phs Launches Second Women In Leadership Programme
A year after phs Group launched its first Women in Leadership programme; Stepping Up; a second cohort of 12 women from across the UK are being welcomed to the programme.
Launched at phs Group’s Tamworth site, Stepping Up aims to provide female colleagues with the skills and confidence to take on senior leadership roles, ensuring a better gender balance in the UK’s leading hygiene provider.
phs Group employs 3,000 people across 70 sites and works with 120,000 customers in 300,000 locations across the UK, Spain, and Ireland. Over a third of its leaders and managers are female but the business wants to increase this figure. phs’ head of learning & development Lucy Taylor said: “phs is a business built on the brilliance of our people based across the whole of the UK, Ireland and Spain. It’s really important to us that we reflect the diversity of the communities that we serve, and Stepping Up is a critical step in achieving our ambition. Over 60 per cent of senior appointments in the last 18 months were made to female candidates and 45 per cent of our current apprentices are female, so the change we want to see is coming. Our female leaders demonstrate passion, motivation and ambition and collectively become a force to be reckoned with.”
The programme, addresses leadership, confidence in communication, setting and achieving goals, conflict resolution and career development alongside supporting with networking throughout. Each individual is assigned a mentor who is a senior leader in phs and is personally committed to the programme. This year the mentor group includes two senior female leaders from phs’ parent company Bidvest Group.
The programme is being facilitated for the second time by Dr Lucy Ryan, founder of Mindspring, a leadership coach and senior lecturer in applied positive psychology. She said: “It’s great to be back and a privilege to lead a programme that’s already had startling success with the first group of women. phs Group is the perfect blend of a company that wants to seriously address their executive gender balance by providing internal support of mentors with board sponsorship and external training and coaching. Last year’s tribe are doing so well, I’m looking forward to seeing how this team progresses.”
Twelve women graduated from the Women in Leadership programme last year, and over a third have already been promoted. One of those individuals is Teresa Gizzi who was promoted from a regional sales manager role to the sales director of phs Wastekit, leading a team of 17 sales people and joining the business leadership team. Teresa commented on how the course helped her achieve her goal of promotion. Tereza Gizzi said: “I’m a big believer in personal and team development and I will always embrace every opportunity I’m given. Stepping Up further boosted my confidence and built on my skills, plus I got to meet and work alongside some fantastic, strong and talented women from right across the phs Group. Hearing their experiences and opinions, and learning more about their roles, was invaluable. We are so lucky to have an incredible team of women with so much to offer. When the time came to step up into the sales director role at phs Wastekit, I was ready to take the bull by the horns and dove straight into this exciting new challenge, knowing I could make a positive and lasting difference. I feel proud of how far we have all come since last year.”
phs Group will celebrate 60 years in business later this year. As the company reflects on six decades of business, it will also be assessing what kind of business it wants to reflect to the world as it progresses. phs’ Lucy Taylor concludes: “We are proud of each and every one of our colleagues, and the work we do to ensure that we keep our customers’ businesses running smoothly. We want to build on the trust and great relationships we have with our people and our customers and build a more diverse workforce on all levels.
“Stepping Up creates broader talent pools and different perspectives that can bring us new insights and ideas – all contributing to better colleague engagement, which will in turn benefit our customers everywhere. Thank you to this team of women for leading the way in this area.”
