Twenty Plus Ten – Alison Henwood
Leadership Experience:
Alison has led finance organizations across the globe for more than 20 years. She has strong experience across sector, size and geography: supply chain, infrastructure, shipping and B2B; in developed and emerging markets. In addition to providing business partnering and challenge to commercial CEOs, her roles included responsibility for core finance processes (governance including JVs, reporting, controls, and risk management). As well as shaping strategic change, she has followed through to ensure it is effectively implemented and in particular that organizational accountabilities are simple and clear. So, she’s “been there” at the sharp end of business management and across all parts of the finance skill set.
Board Experience:
Alison currently holds two listed Board positions. She is a NED and lead for Sustainability at Spectris Plc, a FTSE 250 precision engineering company. At Umicore, a global materials and technology group, she is a member of the Supervisory Board and she also chairs the Audit Committee. Both Umicore and Spectris are heavily impacted by the energy transition and strategically committed to ESG.
Alison was a board member and chair of the Audit Committee between 2016 and 2023 for the UK Hydrographic Organisation (an executive agency of the UK’s Ministry of Defence) where Digital Transformation was a key focus area.
In her more than 10 years of Board experience, Alison has also held Regulated Executive directorships in the USA and UK. She’s been successful in her board roles balancing challenge and support and building a transparent collaborative culture that enables honest conversations about strategic change and performance. So, she’s “been there” in the Board room in both ‘for-profit’ and NFP organizations.
Personal USP:
Alison’s career is built on strong business understanding and stakeholder engagement anchored in financial rigour. More recently, she has supplemented this with ESG leadership training at the Oxford Said business school.
Beyond her finance expertise, Alison’s hallmark has been how she works to simplify complexity to enable alignment and clarity across organizations – which in turn supports delivery and collaboration. Although making strategy and objectives simple often takes more time and effort initially, she has found that this more than offset by implementation benefits. Alison’s experience of board dynamics, combined with her pragmatism and positive approach, equip her to function effectively between board and executive.
Motivation:
She’s held over 20 years of Leadership roles plus over 10 years of Board positions. Alison is now focused on applying these skills to other organizations and supporting and enabling other senior team members to succeed.
Through her Twenty Plus Ten Board Advisory work, she believes that her experience can particularly serve senior teams individuals in public and private companies grappling with simplifying their strategy and business models and aligning their organizations.