Interview: Judy Wagner
5 Jan 10
Understanding what makes senior management teams tick is vital to success in executive search and selection, Judy Wagner tells Robert Outram
by Robert Outram
Lena Wilson is chief executive of Scottish Enterprise. Pete Selman OBE is director of property and visitor services at The National Trust for Scotland. Ellis Watson and Jeff Carr are, respectively, group marketing director and group finance director with leading transport business FirstGroup.
What do they all have in common? All are recent appointments, made after a search by executive selection specialists Finlayson Wagner Black, now better known as FWB.
Together with Scott Black and Willie Finlayson, CA Judy Wagner is a co-founder of FWB. She argues that executive search – less politely known as “headhunting” – is not just a more upmarket name for a recruitment agency.
A search and selection company such as FWB may well have the appropriate person already on their books, but the chances are they will have to go out and look for the right candidate, and at a senior level it is generally a case of approaching someone who is not “on the market”.
Wagner explains: “If you are looking for someone with financial experience in a manufacturing or engineering background, that is a large sector, globally, so it’s about going into those organisations and identifying the key people within them.
“You also tend to back up any direct search with advertising, and also with networking.”
Judy Wagner’s own CV does not begin in the field of recruitment. She studied accountancy as part of her Bachelor in Commerce degree at the University of Edinburgh, and the lectures given by one Professor Tweedie – now Sir David Tweedie – inspired her enough to take up accountancy as a career.
Wagner trained as a CA with Scott Moncrieff Downie Wilson and then worked as an audit senior with Ernst & Young, before moving to engineering and aerospace group GEC Ferranti as a business process re-engineering consultant.
She says: “It was interesting work, but I found the culture a bit frustrating. It wasn’t very entrepreneurial; it was very bureaucratic.”
Wagner started talking to recruitment company ASA International about finding a job overseas, but eventually she and her husband decided to stay in the UK. That was when she received a proposition from the recruiters she had not been expecting: “Come and work for us!” She says: “The environment was buzzy, salesy and entrepreneurial; I loved it.”
Starting out by recruiting newly qualified accountants, Wagner graduated to filling more senior positions. She says: “What really interested me was looking at how teams work, finding the right person to add value, and seeing what makes businesses succeed.”
ASA, meanwhile, underwent a management buy-out, with backing from private equity firm 3i, and Wagner joined the ASA board.
She recalls: “Willie [Finlayson] and I first worked together in 1985-86, and Scott [Black] joined us about 1989-90. At that time ASA was probably the largest in its field, in Scotland… we felt, however, that ASA was quite a broad agency, while we were more interested in working with boards and senior management.
“So we took the brave or stupid decision, in the middle of a recession, to leave well paid jobs – where we owned part of the company – to set this business up. Also, we couldn’t trade for 12 months because we had restrictive covenants.”
The fact that Finlayson’s wife was pregnant with their first child just added to the stress, but as Wagner puts it: “We didn’t really think about it at the time. We just decided ‘this is what we want to do’ and you believe in yourself and your ability to just get on with it.”
It was 1993, the economy was just coming out of recession and technology was the hottest sector.
“It was an exciting time,” Wagner recalls. “Typically you’d have a spin out with a CTO [chief technology officer] who had moved across from a university with a small technical team, a little bit of seed funding and larger venture capital firms standing by for the first real round of funding, but no commercial management in the business. Quite often we were having to go out into the market and find a CEO [chief executive officer], operations director, sales director and chairman.”
Since then, different sectors have proved to be fruitful, including property and construction in the early 2000s, and the public sector, but Wagner stresses that her firm is committed to playing its part in the Scottish economy as a whole. She says: “We are passionate about business in Scotland.”
She adds: “We set up FWB partly to introduce businesses to each other, informally, and we still do that [with networking events]. It keeps the three of us in this business – you feel you are learning something every day.”
FWB also has a consulting arm that advises on how to maximise the effectiveness of senior management teams, and also helps venture capital firms with their due diligence. As Wagner puts it: “When you are buying a business you are not just buying the product or the factory, you are buying the management team as well.”
Headhunters have taken some of the criticism levelled at executive salaries and bonus schemes – after all, they advise on senior hires. Wagner says: “I think it starts with the culture within an organisation. If you have the right remuneration philosophy in place you are going to avoid a lot of the pitfalls.”
FWB advocates a “total performance system” that rewards desired behaviours – such as displaying integrity, or leading and developing staff – as well as performance against financial and other targets.
Wagner adds: “Sometimes companies can focus too much on the remuneration aspect. People want to get up in the morning and feel that they want to go to their job and that they get satisfaction from what they do, and they are appreciated for it.”
As someone who espouses networking (see box, above), it’s no surprise Wagner is involved in many spheres beyond FWB’s business. She is a member of the ICAS Membership Services Board, a non-executive director of energy consultancy Senergy and is actively involved with a number of not-for-profit organisations, including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Daisy Chain Trusts, which supports disadvantaged children in Scotland.
She was also recently appointed chair of governors at Erskine Stewarts Melville Schools in Edinburgh, and is keen to point out the impact that school education can have on individuals as part of their all-round development.
She says: “Our belief is that that pupils should have the opportunity to achieve both their academic and personal potential, and try to instil in each child a love of learning and commitment to excellence. We aim to ensure a good grounding for whatever avenue each child pursues.”
One of Wagner’s biggest challenges came in 2008, when she achieved a long-held ambition to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. She says the hardest part was the final ascent: “It’s like climbing the equivalent of Ben Nevis, on steep scree, at night, on one lung. But it’s a fabulous thing to have done. You just have to take it one small step at a time.”
HOW TO GET HEADHUNTED
People in the executive search business are often asked: “How do I get headhunted?”
Maybe the sterling work you are doing in your job is not recognised further afield, but many professionals are reluctant to blow their own trumpet.
Judy Wagner says: “Clearly, you have to be strong at what you do, and technically sound, but you also have to be able to promote yourself. People are judging you on your people skills and your presentation skills, as much as on your technical skills.
“So you have to look at yourself and think, ‘What am I really good at, what am I not so strong at, what do I have to get better at?’”
Wagner suggests doing something that takes you out of your “comfort zone”, such as becoming a non-executive director at a different kind of organisation, such as a charity. Alternatively, you could present at, or run, an ICAS course.
She says: “It’s good to be seen at courses and networking events. There is no secret to networking, it’s just communicating; engaging with people in a positive way.”
It’s also important to keep up a two-way communication with headhunters, and that does not mean ringing them every week to ask “Have you got anything for me?”
You may well have ideas for them, or you may be able to help with their search to fill another post. The more helpful you can be to the headhunters, the more you will be on their radar, Wagner advises.