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Big Interview | Stuart Kennedy, CPO, Cambridge University Press & Assessment
Meet Stuart Kennedy, CPO of Cambridge University Press & Assessment...
Dale Haddon
Chief People Officer, Royal Ballet & Opera
Dale Haddon's HR career has seen him work at all the big players, Royal Mail, the BBC to the Royal Ballet & Opera - he has negotiated some of the biggest pay deals in HR history. Here's his story...
Dale Haddon
Chief People Officer, Royal Ballet & Opera
Dale Haddon's HR career has seen him work at all the big players, Royal Mail, the BBC to the Royal Ballet & Opera - he has negotiated some of the biggest pay deals in HR history. Here's his story...
There’s a star studded list of employers on Dale Haddon’s CV ranging from Royal Mail, the BBC to the Royal Ballet & Opera. Haddon jokes with me that he only ever works for businesses with ‘British or Royal’ in the name and comedy aside it looks to be true. This CPO has negotiated some of the most challenging deals with staff, navigated people management in the arts when the theatres closed and when all that wasn’t enough – jumped out of a plane to do a sky dive and climbed Kilimanjaro for good measure.
I ask him how it all began.
‘My early influence was my father who was a trade union representative’
Haddon had an early insight into employee relations via his father in what he refers to as ‘seeing the other side of the fence’. That nascent experience piqued Haddon’s interest in employee relations. The rite of passage meant that despite his father urging him to leave school at 16 and ‘get a trade’, University was the first calling with a degree in history and politics; part of his studies were spent looking at how those areas applied to the world of work. Haddon duly found out how they did when he landed in the Royal Mail’s graduate scheme; he tells me this nonchalantly, as if the milk-round for the A-list is as easy to bag as turning up for the day.
It was the right exposure at the right time to pretty much all that can be thrown at you in HR. There was both the, ‘inspirational and the truly worrying,’ he admits. It was a job that not only taught him a lot but also took him from Aberdeen to Penzance and all the stops in between. He eventually landed in Manchester and as ever was ahead of his time, was duly appointed as head of HR for the northeast when he was only in his mid-20s. “I had responsibility for a few thousand people and from thereon in every time there was a re-structuring at the Royal Mail I was lucky enough to be promoted to focus on a bigger challenge, eventually I ended up in London,” he says.
Being in the right place at the right time has been Haddon’s friend and when the big hitters came to town in the form of Tony McCarthy who had come from BAE Systems as their Group HR Director and eventually ended up at British Airways – Haddon was ‘seen’ and primed for his next move as HR Director of Parcel Force. It was 2003 – the year the congestion charge was brought to London and Britain notched up its hottest day on record.
“He gave me freedom to run a business with 3,500 staff!” he explains. By this time Haddon was in his mid-30s and tells me it was a ‘phenomenal opportunity’ that was detached enough from the Royal Mail to allow for some creativity. “We introduced self-employed owner drivers as opposed to employed ones,” he says. The results of dipping his toes into the side kick of the Royal Mail and trying out a few wild cards was transforming its profits from being a £100 million loss making organisation to a £20 million profit making one.
