I didnt tell him to shut up. I didnt want to. Many words flow, but almost every one adds colour to the personality of a man who is refreshingly passionate about what he does. Passionate, in fact, seems to be Singhs favourite word. I count no less than a dozen uses. Each time he says it, his eyes light up in a near frenzy of excitement. Its difficult not to warm to such enthusiasm.
Its a useful quality to have when you are HR director of npower, the UKs largest electricity and second largest gas supplier. This is an organisation that lives or dies on good customer service, but does strategic HR have real clout for npowers internal customers?
Definitely, says Singh. We make the whole company understand that what npower is about is making life simple for our customers. That extends right through the organisation. But the only way to do that is for HR to have a full role in creating a workforce full of leaders. We employ 8,500 to 9,000 people. Of these, 1,000 have some form of leadership role, no matter how small. I want a thousand leaders in our organisation and I want them all to understand what the purpose of our business is. HR has and will continue to invest a lot of time and money ensuring our people have a common language and understanding of our values.
Singhs npower may have a thousand leaders, but until recently it had been a brand punching below its weight perhaps better known for its sponsorship of English Test cricket than its power supply. In fact, its the customer-facing arm of Innogy, which, until it was bought by German multi-utility company RWE in May this year, had found a berth in the FTSE 100.
Npower both generates and supplies power to around seven million customers, and supplies 13% of the total energy needs of British business. Now it has expanded its range with the launch of insurance, telephone, home maintenance and financial services products.
Npowers story begins with the deregulation of energy markets in the late 1990s. To take full advantage, the old state-run utility, National Power, needed to hit the acquisition trail and quickly. In the early part of 1999, it acquired Calortex and Midlands Electricity before demerging in November that year into Innogy and International Power. Npower was created officially to represent the UK retail energy business of the former. More acquisitions followed in 2001, with the purchase of Yorkshire Electricity and Northern Electric and Gas.
When building a business so rapidly through acquisition, its a good idea to make sure the foundations arent wobbly. And thats where Singh came in. By mid-2000 it was becoming clear that, while it had a lot of employees and customers, npower had nothing that linked together the employees in its disparate parts. The company wanted someone who could help build a common feeling of culture, without letting that get in the way of expanding the business further if a new acquisition came along.
As Singh says: We have been building up, but were also building on the inside. To help a CEO do that, an HR director in this sort of organisation needs to make HR fit the business, not the business fit HR. By mid-2000, npower had lots of people, but not many people with commercial acumen. So I was headhunted.
Not everyone agreed at the time that joining npower was a wise career move. My friends told me that I must be absolutely mad to be going to a utility, he admits. I was already being headhunted by a leading manufacturing company, which was more in line with my earlier experience. But Singh soon realised that npower was going to be a massive challenge. We had made acquisitions and still had a war chest to make some more, but at the same time we had to change the culture from an old-fashioned utility into the sharpest operation in the private sector. I thought about that and I got really excited.
Singhs commercial acumen comes from years of hard lessons well learned. After graduating, he chose to enter the cauldron of Lambeth Council for some early HR experience as the divisional personnel and training officer in its housing division. It was the mid-1980s and the council was in disarray: Red Ken Livingstones GLC had been legislated out of existence by Margaret Thatcher and Linda Bellos had only just taken charge in Lambeth. We had some major headaches, admits Singh. Operational ground rules were being written and then rewritten nearly every day. It was a crash course on how to survive in the local government jungle.
After this module in chaos management, Singh felt he needed some HR experience in the commercial world. In 1988 he went into manufacturing, another environment undergoing drastic change. He was recruited to Thorn Lighting to get involved in some major HR change projects within the company. He soon made his mark and was asked to get involved in reworking the companys distribution strategy, setting up 12 major warehouse centres around the country. Just as he was becoming immersed in the project one of the HR managers left the company. His boss asked him to cover the job on a temporary basis, but when he was offered the post on a permanent basis, Singh said no. I really wanted to stay and see the distribution project through.
Perhaps as punishment, the Thorn top brass sent Singh into another lions den: a unionised factory of 400 people in Merthyr Tydfil that needed to face up to some industrial relations home truths. Singh used his grounding in Lambeth to good effect. To be honest, after dealing with the unions in Lambeth, looking after Merthyr was a piece of cake, he says. After building up trust, Singh hammered out two big pay and conditions agreements. When I came back to Thorns head office they all said Gosh, how was it?, but to be honest, it was pretty straightforward. After that they offered me the HR job again. And this time I took it.
Four years later, Singh got a call from the managing director, asking him to look after all of Thorns HR in the UK. I was a little surprised. I was 33 at the time and I didnt have the confidence in me that other people seemed to have. There were one or two people in Thorn who I thought should have got in ahead of me. I remember saying to the managing director, Are you quite sure about this? At the time I actually told him that if he wanted a proper HR manager, he should get one in from outside. But he told me that Id earned my spurs and that he wanted someone with commercial nous. So that earlier grounding definitely paid off.
What followed was perhaps the most formative time of Singhs career. Its only when you are at the sharp end of manufacturing, he says, that you see both the limitations and the potential of HR. I really began to see how it fitted into the big picture. It was great to talk about team-building, but what about the bottom line, improving our market share and adding value?
Singh is particularly proud of the partnership he built with the unions at Thorn. The pay round normally took six months to negotiate, so Singh introduced a more streamlined process with the help of the unions. It is up to us to build a relationship with them and let them in as much as possible on the bigger picture, he says. If a union wanted a 10% pay increase, I told them, then well have lower profits and in time you will have fewer members. Was that what it really wanted? Of course not. By the end of Singhs stint he had negotiated a two-year pay deal, the second of which was a zero pay rise. This was recommended by the unions and accepted by the membership. Singh says: Why are we all so frightened of unions? If you manage the relationship properly, you shouldnt have problems.
The new spirit of partnership filtered through to the shop floor, much to his obvious delight. He tells the story of a union president who came to have have a look at a Thorn Factory. He started lecturing his members on the need for NVQs for the workforce at a cost of 250 per person. One of our shop stewards took him to task, saying, Money doesnt grow on trees you know. We have to generate revenues to make this worthwhile. We dont want to waste valuable company resources. A few years earlier that could only have been a manager speaking.
Before taking on the npower role, Singh had been promoted by Thorn to head its European HR operations. Thorns UK market share had grown from 13% to 20%, all through organic growth. At the end of 1998, the company wanted to transpose its successful UK practices to continental Europe. People talk about operating on a Europe-wide basis, but if I am totally honest we are talking about completely different operating environments. We ended up closing factories, which was not easy given the national sensitivities. That was difficult, but you have to be straight about it not cloak-and-dagger. You have to treat people as reasonable human beings.
Once Singh was in place at npower, he realised that he needed to get more commercially-minded people in place. I looked around and realised that, while we had a lot of people, we needed more people with business know-how. It was an obvious weakness and so we had to put that right as a priority. Now that several acquisitions have been made, Singh is devolving HR into the various npower operations. Im doing this because thats where HR decision-making belongs, he says. Ive put some heavyweight people in place and they are thinking of the business first and HR second.
Singh now carries influence at two levels. Although he is reluctant to discuss acquisition strategy openly, others in npower say that Singh has had an impact on major strategic issues. A senior director approached him last year and asked him whether, culturally, it was a good time to make a certain acquisition. Singh believed that it was, if it was the right business decision. Some months later the same director came to him and said, What if we were thinking about making another acquisition what would you say? Singh told him that in his opinion it was now time to integrate properly and realise the synergies that had been acquired.
Now there is change afoot at npower, with the departure of CEO Steve Fletcher and the arrival of his replacement Andrew Duff from Innogy. By common consent, Duff is likely to be a more cautious CEO than his predecessor, signalling a period of consolidation, rather than further acquisition, something which would appear to run with the grain of Singhs thinking. Speaking before the recent management changes, Singh noted, If we simply build and build and build we will have a weak organisation. We need to make this organisation seamless internally.
Singhs second level of influence is in translating the values of the company down through his 1,000 leaders to make the business work as well as it possibly could. Im passionate about all my folk. When I talk about leaders, Im not talking about the npower board. Npower for me and for everyone in this organisation is about making life simple for our customers. Although lots of people say, We are passionate about our customers, we really do try and live that. Its just as important for the guy on reception to be living the brand values as it is the man at the top. Fortunately, Singh has an unashamed faith that people want to do a good job if the organisation lets them. It all comes down to human nature. I believe passionately [that word again] that people do actually want to do a good job. Its up to an organisation and to me to create the right environment for this to happen.
Creating the right environment is what Singh is all about, and since he arrived he has been a busy man. I love what Im doing now. Since I came in, my feet havent touched the ground. Its great to be part of the success. And when youre in a new business that is building a new culture, you can get involved in every area of its operation. From beginning to end you are not in a silo and you can really influence the business, probably in more ways than if I was any other sort of director.