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Amicus co-founders General Sir Peter Wall and Jennifer Carnegie tell Emily Moore why good leadership, and treating people well, is important to business success.
He was the head of the British Army; she was an industrial engineer who had run a global corporate university for Mars Incorporation before becoming chief people officer for Digicel and then taking a career break to bring up her three children.
But when General Sir Peter Wall and Jennifer Carnegie met at a dinner in Bermuda, they found that, despite their diverse professional backgrounds, they had a lot in common, not least of which was their passion for leadership and enabling people to “be their best at work”.
“We have both had the privilege of working for great bosses and have seen the difference that such strong leadership has made to our lives,” explained Jennifer. “We also both believe very strongly that good leadership is crucial to helping people to feel supported and happier at work.”
But while both Sir Peter and Jennifer had seen first-hand the benefits of working with good leaders, they were also aware that such bosses were not as commonplace as perhaps they should be.
“It was my husband who first suggested that we should set up a consultancy business when we returned to Jersey,” said Jennifer. “I was slightly reluctant at first because I hadn’t had a very positive experience with consultants, but we soon saw the potential that combining our skills could deliver.”
The product of that combination of skills was Amicus, the “critical friend” which, for the past decade, has been working with organisations in a range of sectors to “set them up for success”.
“When we work with a business, the focus is on making that organisation better, so that its team can deliver change more effectively,” said Jennifer. “We don’t make the change for them. Instead, we enhance the capabilities of the individuals within the organisation so that they can drive and deliver the change.”
Fundamental to this approach, as Sir Peter explains, is Amicus’s focus on “promoting better leadership”.
“When I left the military and started working with businesses in the commercial sector, I was struck by the leadership gap which I saw in many cases,” he said. “While some people may question whether military skills can be transferred into commercial entities, there are many similarities between the two environments.
“The military is a big, complex, dispersed organisation trying to execute complex projects at pace, and that is quite similar to the change programmes taking place in the commercial world. Contrary to widespread perceptions, the military is not a highly authoritarian, unregulated body. Instead, it is a highly regulated organisation which has to conform to political and legal restraints and which only gets things done through delegation. Therefore, it is a good model for organisations undergoing change in any industry.”
As well as “helping leadership teams to become more effective”, Sir Peter adds that Amicus runs “bespoke development programmes, designed to align with each company’s ambitions” for individuals within businesses.
“The most important thing to remember is that if you strip everything out of a business, the one thing left is the people,” said Jennifer. “Therefore, it is vital that the people at the top of the business are capable of taking the company into the future while developing and retaining talent. Leaders have to recognise the benefit of treating people well, setting them up for success, making sure they are crystal clear on what is expected from them and ensuring that they have the skills, tools and resources to deliver on those expectations.”
This, says Sir Peter, is one of the key factors which differentiates Amicus from other consultancy firms.
“We are not a management consultancy offering change programmes using a generic model to help people carry out manoeuvres,” he said. “Our focus is much more on helping leaders to get the best from their people. A lot of training courses are perfectly worthy but don’t change very much. We look at everything from the perspective of how we get to where we want to be, how we accelerate that change and how we encourage people to behave differently. That can be challenging but all the people who work at, or with, Amicus are practitioners who have worked in leadership roles in relatively demanding circumstances, whether in complex civilian organisations or in military operational circumstances where decisions have a bearing on life and death.
“That practical expertise sets us apart from a lot of players in the market, enabling us to work with clients to discern what their challenges are – which may not be what they think they are – and then deliver high-end bespoke solutions to get to the intended destination as quickly as possible.”
Underpinning this, says Jennifer, are the relationships which Amicus builds with its clients.
“We have a fantastic rapport with our clients, and that enables us to get under the skin of organisations very quickly and cut through the noise,” she said. “By getting to the heart of the issue, we can then work out, with the client, the action which will deliver the change. We are not interested in just talking about change, we want to get stuff done, so the focus is very much on outcomes.”
And a key outcome which Jennifer and Sir Peter would like to see is an increase in the number of “really good leaders” in the Island.
“We work with quite a few organisations, and I would say that the number of really good leaders is quite low, something which is borne out in the Leadership Jersey survey results,” said Jennifer. “However, encouragingly, the number of people who want to become better is increasing. Often, though, people only turn their attention to leadership development when they have a problem to solve.
“What a lot of leaders don’t realise is that there are problems beneath the surface, which just haven’t yet come to the fore. A really good leader is aware of those issues. They also understand themselves, have great self-awareness and understand the impact that they have on their teams. They understand their capabilities and limitations, and they put their people first, doing everything they can to set their teams up for success. They are also focused on the future and know how to empower people through delegation rather than just giving staff more work to do.”
As well as working with individual businesses, Amicus promotes these messages through a series of workshops including Leadership For Getting Stuff Done and Leadership For Emotional Wellbeing, which anyone can attend.
“The idea of the workshops is to bring different perspectives to a subject,” added Jennifer. “With Leadership For Emotional Wellbeing, for example, we bring in a clinical psychiatrist who explains what happens in the body when we deal with stressful situations. Putting that science behind the behaviours is really compelling and shows the value of not just being aware of behavioural science trends but in seeing how that knowledge can be turned into practical use.”
In a similar vein, Amicus’s first leadership conference, which took place in March, was designed to “challenge convention and myths around leadership”.
“We wanted to bring a diverse group of people together for an engaging conversation about leadership,” said Sir Peter. “The feedback showed that the diversity of the audience was enlightening for participants, as they discovered that people face similar challenges despite working in very different environments. Encouragingly, the conference also showed a strong appetite for leadership development in the Island, so we plan to organise another event to capitalise on that.”
Indeed, the business, which is also looking forward to celebrating its ten-year milestone this month, has several events in the pipeline for 2025.
“Next year is set to be a big year for Amicus, with lots of exciting leadership development programmes on the cards, as well as a leadership conference in Bermuda and a new workshop focusing on leadership for high-performing teams, so we encourage anyone keen to enhance their leadership skills to keep an eye on our website, where further details of each initiative will be announced soon,” added Sir Peter.
lTo find out more about Amicus and to be one of the first to hear about each event as it is announced, visit amicuslimited.com and sign up to the newsletter.
