We sat down with Lynn Evison of Alvarez and Marsal to hear about her career and learn more about the work she currently does, combining her roles as MD and People Ambassador at A&M’s Corporate Transformation division.

Lynn has worked across the world at some of the biggest businesses and has a wealth of experience to share on driving diversity and inclusion in corporate environments.

Lynn will be speaking at our next Women in Transformation event, showcasing some of her recent successes at A&M, discussing the importance of investing time into understanding the perspectives of women across all levels of an organisation, and exploring the power and limitations of data for ED&I.

Can you tell us about your background and how you came to join A&M?

I’ve held senior positions in the retail and consumer sectors throughout my career, and I've jumped from industry back to consulting and vice versa, doing advisory roles as well.

I've always been in the retail and consumer sector, having started many years ago as a graduate training at Marks and Spencer. I also launched clothing for Sainsbury's under Justin King. I was part of a very small team that built TU Clothing from a blank piece of paper, which I think all of us are still very proud of. In my most recent role in the industry, I was the EVP for pretty much everything except product design at Swarovski. That involved looking at the global footprint from a distribution network perspective, supply chain, back office, planning, marketing, real estate, everything.

That’s the industry side of my experience. On the advisory side, when I left M&S, I went to work for a company called Kurt Salmon, which is now part of Accenture Strategy. That’s when I was lucky enough to embark on working in probably every corner of the globe except my home base of London. I've spent time in India, China, most European countries, as well as Canada and Japan.

At A&M, I work on large-scale transformations pretty much anywhere in the world. In addition to being an MD and doing daily work serving clients and delivering turnarounds, I'm also the people ambassador for our Corporate Transformation Division. That involves looking after our people, and one of the key themes of that is female leadership and female development.

Can you tell us more about what that involves? 

Diversity is an area we monitor regularly. When talking about diversity, people generally talk about gender or ethnicity, but for us, diversity involves much more. We consider age, background, experience and culture to ensure we balance giving our people the right opportunities to continue to grow with having the right people on our projects.  

An area that we also continually look at is recognising the different needs of our people at varying stages of their career.

We have a Women’s network that operates across EMEA and actively supports our female community.  One aspect of this is to ensure that women feel that they've got the right training and career opportunities, as well as buddies, mentors and coaches to make sure that they feel supported.

When we started looking at this, we started with 1-to-1 sessions with all our females to understand their experience of working as a woman at A&M.  One thing that became apparent very quickly was that the points raised by our Women’s network applied to everybody.  For example, we have established internal groups led by our own employees, such as our parenting network, which was set up by the females in the business but was open to all. We've pushed initiatives around paternity and maternity policies. We're also very focused on flexible working and making sure people can still do the job and have a family and work-life balance.

We regularly ask our teams what else we can do to support them.  Feedback we received last year was that at some point, people may need to be at home, not to look after a child, but to look after a relative or a parent who is ill, so the same policies apply. We just have to be mindful that people have different needs and we need to accommodate them.

What sort of things are you planning to talk about at Women in Transformation?

There’s a little bit about doing a training-needs analysis and knowing what your female team members need. There's something that's quite action-oriented around that, even just in terms of taking the opportunity to listen to your people.

One of the things I’ve done as part of my people role over the last couple of months is speak to every one of the women in our business on a one-to-one basis to understand what it’s like to work at A&M and get their perspective.

Some of these things that we've done, often organisations say, “Oh, I don't have a budget for it.” Actually, you don't need a budget. It doesn't cost any money to talk. Just go to people and listen. What we found is that female engagement increased significantly because they knew there was someone to go to, and that someone was willing to take the time to listen to their experiences and what they need.

Often, the things I learned when having conversations with these people never came up on our surveys. We had no data points on it, and that's interesting for us as a business. Don't get me wrong, data is important because it gives you insight, but it's not the only topic. We’re talking about human beings, not transactions and transactional data. We're talking about you and me, how we feel in the morning, and you can't capture that from just data points.

Another thing to mention is that while some companies put a big campaign around it, and it becomes one of those fashionable things to talk about, at A&M, we don't talk about it, we just do it. We start with understanding the data, then we work on personal relationships in terms of talking to people, and then we address issues and make sure we've got the right policies and procedures in place to support people. It's not like it’s a project where you say, “Okay, this is the project of the year.” It's part of our DNA and our culture of supporting people.

These are the sorts of things that we're pulling out to say, “This is what we've done. This is the result we've seen. Give it a go.”

Wrapping up

The impressive range and depth of Lynn’s experience makes her a fascinating source of insight into what can be done to drive ED&I and have a meaningful impact on organisations. We’re thoroughly looking forward to hearing what she has to say.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the series and seeing what our previous events have looked like, click here.