Dr Heather Melville OBE - Creating inclusive cultures and getting the best out of people

Nottingham Business School Business Leaders

Banker Heather Melville remembers clearly the day she told senior colleagues at Royal Bank of Scotland about her idea to set up a women’s network for staff.

“One male colleague said: What are they doing? Are they going to be talking about jam and burning their bras?” she tells the Nottingham Business School’s Business Leaders’ Podcast.

More than a decade later, the innovative women’s network now has more than 12,000 members across 33 different countries – and Dr Melville has been awarded an OBE for her services to gender equality.

She says: “To this day, I still think it’s quite comical. I paid no attention to the comments. But I tried to grab the attention and the ego of the person who made them by saying: This is a really important initiative and I need you to cast your eye over it.

“When he did, he saw the business case. He came back and said: This is definitely something we should be doing. I’m going to retract my comment about the jam!”

During more than three decades working in the City of London, Dr Melville was a senior exec at both the Royal Bank of Scotland and at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

She has been a great champion of women in business and chairs the Women in Management organisation CMI Women.

In this episode of the NBS Business Leaders’ Podcast, she tells Honorary Visiting Professor Mike Sassi that many businesses still have much to do to create an inclusive culture that is welcoming for men and women.

But she says their mindsets are being changed by the next generation of business leaders.

“I often hear young men saying they will not work for an organisation that doesn’t treat women fairly,” she says.

“Today’s young men are growing up with that value inside them. They recognise that their sisters, mothers, girlfriends, daughters, nieces… want equality.”

In 2012, Dr Melville was named as one of the top 100 women in the world making a difference to the economic empowerment of women, in the International Alliance for Women awards.

Five years later she was awarded her OBE, in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, and she is now a senior managing director with the prestigious Ridgeway advisors, on London’s Buckingham Palace Road.

Today, the IBM Business School graduate believes companies are increasingly recognising that all staff are much more likely to be loyal to a considerate boss.

Dr Melville says: “Once upon a time people frowned on the idea of someone working three or four days a week, so they could take children to school or parents to appointments.

“Now [modern leaders] recognise they get much better value from their staff if they appreciate them.

“I know people who have been offered a lot of money to change their job, but they stay because their organisation looked after them when they were on maternity leave or when a relative died.

“Leaders know that organisations benefit when they treat their employees well.”