Yahoo Finance My first boss: Ipsos CEO Kelly Beaver
The people who helped shape business leaders
East Belfast-born Kelly Beaver MBE is chief executive of global market research firm Ipsos (IPS.PA) in the UK and Ireland. She has been with Ipsos for over a decade and was managing director of its public affairs division.
She previously held roles across various consultancies including PwC and KPMG and specialised in public policy evaluation. Beaver oversees about 2,000 staff at Ipsos, on top of call centres and the largest face-to-face field force in the country.
Every year PwC in Northern Ireland took two interns from the multiple universities and they were really coveted roles. I applied and managed to get one of them and in many ways it has made the many opportunities that have followed.
I was in the economic consulting division in Belfast. I went in on my first day with my best suit on which mum had purchased out of her savings.
You notice very quickly there are a tier of directors just below partner, who are running teams and where the engine lives. One of them was Dr David Armstrong, who retired this year and had a massive shaping on my career.
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There are lots of things around professional discipline when you start your first job that you maybe aren't aware of when you go into a big organisation. As a high-end consulting business, you have to gain an understanding of what’s expected of you pretty quickly.
It’s all about the quality of the people and how you manage high performance in your team. David built a very people centric culture and the way he gave feedback was such a gift. He would come to the pub and then leave us to it — he was very keen people socialised together and built relationships.
As an intern I was the lowest rung in the project team but David would always ask for my opinion. I never felt I was the most junior and there were expectations I would add a valuable contribution. That created a space for me that I was worth listening to.
Often in big organisations it can feel quite overwhelming for people. There is a way to cut through as a leader and David did it through all of the tiers. I may have only seen him every few weeks, but already he had instilled confidence.
In the professional services world, the reporting output is the gold. A lot hung on those big reporting deliverable moments which would be communicated to clients. All the interns had to proofread them where David was a stickler for grammar. He cared about every single detail and he would make sure to come over and give positive feedback on any tweaks he had made.
Feedback is too often under-rated and people are frightened to be critical, but it makes a huge difference as you are developing.
David would identify individuals in the team who were working hard. My mum asked why I was working bank holidays or late at night. I just enjoyed it and thought that the harder you worked, the more opportunities for exciting things came about such as going to meetings. It is something I do now; making sure I take somebody so they can learn.
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David loved his family, music, socialising, did a lot for charity and was an authentic and rounded leader. This all made people work for him — but also they were seeing their own careers being developed at the same time.
I left PwC to join a small firm in London where I had an equity stake. I was disappointed to leave but sometimes you have to try something slightly different.
I first moved to Ipsos 12 years ago to set up their public sector advisory business. I met David three years after joining and I was explaining why someone with an economic background had joined a research business. The reason was that the research market was evolving. From data collection to more focus on helping advise clients on the back of the high quality data and understanding of people you had built on their behalf.
Now it’s a big focus on the future of our business, to make sure we are at the cutting edge of being able to advise on the back of the data we collect.
David told me I had “the perfect skill set at the perfect time and place” and that I had to make sure I utilised it to my advantage.
He was absolutely right.
Ipsos is an incredible organisation, it has a lovely culture and is similarly all about people. One of the things we are continually working on is building on our high-performance culture and getting even better at providing feedback and developing careers, while we have an academy in our UK business which allows people to get the training development that employees require.
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Ipsos is an independent research organisation led by the technical specialists in our business. My knowledge and background really helps in this business but also knowing about where we are trying to go on the insights side.
With the cost of living crisis, we have also looked at all our employee policies. We are market and industry leading with parental leave policies. We now have interest free loans for our early career staff to get on to the rental market or other outlays they aren’t foreseeing. Interest rates and cost of loans are painful, but we can shoulder that as a large business and give the more junior staff some leeway and support.
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