My journey to FSP has been somewhat circuitous. I did a degree in Philosophy & Linguistics followed by a Masters in Field Linguistics with the intention of travelling the world documenting endangered languages. I didn’t get on with the politics of academia and found myself working in an IT company as part of the Research function.
After a couple of years, however, I realised that I needed more adventure than the 9 to 5 could offer, so quit my job and went off travelling. Over the next five years or so, I lived and worked in six different countries and travelled across every continent except Antarctica (which is still on the bucket list!).
When I returned to the UK, I put this experience of other cultures to good use by setting up a joint venture in Hong Kong, alongside building my freelance consultancy career. My passion has always been helping organisations be more successful, and so change management was a good fit. My background in Linguistics was especially helpful in the communications side of change, but ultimately, I believe that at the core of any successful business is its people – happy people do good work. So, my digital change strategies always focus on how to solve problems for people – how to make their working lives easier through the use of technology rather than how to fit the people to the technology.
Like many others, when I joined FSP I was slightly sceptical about the claim to be a values-driven company. I’d worked with many organisations throughout my career and found that very few of them had a firm grip on where they were going from a vision and values perspective, and even fewer were actually living the principles in reality.
But from my first day at FSP, I found that I was welcomed by absolutely everyone. No politics, no toxic culture – just a great bunch of people working hard and delivering outstanding service for clients. I immediately started thinking about how we could use FSP’s success to help our clients!
FSP gives me interesting and varied challenges and an incredible group of talented people whose expertise I can draw on when I don’t have the answers. The leaders are supportive, passionate and generous with their time. I feel part of a team I can trust to have my back and although we’re extremely performance driven, it never feels like pressure. And we have a laugh too!