INTERVIEW MADE IN ESSEX Sean Feast speaks to Louise Smyth of Companies House about Classical Civilisation, the Civil Service, and the musical tastes of Andy Kershaw. LOUISE Smyth is a woman in a hurry. At least that’s how her colleagues see her. On her desk is a buzzer. She presses it, and her recorded voice utters ‘more pace’. “Apparently it’s something I say quite a lot,” she laughs. “Whatever we are doing or planning, I always want us to be working faster.” Such a desire could be mistaken for impatience, but it would be wide of the mark. Neither has Louise always appeared to be in so much of a hurry. The daughter of a policeman, Louise was born in Ilford and educated at Loughton High School (“My mum wouldn’t let me go to the Comp,” she jokes). She was in no rush to start a career, and received little or nothing by way of careers’ advice beyond that suggested to all the girls – to become an Environmental Health Officer. “I was rubbish at science but pretty good at Latin,” she explains, “and so I decided to study Classical Civilisation at University. It was a combination of Latin and Ancient Greek language with an element of history, literature and social studies. I saw one of my university reports recently, and it said that my Latin was ‘the rustiest Latin they had ever come across’!” SISTERS OF MERCY Louise thoroughly enjoyed her time at the University of Leeds, and among her contemporaries was the DJ Andy Kershaw. “He was in charge of events and so we got to see some amazing bands like The Stranglers and Sisters of Mercy. You always knew he would make it big because the events were all billed as ‘Andy Kershaw presents…’.” On graduating with a BA Hons, Louise still had no clear direction of the career path she wanted to follow, and her CV is an interesting assortment of organisations and roles that don’t completely tell the whole story. While on the face of it, most of her working life has been spent in the civil service, usually with a bias towards HR and people management, she has also worked in Retail (including spells with Debenhams and M&S) and as a trainee manager at McDonalds. “I rather fell into the civil service but have always been proud to be a civil servant because its values of integrity and impartiality are values that I identify with myself, as well as fair and open competition. “When I first started, we didn’t even have a computer. If you wanted a letter to be sent you had to take a draft, with the correct slip, to the typing pool, and had to be extra nice to those in charge or else you could go to the bottom of the pile. “In those days it was all about grades and hierarchies. You had to call everybody Mr this or Mrs that, and they all had big offices, with the size of the office (and the number of windows that it had) based on how senior you were. Today we are now almost entirely open plan, and I pride myself on being approachable. I want people to be able to come up to me and have a chat.” EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT Engaging with employees, she says, can lead to real business improvements. She has a mantra to be adaptable, bold and curious: “It is the people on the ground who really know what changes need to be made that can make a real difference, and the skill is in giving these people a voice. That’s why we’ve recently created an ‘ideas hub’, and one idea alone from one of our team has saved the organisation £650,000.” Louise spent the bulk of her civil service career at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), including a stint as Director of Corporate Services which included delivering a new website which is still rated as being one of the top ten government websites. She increased her responsibilities as Director of Business Support and subsequently Director of IT, leading a transformation project to deliver a new organisation and ways of working. She became Acting Chief Operating Officer of the IPO in June 2014 and COO the following year, leading The Recognised Standard / www.cicm.com / <strong>September</strong> <strong>2019</strong> / PAGE 16
I rather fell into the civil service but have always been proud to be a civil servant because its values of integrity and impartiality are values that I identify with myself, as well as fair and open competition. The Recognised Standard / www.cicm.com / <strong>September</strong> <strong>2019</strong> / PAGE 17 continues on page 18 >
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