Joey Powis works with the Distance Learning Team for
Rolls-Royce, project managing maintenance training courses for the
civil aerospace business. He took part in Frontrunner, a Common
Purpose course for emerging leaders.
"As someone just starting out on my career, I found it
invaluable talking to others on the course and learning from their
experiences. The beauty of having people from the public, private
and voluntary sectors on the course was that we all came away with
a deeper understanding of how the differing organisations work.
What I found particularly interesting was the similarities between
effective social and commercial leadership. This has really helped
me in my role at Rolls-Royce.
"The biggest impact that the course had on me personally was
in giving me the confidence to be the leader of change not only
within, but away from my specific department and role. I'm now more
active and forceful in pushing for change if I think it will
benefit my company.
"Common Purpose makes it easy to keep in contact with the
other participants on my course as well as other Common Purpose
alumni. I now have a wide range of contacts at my disposal,
spanning various sectors. I find it hard to think of any faster way
to build such a vast leadership network.
"Frontrunner made me realise that I actually had a lot more
power than I thought I did, it was just up to me to make the most
of it."
Looking back on his time on Frontrunner, Joey says that he was
also struck by the frankness of the speakers and the relevance of
what they had to say:
"I was impressed by the calibre of the leaders that came to
speak to us. They didn't focus solely on how they'd got to where
they are, but spent a lot of time talking about the efforts they'd
made to improve the overall working environments within their
organisations - making life better for employees as well as
shareholders."
