Blog Series NWBLT Career Insights with Joëlle Warren
We are shining a spotlight on NWBLT members career journeys’ as we seek to raise awareness of different career paths and the wealth of opportunity that people have to pursue a purposeful and fulfilling career in the North West. In the second of this series, we hear from Joëlle Warren, NWBLT Deputy Chair and founder of Warren Partners
Tell us a little bit about your current role?
My main role is as Founding Partner of Warren Partners, an executive search firm I started in the North West 25 years ago and which now operates throughout the UK and internationally. We help boards to build diverse boards and leadership teams and my role has a mixture of internal and external responsibilities. Internally, I chair the Employee Owned Trust as the business has now been owned by its employees since 2019. I also sit on the Warren Partners board and play an active role in supporting and developing our amazingly talented team of people.
Externally, I am an ambassador for the business, speaking and representing Warren Partners, particularly in the equality, diversity, and inclusion space. But I’m also passionate about business as a force for good which is why I love another of my roles, as Deputy Chair of the NWBLT. Throughout my career I’ve always held unpaid roles alongside my ‘day job’ and at the moment those are as His Majesty’s Vice Lord-Lieutenant of Cheshire, a role I’ve held for the last 14 years. I’m Chair of the Audit and Risk Committee of Chester Race Company, which runs racecourses in England, Scotland and Wales, its own hospitality outlets, events/catering business and a hotel. Lastly, I’m Trustee of Crewe Youth Zone, a brand new charity which is building a state of the art space for young people in one of the most deprived areas of the country, giving them somewhere to go, something to do and someone to talk to.
How did your career start? What are you most proud of?
I started my career with Lloyds Banking Group on their graduate training programme. The 10 years I spent with them in a mixture of management roles across retail and corporate banking as well as coaching, included some amazing leadership training and plenty of hands-on people management experience at a relatively young age. I was learning how to play out my own personal values in the world at business, which has been something I’ve always tried to do, and was the reason behind the establishment of Warren Partners, which is the thing I’m most proud of so far in my career. I was influenced by a number of other business leaders over the years who’ve tried to prove you can be successful in business without losing in life, by treating people decently. ‘Treating others as we want to be treated’ was the core principle when I set up Warren Partners all those years ago and today is still at the heart of how we treat candidates, clients, colleagues, suppliers and our community.
Why did you decide to build your career in the North West?
I’d taken a career break from Lloyds Bank while our two sons were small during which we’d relocated back to the North West, where I was born and my parents were based. As I planned my return to the bank, I realised at the time that I was the most senior woman in the bank north of Birmingham and they weren’t terribly receptive to the idea of part time working. Lloyds is one of the most progressive employers now for parents, but it wasn’t then, so I was receptive to a call from a headhunter to join them as Finance Director to cover a maternity leave two days a week, which led me into the world of executive search…the formation of Warren Partners …and the rest is history.
Do you think working in the North West is different to working elsewhere?
I remember when I first started working in Manchester being told that the business community is like a village, and it was easy to get into. Thirty years ago, it was rather a male-dominated village, but that’s changed and although my career has become much more nationally focused, I love the warmth and welcome of the North. I appreciate the straight-talking and the pride, the courage, and the drive of the people I work with in the region. What’s not so great compared to the first part of my career in London, is the ease of getting about. It’s hard to get into Manchester, Liverpool, Chester, or Leeds in much less than an hour although the distances aren’t much different from the span of the London Underground. But as a place to live and work, there’s little to beat it!
What’s the greatest challenge that you have faced in your career or as a leader?
There have been plenty of challenging times: the financial crisis and COVID were particularly testing times as we faced sudden falls in our revenue stream and had to respond quickly. But what I found is that by sticking true to our purpose and values, by working with the team to come up with solutions and realising I don’t have all the answers, we came through both stronger as individuals and as a business. It’s easy to forget values when you’re under pressure but for me, that’s when they become even more important. At Warren Partners, they’re not something we put on the wall and forget, we use them in decision making, in recruitment, in assessment, in every aspect of our business. They’ve been core to our success to date and will be core to our continued success over the next 25 years.
As a business leader, what skills, values and behaviours are you looking for to support your organisation to continue to be successful?
I look for similarly purpose-driven, values-led people. Those who don’t just talk to the talk but walk the walk. When we’re recruiting people, we spend a lot of time understanding if they are aligned to our purpose of building diverse boards and leadership teams, we test whether their personal values align with ours around being generous, inclusive, ethical, courageous…and fun! We have learnt that if we spend time on getting that right, they will be happier with us and will perform better.
What advice would you give to those thinking about their first career steps?
Be clear about what’s important to you – your purpose and values – and what you love doing because you need to find a job you love, in an organisation that allows you to be you, aligned to your purpose and values.