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Tinne Ledwitch-Madsen, Head of ED&I at the Post Office is picking up the baton of cultural change in the wake of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. The dream is to move inclusivity forward through new behaviours – leveraged via cultural dashboards that will highlight key data to the executive team.
It began with romance.
‘Recruitment was a happy accident’
A degree in history and Italian from her native Danish university was followed by a masters in the same subject. A study year abroad and with the romance of being in Italy rubbing off - she ended up meeting her husband. “He’s British, so when we moved back to the UK, I had to secure a job to qualify for settlement through the then European citizen scheme. I applied for numerous roles in the humanities sector but ended up in recruitment,” she says.
That self-confessed accidental career lasted 16 years. Executive search was by her own admission fascinating. “I was literally finding people for anything from government jobs to head of camping and caravanning!” she laughs.
Family life ensued and two periods of maternity leave began, starting with her daughter’s birth in 2009. “I had two children in quite a short space of time, and I came back and thought I can’t do this nine to five, so I set up my own firm and did that until my son was older,” she explains.
Postmasters, who are trusted figures in their communities, play a key role in supporting vulnerable customers, ensuring they still have access to the services they rely on
She then joined an in-house recruiter, The Three Partnership – it was a positive move, and she found herself recruiting roles from London to Amsterdam. The tempter was always on her own doorstep, however – Warwickshire, the home of Jaguar Land Rover’s head office.
Starting there as an executive recruiter in 2017 she eventually climbed the ladder, becoming their Diversity and Inclusion Manager in 2021. It was a switch that was brought on by furlough. “Recruitment dried up and I was given six months full pay which I was very grateful for with two young children,” she says.
When furlough ended, she was handed an IR35 project. “I knew I didn’t want to do recruitment anymore,” she says.
‘The role in ED&I at JLR came at a time of great cultural change’
It was a stroke of luck that the role in ED&I came up – it also happened to occur at a point of change. “JLR was moving from being a typical manufacturing operation to a totally different culture,” she says.
JLR had 12 inclusion employee resource groups and Ledwitch-Madsen was adamant that this should extend to giving the factory workers a voice too. “We had to carefully consider how we introduced tools like Microsoft Teams to a dispersed workforce, ensuring seamless adoption - these were key discussion points. Alongside this, we established diverse interview panels to foster inclusion. It was during this time that National Express reached out to me with an opportunity to join their team,” she says.
