Moira Siddons FCA

After eight exciting and challenging years Moira has just stood down an a non-executive director of a mutual life assurance company and chairman of its audit committee. In addition, she is a member of the Balancing and Settlement Code Panel that oversees part of the trading of the electricity industry, an executive coach to directors and senior managers, and a facilitator at Board level. Prior to these roles, Moira spent 30 years with PricewaterhouseCoopers (and its predecessor firms) including 13 years as a partner. Initially, she qualified and practised as a chartered accountant, subsequently moving to consulting where she was both a leader of the Human Resource Services and a business consultant in the issues of corporate governance, boardroom pay and board effectiveness. She has lectured extensively on these subjects, in Europe and Asia, and written articles that have been published over the years in most of the mainstream HR press.

Moira’s reasons for taking part in this work are also an important part of what she brings to the programme:
“I started my career over 30 years ago, joining a small firm of chartered accountants and qualifying with them. In time as a manager, I joined Coopers & Lybrand (now PricewaterhouseCoopers) and worked with them initially overseas, then returning to Cambridge and finally moving to London, spending the last 13 years with them as a partner. During that time I worked as an accountant, tax adviser, business consultant and ultimately, HR consultant to many organisations, large and small. I was also a manager myself within the firm, being at different times responsible for business units and people with revenues ranging from £2m to £70m.
Managing my own career was not always easy, but I was successful. What I came to notice more and more as I progressed that there were many many women, both in the firm and working with my clients, whose potential and strengths I could see, but that their “bosses” did not recognise in them in the same way. As I looked at this in more depth, it became clear to me that two things were at work. Firstly the women themselves had no idea of what they were capable of. Indeed many of them were balancing several children, supporting professional husbands and managing complex client relationships; but they could not see how skilful they were being. Most of them were hugely valued by their clients and customers, but rarely so by their employers. Even if they knew within themselves that they had more to offer at work, they seemed unable to bring it or express it in a way that could be heard.
The other matter at work was that many employers were focusing on trying to build new (and somewhat harder/competitive/assertive) skills in these women. As they did this so the individual women lost more self esteem and or began to voice the fact that they did not want to work that way, did not want to be part of a system that recognised only those kinds of skills.
So either those women reached a certain level and got stuck there, or they left.
I believe that businesses need the kinds of skills their people hold back from them, and that when an individual is working with their full strengths on business issues, work is done more effectively, individuals are happier, and loyalty builds between the employer and employee.

"My passion is to put people in touch with their real selves, so that they can bring that, with confidence, to businesses”.

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Moira Siddons FCA

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