Who we are
Cathy Millis
Cathy is a People Director who defies the typical HR stereotype balancing a people focused approach with commercial acumen, business challenge and a selfless desire to inspire individual and business success.
With over 27 years business experience in UK & International markets in customer focused organisations, Cathy has led significant multi-channel and multi-market transformational change programmes. She has experience of operating in multi-sized FTSE companies as well as a Board Director of a privately-owned company.
Always looking for optimum performance, Cathy’s strength at building rapport integrates her rapidly into organisations and with people to be a conscience and challenge and to immediately start delivering results. She focuses significant emphasis on storytelling and ensuring total stakeholder engagement to the business strategy.
As a natural leader, Cathy uses a direct but empathetic style to elicit high performance from individuals and teams and she drives accountability and ownership to ensure translation into business results.
Cathy has worked on industry-leading programmes including the launch of the SIMPLY Food format in Marks & Spencer, International market growth, significant closure programmes, transformational reward and benefit change, TUPE & acquisitions and multiple organisational design restructures. Cathy has also established award-winning HR Functions and developed People Strategies and departments from scratch.
As a coach, Cathy builds strong, genuine rapport with individuals and uses her expertise and intuition to enable others to identify and achieve their goals. Cathy is not afraid to challenge individuals to ensure they tackle all aspects of their self-development including embracing and exploiting their unique strengths.
“My best days are where I know I’ve had productive conversations where others have gained knowledge or insight into themselves or others that helps them move forward”.
Cathy is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. She holds occupational testing certificates in Saville Wave Assessment and British Psychological Society (BPS) Level A & B and BPS accredited Certificate in Coaching.
Simmone Haywood
Simmone is an experienced People Director with a clear sense of purpose. Supporting Organisations, Teams and Individuals to realise their potential is at the heart of what motivates her. Working closely with business leaders, developing strong people strategies to deliver business success comes naturally to Simmone. With Operating Board level experience, Simmone has been responsible for the People Function of a FTSE 100 company, with over 75 000 colleagues.
With over 30 years business experience in UK Retail, Simmone has led significant transformational change programmes. Her brand loyalty has allowed her to develop a deep understanding of all aspect of UK and International Clothing and Home retailing.
Simmone’s strength in identifying issues and being able to cut through with natural ease and rapport make her a pleasure to work with. Results are important to Simmone. Being commercially driven, as an HR practitioner, is second nature and Simmone’s ability to influence and engage her stakeholders with passion and commitment is part of her natural style.
As a natural leader, Simmone enjoys developing teams and individuals to get results. Her empowering style facilitates high performance and continuous improvement and she drives accountability which allow her to deliver, track and measure business results.
Simmone has been responsible for the Global Talent agenda for Marks and Spencer PLC. She has led the Recruitment, Learning & Development and Succession Planning functions. She led the development of a Board Level Inclusion Strategy, reigniting the business focus on Diversity and Inclusion, and delivered a new graduate recruitment scheme and led the delivery of the strategy to improve the digital capability of the M&S workforce.
In 2016, Simmone spent 6 months as Marks and Spencer’s Director of Human Resources, during which time she led the function through significant changes and supported the new CEO in developing and delivering changes to the top team, introducing the newly formed Operating Committee of which she was a member.
During her long career with M&S Simmone has held a vast array of HR roles including Regional and Divisional leadership, specialist project management role in Pensions and senior HR Business partner roles – responsible for teams based both in the UK and globally.
Simmone has Non-executive experience. She sat on the board for the three- year Leeds University research programme, and represented M&S on the British Retail Council’s Pay and Performance forum. She volunteers as an Enterprise Advisor for a local secondary school, supporting the successful achievement of the Gatsby Benchmark. Simmone is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). She has undertaken the prestigious ‘Top Flight’ programme for Senior Women Executives run by The Pipeline.
Associate Network
Additional Information
We currently have access to a wide network of associates who are from Business backgrounds with extensive experience in Business Leadership & Development & Coaching, Talent & Recruitment, Employee Relations, Transformational Change, Communications & Engagement & Programme Management.
