We are sitting in someone elses office in the central London corporate headquarters of BAA, the airport operator where Ward is group services director. He doesnt have his own office, he says, he doesnt like the idea of them. Instead he shares an open-plan space with the finance director and the communications chief and other head honchos. He sings me a paean of praise to the benefits of open-plan and its effect on corporate team spirit. The downside, of course, is that when you want to have a confab with a journalist and dont want others listening in, you have to borrow someone elses glass box.
But Ward is nothing if not pragmatic too, a quality which has taken him through HR functions at blue-chip giants GrandMet and Kingfisher before he settled in at BAA five years ago. At 52, with a seat on the board, an OBE and a 268,000 salary package, he is one of the most respected and highest-achieving HR specialists in corporate Britain, yet in a world obsessed with CEOs and chairmen, still rather invisible. Invisible, that is, until last month, when he was suddenly thrust into the media spotlight as management spokesman in a dispute with firefighters and security staff from the Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU).
Shy? Im articulate, but not an orator, he tells me later, in a characteristically considered overview of his strengths. Being a CEO is not something that has ever interested him, he adds, because he couldnt stand having to deal with the external politics. Others think he would probably be rather good at it.
But he is not what you expect from a boardroom heavy hitter. Hes almost too handsome for a start, with cropped grey hair and grey-blue eyes, looking a little like Terence Stamps younger brother, medium height, dapperly dressed in immaculate Italian jacket and dark blue shirt; and very affable in manner, keen to listen and oblige, softly spoken with just a hint of north Lincolnshire, his birthplace, in his accent. As he cut his HR teeth dealing with militant unions oop north in the 1970s, I am presuming there is considerable steel beneath, but he has it well-covered.
He has a raft of responsibilities at BAA now, including IT, security, health and safety, risk management, the pension fund and more. When I apologise for my cynicism Id suspected his catch-all group services title was just corporate waffle he says quietly, No, no, please be cynical, its not a very good title but it gives me the most flexibility. He describes his role as making the backroom work effectively so the CEO can lead the strategy of business and commercial activity, which seems self-effacing, to say the least.
That commercial activity is frenetic seven UK airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, numerous airports overseas, around 2 billion of revenue, an 8 billion investment programme in its south-east airports over the next 11 years, a huge new terminal at Heathrow to build. Despite a downturn in passenger traffic following September 11 last year, BAA still made an operating profit, but events have highlighted security as never before. A third of its 13,500 staff work in the area. Overseeing that, you imagine, must have taken up a lot of Wards year.
He nods. We dont let others do security. Its a strategy that has served us well post-September 11. We work extremely hard at it and, he smiles, we do it with a friendly disposition. Its not easy, as the public can be, he pauses, quite gratuitous with its insults.
You can tell Ward enjoys a challenge. He says the essence of BAA is its complexity. It is a very simple business in terms of what it has to do but doing it is very complex. Thats not just dealing with passengers, running the airports and milking those retail opportunities but also managing the politics, trying to expand, influencing politicians, negotiating with regulators, motivating the staff and mollifying an angry public that loves using airports but doesnt want them in their backyard.
Everyone in the company, says Ward, must be focused on providing a good service. We are the best business case of a balanced stakeholder model that you will find, he says. And you have to be balanced in this industry.
Not just an airy-fairy term? No, its very real. We are not an easy neighbour to live with, but that doesnt stop us being a good neighbour. Yes we do play a part in the consumption of energy and minerals, but if the Government believes that air travel is vital for the economic success of the country, for us to do it badly would not play well, so we have to do it well and also efficiently. The Government gives us the licence to operate, but communities allow us to operate too, and staff have to recognise that they are a public service that happens to be in the private sector, and we have to structure our organisation and relationships to provide that service 24/7. If that balance isnt struck, he continues, the demands for shareholder returns take over and you become unstuck. And thats true of employees as well they can hide behind this thing called BAA plc, but it really means every one of the people who choose to work for the company.
Happy staff? We have very good staff retention, very low, we work hard at it. And industrial action? We have a very good record here, touch wood, he says, stretching his fingertips onto the table. Yet that will be severely tested this winter as BAAs security staff and firemen push for more pay.
He always wanted to work with people, he says, almost to compensate for the remoteness of where he lived in his youth. Brought up the second son of a farmer-turned-CEGB-worker in the wilds of north Lincolnshire it was flat, arable, I knew more fields than people Ward went to grammar school then Leeds University to read science. He was bright, and a good footballer who was offered apprentice terms at club level but declined. Hed set his heart on management and left the countryside to take up a trainee slot at an engineering firm in Oldham. His life has been determinedly metropolitan ever since, but you can still hear the hedgerows in his aphorisms. The farmer who doesnt tend his field grows a lot of rubbish, he says at one point. Ignore a field in one season, and suffer in the next. I think there are laws of basic nature which hold good for much of what we do as human beings and organisations, he explains.
And how do those aphorisms go down with the BAA board? Ha! he laughs. I dont speak in agricultural metaphors to the board. Mike Hodgkinson, his CEO at BAA, describes Wards key characteristics as very analytical, very approachable, one of the modern breed of HR specialists. It is his ability to pick calmly through the detail of problems and handle complex areas outside HR, such as security, that makes him so highly valued, plus the fact that others trust him. High integrity, good sportsman, affable guy, says Hodgkinson, summing him up. That affability, and the sense of reassurance it promotes in what is basically a very male, very competitive environment at the top of a FTSE 100 company, has always stood Ward in good stead.
It was probably forged young. Ward took his first job in personnel at Stone-Platt Industries, a manufacturing firm which had its fair share of union aggro in the 1970s. He was swiftly promoted. At the age of 24 he found that, due to constant industrial unrest and his unflappable approach to dealing with the unions, he had suddenly become the second most important person in the company. And the most important was the union convener.
His achievements there brought him to the attention of GrandMet, where he was hired in 1981 to manage major change in its brewing division. Is that just a euphemism for managing the unions? Ward bridles. I didnt manage them, I worked with them, he says. Having said that, there was a large amount of unreasonable behaviour. But then, the unrest was a backlash against the irresponsible management of the 1960s. Does he believe good firms need trade unions? Yes. You dont preserve good management without trade unions... But I am a firm believer that you can develop good organisations which dont require militant trade unions.
He ended up as personnel director of GM Foods, Europe, running HR, legal and security services for a multi-company division with 15,000 employees. He could have moved out of HR and into line management at the group, then growing fast under Sir Allen Sheppards aggressive leadership, but never made the leap. I had more than one offer but the roles just looked like a cul de sac.
By then his work had brought him to the attention of the CBI, where he contributed to the employment policy committee. It was the CBI that nominated him to sit on the Commission for Racial Equality, where he was deputy chairman for five years. His work there, and his services to employee relations, won him the OBE.
He left GrandMet in 1992 and joined Kingfisher, the retail plc that runs Woolworths and Comet. Retail, he says, was attractive as it was an area he hadnt experienced. There he worked on senior management development strategy, compensation and graduate resourcing, but three years in, the financials came unstuck and a host of senior executives were despatched following the announcement of a profits warning. It was a night of the long knives after which the CEO Geoff Mulcahy and I were the only senior executives left standing. Picking up the pieces afterwards was very difficult. The problem was Woolworths, which we got back on track, but we never resolved the strategic issues, which are still there today.
He eventually left Kingfisher in 1997, after mulling over a number of job offers one of the perks of being a leading HR player, he confesses, is that you get to know a lot of headhunters. Did he choose BAA because they offered him a seat on the board? It was mentioned but put to one side, he grins. Ruth Tait, the headhunter who placed Ward at BAA, says he was an instant hit. Tony is a professionals professional, highly strategic, very commercial. Other managers say he is unusual for an HR guy in that he helps them deliver results, hes more like a business partner.
The seat on the board, so rare for HR directors, came in 1999. Is it essential for HR work? It does make a difference with some HR functions, says Ward, before warning me that, actually, his views on this would probably surprise me. A position on the board may be essential for mediocre HR directors, it is not essential for very good ones, he says. It is, however, essential to be a member of the business executive, as you have to understand the business in order to propose the appropriate solutions.
He goes on to talk eloquently about the standard of management in private and public sectors, drawing parallels with the fire services industrial unrest this autumn. He went to a presentation once by fire service executives, he says, where he was proudly told that every member of senior management had served as a fireman, so they knew what the job involved at all levels. That, he thinks, is wrong. You have to appreciate what goes on at the front end and value the people who do it, but the people who run organisations best are not necessarily those who have done the front-end jobs.
He smiles broadly. By now, we have overrun our allotted time and I make the usual preambles to wind things up. Then Ward does a curious thing he says no, wait, there are some items he wants to read to me first. He smoothes out the sheaf of papers that he brought in: a lengthy, handwritten list of his own qualities, as others see them, which he has diligently prepared, because that, he clearly feels, is what these interviews are about. And he starts reading. The issues that drive him, how he has waged war on phoneyism and the abuse of power, how he loves learning and cherishes humility, how he tries to show integrity, trustworthiness, bravery, how hes articulate, intuitive, supportive, on the introvert side.
By now I am finding this a bit uncomfortable and rather curious, in that while he is absolutely genuine in his motivation to see me do my job well, he is insensitive to how this might be construed. When he launches into a speech about how future-oriented he is the future is always a bigger circle than the present or the past and I have kind-of thought about that, I dont see it in time terms but in terms of opportunity... he comes perilously close to sounding like David Brent from the The Office.
Am I being unfair? Brent-speak, of course, is an HR specialists occupational hazard. Ward is so affable that its perhaps churlish to carp. Later, after Ive quizzed him about his wife and grown-up daughter, his home in Beaconsfield, his love of golf and Manchester United, and hes shown me his workspace complete with signed ManU picture, hes told me about the photoshoot, hours on top of a freezing building at Heathrow, and hes been chirpily enthusiastic all the way to the lift, we say goodbye and I try to puzzle it out.
Four days after that, in reply to my request for a couple of phone numbers, he sends me a nice email. In it he writes that hes worried about how he came over. ...i probably appeared too LibDem, he writes, not emphasising my commercial experience enough. (you dont survive for 11 yrs in GMet without it) in essence i enable organisations to perform to their potential for sustained commercial growth. Best wishes. T
So, not insensitive at all. Whats intriguing is that Ward hasnt had to wear his commercial clout on his sleeve to get to the top. Which makes him all the easier to like and probably all the more effective.