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Serco - The Chief Executive View
Passion for the job and common purpose
By Chris Hyman
Edition: Achieving Effective Execution.

CEO personal highlights:

  • Time in the job: 3 years
  • Career highlights: Previously Serco Group Finance Director
  • Outside interests: Tennis, Motor Racing, Gospel Singing
  • Family highlights: Married with a daughter and a son

Serco:

  • Description: Support Services
  • Turnover (FY 2004): £1,637m
  • Employees: 41,000
  • Key Markets: Defence, Transport, Home Affairs, Local Government, Science, Education, Health
  • Geography: UK, Europe, Middle East, North America, Asia Pacific
  • Ownership: _Quoted_

Employ people with passion and capacity

On the ground, in our delivery contracts, our business is about the hard inches. We look for people who believe in what they are doing, have passion for their jobs, and have the capacity to grow, take on more and absorb pressure.

If everyone has this mindset, you can achieve almost anything. For those who lack passion, or who run out of it along the way, we encourage them to find a way out and we try to help them find something else.

Know the outcomes

If you are going to consistently deliver, you can’t afford to leave things to chance. At a leadership level, this means understanding that you can deliver on your promises before you make them every time. This means understanding that you can deliver the contract before you take it on.

We don’t take on contracts unless we have access, time and resources to understand from the bottom up how we are going to deliver it. This means building long-term relationships with all our stakeholders to ensure we understand and can meet their needs.

Lead through governing principles

..passionate people believe in what they are doing and excel naturally..
Our business is service delivery, in myriad forms, in many contracts. To lead, we need to do this better than anyone else in our chosen markets. We believe the best way to do this is not through systems and controls, but through fostering common attitudes and values. The attitude part is “passion and capacity”, the values part is something we have worked at very hard over the last year to understand, articulate and bring to life (see box below).

We are very serious about our values and I believe that living them will be the main reason why people join us and ultimately why we are successful.


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