Quentin Colborn, QC People Management
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14754390780000945 |
| Date | 01 January 2007 |
| Pages | 6-6 |
| Published date | 01 January 2007 |
| Author | |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Quentin Colborn
is director of QC People
Management. His previous
positions include group HR director at Rubicon,
employment relations manager at RAC Motoring
Services and HR and training officer at Scottish and
Newcastle breweries.
6Volume 6 Issue 2 January/February 2007
PRACTITIONER PROFILE
,
HR executives share their experience in human resources
Quentin Colborn, QC
People Management
S
tudent politics seems an unlikely
route into HR, but that’s exactly
where Quentin Colborn, director of
independent HR consultancy QC People
Management caught the HR bug.
“A few experiences I had working at
Swansea University students union were
eye-openers into dealing with people at
work,“ he says. Having left university,
Colborn learned the HR trade at Scottish
and Newcastle breweries, among other
places, and then accelerated his HR
career at RAC Motoring Services.
Tapping into employee needs
During his 11 years at RAC, Colborn
introduced opinion surveys to all 4,000
employees. “I had to convince employees
that the survey would be listened to.”
They were given feedback on the survey
results and the issues actioned included
improving internal communication – a
particular problem at a company with
many field-based employees. One
solution was to distribute a regular
cassette tape “magazine” containing
RAC news and information for
employees to listen to in their vans and
keep in touch with the business.
By the time RAC was sold to Lex
Service in 1999, HR had developed highly
effective relationships with employee
trade unions – such that the unions even
promoted RAC membership to their own
members. “This was great because it
meant that HR was generating a revenue
stream, albeit fairly small,” says Colborn.
Rubicon’s mergers and acquisitions
Colborn later worked as group HR
director at insurance services provider,
Rubicon, where he was involved in
assessing a number of business
acquisitions. On one occasion, Rubicon
was looking to buy a call center from a
major UK insurance company. “The
vendors thought the redundancy liability
was about UK£1.5million. However,
having read the very unusual and
illogical employee contracts, union and
redundancy agreements, I discovered it
was actually UK£2.5 million. The
acquisition didn’t go ahead,” he says.
HR practitioner qualities and training
Colborn’s HR experiences have led him to
conclude that one-size-fits-all training
isn’t as effective as targeted training. “At
Rubicon, the most effective training I did
for the HR team was running occasional
lunch sessions where we discussed HR
issues,“ he says. Using live, topical events
– for example, a company strike that was
in the news – the team would discuss the
underlying HR issues and what could be
learned from the example situation.
Another lunch session was introduced
for line managers, who were encouraged
to attend the meeting with any HR
questions they might have. “I chaired
these meetings with one other HR team
member in order to enhance their
working knowledge,” says Colborn.
Valuable HR qualities
Colborn thinks HR will gradually become
part of the business management team,
“but some businesses still keep HR
tucked away in a box,” he says.
“A good HR person needs to keep
their finger on the pulse and be
pragmatic, business-aware and solutions-
oriented,” Colborn believes. “Too often,
HR people will have reasons for why
things can’t be done. Legislation does
constrain sometimes, but you need
people who can look at what needs to
happen and find ways of doing it,“ he
says.
“HR should build relationships so that
when line managers have issues with
their staff they feel able to flag them
early.“ Similarly, Colborn says “an HR
person should never be surprised by
what a line manager brings to them,
because they should know what’s
bubbling under in the business. Even
potentially small issues can escalate and
the good HR professional needs to have
a ‘nose’ to spot potential issues and
recognize when the employer may face
litigation,” he says.
Colborn now runs his own
independent HR consultancy, QC People
Management. In this capacity he’s often
asked to help solve workplace conflict.
One method he suggests is to
“encourage the more senior employee to
put themselves in the other person’s
shoes and think what the reasons could
be for this person to behave the way
they do,” he says.
Assessment procedures
“I learned a lot about psychometrics in
my early training, which I’ve used
wherever I’ve worked,” says Colborn. In
his recent consultancy work with the
Motor Insurers’ Bureau, he helped install
a succession-planning process which
included assessing the senior team using
psychometrics, personality questionnaires
and aptitude tests. “It was a slightly
unusual use of psychometrics, as its
standard use is within recruitment
procedures,” he says.
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