Credit Management January February 2024

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RISING STAR THE CREDIT WHISPERER A young, talented professional chose credit management over accountancy and has never looked back. BY MELANIE YORK WHEN Hayley Earle ACICM left school, she had ambitions to become a chartered accountant. Having a talent for numbers, she applied to the University of West of England and started her degree course. However, in her second year, she took an option in credit management, run in partnership with the CICM, where she found her real passion and the start of a successful career. “The tutor was just so passionate and engaging it changed my mind about what I wanted to study and what I would do after university,” she says. This was during the 2008 credit crunch, so it was relevant, meaningful and exciting. “So I took another module in my third year, which was credit risk analysis, which I loved. I have not looked back since.” Today, Hayley is Head of Credit and Collections for Amey Group Services, a leading provider of full life-cycle engineering, operations and decarbonisation solutions for transport infrastructure and complex facilities. She attributes her success not to her inherited numeracy skills but to the communications skills she has learned along the way, and planning her career carefully. Getting to know people Through her university courses and the CICM qualifications, which she completed later, Hayley began to realise how much she enjoyed working with other people. She also recognised how the communications skills she was being taught could impact the effectiveness of the credit management team and, ultimately, the business. “Understanding clients and what makes people tick, along with their customers’ payment processes so that they pay when they are contractually due, determines how to get the desired outcome for the business,” Hayley continues. “Getting paid ahead of your competitors, for example, is about pulling all stakeholders together and getting them on board.” In order to build that understanding, listening to customers and stakeholders within the business and the team – and listening well – is critical. She was given one piece of advice early in her career, which she shares with her team today: “Just listen until the other person stops talking,” she says, “rather than trying to insert your opinion or trying to give your advice.” Through her CICM training, she learned that technique works even with angry customers on the telephone: “Eventually when they hear that you're not speaking, they will feel truly listened to,” she says. Today, Hayley takes the same approach with all her stakeholders the business and her team. However, she admits learning to listen isn't easy: “People’s instinct is to try and jump in first because you always have assumptions of what people are going to do and say,” she explains. “But if you listen, there are always nuggets of information that you pick up on and can pass onto the team.” As well as listening, Hayley has also learned that good communication consists of using the appropriate style of language when writing emails or having telephone conversations with clients and internal stakeholders: “We were taught to tell rather than ask. It's amazing how changing a few words can impact the message you're trying give,” she says. “Using active rather than passive language can make a real difference in the results.” Challenging times When it came to the biggest challenge of her career those communication skills would prove vital. Hayley was originally working in Oxford close to her hometown. Then, the credit function was relocated to Liverpool where she was asked to become the new Head of Credit and form a new team. Two weeks after starting with the team in Liverpool, the pandemic hit. Hayley immediately noticed one significant difference the lockdowns made: the ability to listen to the team within the work environment: “When I was a junior,” she says, “I listened to senior staff, or my peers speaking. You would pick up so much information even though you weren't involved in the conversation.” Brave | Curious | Resilient / www.cicm.com / January & February 2024 / PAGE 40
CREDIT MANAGEMENT Remote working made that impossible, so Hayley and her team had to work that much harder: “We had to learn in this virtual world, and train people via teams, with our CICMQ accreditation coming up for renewal.” And Hayley was the only member of the team with experience of working within Amey. Achieving the CICMQ accreditation relies on communicating to get people from within the team and across the business to work towards the same goal and the new ways of working could have been a significant barrier to the team's success. But Hayley started by being very open and inclusive: “As a manager or a leader, you always feel like you have to be the person to speak. But you also need to listen to their thoughts and opinions. The team must be on the same page if you are trying to change specific processes. I always gather the team's opinions on anything new we may be doing and genuinely listen. Ultimately that helps us work together and succeed.” “The tutor was just so passionate and engaging it changed my mind about what I wanted to study and what I would do after university, this was during the 2008 credit crunch, so it was relevant, meaningful and exciting.” Winning ways Her team, she discovered, were keen to continue the legacy of the old team’s approach, but also build new foundations to improve Amey's credit function. Hayley was keen to get the whole team involved. She divided the assessment project into different sections and shared the tasks among them. Crucially she gave some of them the chance to lead. “So, instead of me, we had two junior members of the team project-leading it,” she explains. “Giving people that responsibility means everything is done as a team rather than just you as a manager simply telling them what they are doing.” Hayley was keen to give junior team members the experience of talking to and completing tasks through their peers without having line management authority. “Trying to win over your peers who work alongside you can sometimes be challenging, so it's a good learning curve for them,” she says. The team also learned through the process how essential it is to complete specific tasks at certain times because they could see and understand more clearly how their individual actions impacts the whole team’s performance. It certainly made a difference; Amey’s unallocated cash was reduced from a high of £20 million to £1 million in just twelve months. Their involvement also created a highly enthusiastic team, which was clearly apparent during Amey’s CICMQ assessment and contributed to their success. Brave | Curious | Resilient / www.cicm.com / January & February 2024 / PAGE 41 continues on page 42 >
Page 1 and 2: CREDIT MANAGEMENT CM JANUARY/FEBRUA
Page 3 and 4: SEAN FEAST FCICM MANAGING EDITOR Ed
Page 5 and 6: CICM GOVERNANCE President: Stephen
Page 7 and 8: CREDIT MANAGEMENT A Decade of Excel
Page 9 and 10: CREDIT MANAGEMENT Unprecedented cha
Page 11 and 12: CREDIT MANAGEMENT pandemic and the
Page 13 and 14: CREDIT MANAGEMENT Author: Alexandra
Page 15 and 16: CREDIT MANAGEMENT The initial wave
Page 17 and 18: CREDIT MANAGEMENT DRIVEN TO SUCCEED
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Page 21 and 22: Thursday 1st February 2024 Royal La
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Page 50 and 51: LOOKING FOR YOUR NEXT CAREER MOVE?
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Credit Management January February 2024

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