Inclusive Growth Show

Driving Gender Diversity Through Inclusive Leadership at Parcelforce

• Toby Mildon • Episode 156

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“You can’t transform without diversity.”

In this episode of the Inclusive Growth Show, Toby Mildon speaks with Aaron Barnes, former Managing Director of Parcelforce and now a consultant in operational excellence and leadership development.

Aaron shares his powerful journey of confronting and transforming a lack of gender diversity at senior levels in Parcelforce. When faced with the challenge of doubling business revenue, he realised that a homogeneous leadership team posed a significant risk to change. His data-driven and deeply personal approach led to the creation of employee resource groups, allyship campaigns, mentoring schemes, and recruitment reform.

Key takeaways:

  • Why Aaron saw a lack of diversity as a strategic risk
  • The power of engagement surveys and what lies beneath the surface
  • How to overcome resistance and “collateral damage” when championing inclusion
  • Real-life examples of second-generation gender bias in action
  • How inclusive growth can lead to personal and organisational transformation

Guest highlight: Aaron Barnes, ex-Parcelforce MD, now leading his own consultancy, shares honest, actionable lessons for leaders driving change.

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If you're enjoying this episode and looking to boost equity, inclusion, and diversity in your organisation, my team and I are here to help. Our team specialises in crafting data-driven strategies, developing inclusive leaders, designing fair recruitment processes, and enhancing disability confidence. With a blend of professional expertise and lived experience, we're ready to support you on your journey. Reach out to us through our website. 

If you want to build a more inclusive workplace that you can be proud of please visit our website to learn more.

Toby Mildon:

Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon, future

proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace. Toby Mildon:

Hey there. Thank you ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. I'm Toby Mildon, and today I'm joined by Aaron Barnes. Aaron has got loads of experience working in senior leadership teams at Parcelforce. It's one organization, for example. Now he works as an operational excellence and leadership development consultant and we're going to talk about diversity and inclusion. Because when he was working at Parcelforce, he was really instrumental in addressing gender diversity within the organisation. So going to catch up with Aaron to learn what he learned and hopefully apply some principles to your own organisation. So, Aaron, thanks

ever so much for joining me today. It's lovely to see you. Aaron Barnes:

Thanks, Toby. Been really looking forward to the pod and the opportunity

to share my experience. Toby Mildon:

So that was a really brief, high level introduction to yourself. But can you just share with us a bit more about your background and what inspired you to focus on gender

diversity during your time at Parcelforce? Aaron Barnes:

Yeah, with pleasure. Thank you. So, my diversity background, I'll talk about career first. So briefly. My background is 18 years of leadership in operations, commercial and operational excellence roles at Royal Mail and that culminated as you touched on in me being the Managing Director of Parcelforce Worldwide, which is Royal Mail's express parcels business. Recently, I've set up my own consultancy and that specializes in operational excellence and leadership development. And just to add for context, in the early days of my career, right at the very beginning for Royal Mail, I combined, as many graduates do, a strong work ethic with a love of learning and personal development. And that saw me progress at a good pace. And then as my roles included more accountability for people and team leadership, I discovered a passion and developed a skill for shaping those teams, for fostering the right culture and embracing development. And it really all became about the people plan. So you asked what inspired me to focus on gender diversity. When I started as the MD in Parcelforce, it's a significant sized business, it's over a billion pounds of annual revenue and I was tasked with a strategy, or to develop a strategy to grow the business,

monstrously grow it, over double the revenue. Aaron Barnes:

So the strategy was a growth strategy, a really significant one too. And do you know what scared me the most about that task? It wasn't that it hadn't been done before, it wasn't that it was my first MD role, although that was certainly daunting in its own right. It wasn't anything like that. It was the lack of diversity amongst the senior leadership team and the risk that that represented to the achievement of the strategy. And just to build, I looked at the operational leadership team. When I'm saying that I'm really focused on the operational leadership team. They're the nucleus of the organization and there just wasn't any diversity. I don't know why, but what struck me most about the lack of diversity was that there wasn't a single woman. And I just found that troubling, you know, and how could we change on the scale that we needed to change with such little diversity? It unsettled me and I'll just build on that in the answers to the question. I described the paradigm at the time in the business as like a security and the status quo, which isn't unique to Parcelforce. And I think the absence of diversity at that time in the management team was one of the mechanisms that preserved the status

quo. Aaron Barnes:

So I came into the business. One of my vantage points coming into Parcelforce was that I was like this outside insider. I'd come from Royal Mail into Parcelforce. I could draw upon what I'd seen in Royal Mail. And it must be said, Royal Mail had made excellent progress on DEI from the top down, and particularly on gender diversity, which is perhaps part of what made it stand out even more to me in Parcelforce. Now, Parcelforce hadn't, it seemed being touched by any of that, or maybe it hadn't sustained or reversed out because I can't really comment on what had happened prior to my arrival. But it was just really clear. It's a big difference. Big, big difference. So the catalyst for this focus on gender diversity, to come back to your question, Toby, was based on that initial assessment for the business's readiness to change and on the scale it needed to change. And to me, the absence of diverse leadership was, one, a moral and ethical concern, and two, it represented a very real risk to our ability

to transform. Toby Mildon:

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you said that because with many of my clients I talk about the business case of diversity and inclusion and how it helps us create higher performing teams. And we need to link it back to business objectives around growth, for example, and things like that. So as you were sort of getting started on your journey, what were some of the steps or initiatives that you took to address diversity and what did you find were

the most impactful? Aaron Barnes:

Yeah, so I'll start with the state of gender diversity when I sort of began and then move on to actions that were taken. So first of all, there's a very clear glass ceiling at depot manager level. There were no women beyond that. It was fixed. And the disparity didn't end there though. So the chronology of this for me was those that observations and then sort of overturning stones, and it reinforcing the fact that something needed to be done. And one of those key moments for me came when the business's annual engagement survey got published. And this, in Royal Mail, as it is in many organizations was really high profile. It mattered to the business. It mattered to me enormously. So I'm poring over the results as you do and trying to make sense of them. Now I know and it's interesting to note that in engagement surveys women tend to answer more positively than men. So you should expect to see, say higher engagement amongst female employees compared to male employees, for example. And you could see that in my businesses overall results, women were more engaged and they had higher

trust than their male counterparts. Aaron Barnes:

Shockingly though, when I filtered it by managers, a huge gap jumped off the page. Women managers, for reasons I didn't understand at that point, were considerably less engaged and had considerably lower trust than their male counterparts. And so my discomfort increased tenfold. You know, I just had to take action. It's no longer this initial observation. It starts to gain real validity in my mind, even more so. So steps that I took initially. There were a couple of distinct phases that actually ran in parallel with. At the time I was... It's just circumstance. I was studying for my MBA at the time as well, with Henley Business School, which as a side note was a personally amazing experience. And I got to a reputation and responsibility module as it was called. And interestingly, you could focus on internal reputation as well as external, or instead of external reputation. So it was about both. And so I took the opportunity to understand this diversity problem in more detail. Arranged one to ones with every female depot manager in the business. There are only nine. Yeah. So this isn't an enormous endeavor.

Less than 20% of all of our depot managers. Aaron Barnes:

And those conversations were interesting. They were really interesting, but they barely scratched the surface. One theme that I was curious about, and it struck me at the time was that there wasn't any immediate reinforcement from those women about the survey