at M&B continued with a move into a Brand Operations Director role for All Bar One in 2011 and at the same time she held overall responsibility for leading the “Change Transformation programme” across the business as Project Director. It was after this successful project that Susan took on the role of Group HR Director, a position she has held since November 2012 . Since this time she had responsibility for various roles across other functions including returning to operations in mid 2018 to lead the Restaurant division as interim Divisional Director until Oct 2019 in addition to her HR responsibilities.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I’ve been working for the same organisation, Mitchells & Butlers (M&B) since late 2000. My background at that time was essentially in marketing and procurement but in 2000 I moved into Operations, and I’ve now spent over a third of my career there. In 2011, the Chairman of M&B decided to embark on a transformation programme to ensure that the business remained in a strong position for future years, at the heart of that programme was a drive to achieve a real guest obsessed culture.
I was approached to take on the role of director of the Transformation Programme, working for the Deputy Chairman. Due to my breadth of experience across the organisation the Board felt I had a strong understanding of the business and I’d be well placed to lead the transformation required, my experience meant I could understand what would resonate with both our Support Centre and our teams at the Frontline.
I started that role in September 2011 and six months into the programme it became evident that if we were to be successful in making the transformation stick once the project team disbanded, we would need a strong HR platform to help drive the culture of the business, build strong levels of engagement and support the business in becoming truly guest obsessed.
Leading the transformation programme was a stepping stone for me in taking on the HRD role. From a technical point of view, I had no formal expertise in HR but I had a strong understanding of the business, and I had worked very closely with HR across my operations roles.
It was a steep learning curve around certain technical aspects of HR however I was fortunate to have a strong team around me. As a company we have 42,000 employees and there are c.200 people in HR covering all aspects from Operations, Culinary Skills, Shared Services, Learning & Development, Talent, Reward, Internal Communication and Recruitment. Centrally, I have five direct reports and a Head of People in the field for each of our four operating divisions who work directly for the Divisional Director whilst maintaining a strong dotted line to myself.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
In the last six months M&B have faced the most severe challenges that I’ve witnessed in over 35 years in the sector. Supply chain and recruitment have been ongoing challenges, as well as the number of COVID outbreaks that we’ve had, and like others at times we have struggled to keep some of our businesses open.
If I distil that down into my key HR challenges at the moment, it would be recruitment, retention and developing talent. I think the pandemic has made a lot of people sit back and review what they want from life. We’ve seen a lot of people leave us from the front line to go into other sectors that don’t have such unsociable hours. We’ve also seen other businesses emerge that offer the same flexibility in working that we do, such as delivery and online shopping channels.
In terms of retention, it’s really about making sure that we continue to make M&B a great place to work and live our EVP. We are seeing a few green shoots in the sense that people are returning to us because hospitality is such a great place to work. It’s fun, and although it’s long hours there is no glass ceiling, you can start in pot washing and could end up on the Executive Committee, and I think we need to shout about that more as a sector.
The key levers underneath our EVP are flexibility, being a part of the M&B family, career development, the fantastic training we can supply and security. When we researched our EVP in 2014 we were quite surprised at how important security was to our employees, but if you think about it, many of our employees in 2014 would have seen their parents lose their jobs due to the 2008/9 recession. Coming through the pandemic, security is again important. We’ve really tried to look after our people, and we were fortunate that we were able to protect most jobs which was our key priority.
As we enter 2022, we are still in recovery mode and focused on repositioning ourselves once again as the leading hospitality company in the UK. We’re recruiting the very best people in the market but also developing our internal talent for that pipeline of future roles.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
If I was mentoring someone who wanted to move into HR, the first thing I would say is, if you’ve got the right skills, behaviours and leadership competencies, you do not need to have a technical HR background to be a great HRD. The most important skills you need are to be a people person, to be able to remain fair and objective but also be honest with people, and adopt a high-support, high-challenge approach.
If you would like to become an HRD and you are not already in HR, then there are a number of routes that you can take. You don’t necessarily need to work through all the different departments in a HR function. Open your mind to the idea that you can gain the skills to be a great HRD by doing different things.
The next piece of advice to anyone who aspires to be an Executive level director, not only in HR, is to take opportunities when they present themselves. Seriously review all opportunities and remember that timing is rarely perfect. For example, when I moved into the transformation role, I’d only been back in procurement for 18 months. Originally, I had a plan to do that role for c 2-3 years, but that job became the platform for me getting my HRD role and I would have missed that opportunity had I not taken the transformation role when it came up.
My final piece of advice – again not necessarily just for HR – is to broaden your experience as much as you can. If you want to be a Director, make sure you’ve got a fantastic repertoire of experience on your CV.
Susan holds a BA Hons in Economic & Social History and Government & Politics, and has been the Group HR Director at M&B since November 2012.