Dame Stephanie Shirley

Entrepreneur and philanthropist Dame Stephanie Shirley is one of the UK’s most remarkable and innovative business leaders. In 1939 she was one of the few Jewish children fortunate enough to escape Nazi Germany when she came to Britain, where she has lived ever since. Driven by the desire to make something of her new lease of life, she became an extremely successful businesswoman. In 1962 she founded a business employing mothers as freelance computer programmers, enabling them to work flexibly from home. She took to calling herself Steve in order to overcome the scepticism of the time against women in business. Credibility and major contracts followed and the company became stunningly successful.

Steve Shirley, as she has always since been known, describes these early days as “visionary, crusading madness” and it is hard now to appreciate just how innovative the idea was then of employing women with children to work from home, enabling them to develop careers as well as be mothers. “I was trying to create an organisation in which I myself would have flowered,” Steve reflects, “one that was in contrast to the command and control ethos of the time. Why shouldn’t work be equally flexible and friendly as family life?”

Formerly known as Freelancers International, the business is today known as Xansa plc and employs 3,500 people. In another early innovation, Steve organised ‘free-speaks’ with staff, travelling to the many local areas where they worked to hear their hopes and concerns. Over time these developed into genuinely co-operative groups and this creation of teamwork has been at the heart of Steve’s success. “I am constantly amazed at what comes out of teams,” Steve observes. She has a saying that ‘Success is to be found at the edge of failure’ – by which she means that true success, the point where people give their utmost to a shared venture, is reached by pushing the barrier of giving to where you can almost give no more to people.

“Women have a different view of competitiveness to men,” Steve told trustedleader’s editor, “and the business remained predominantly female until Equal Opportunities legislation eventually forced us to employ more men, but by that time the culture was so well established that the men merged into a female culture, one based on values, ethics, the pursuit of excellence and stopping to question right from wrong.”

Consequently she was happier when they had submitted a bid for a contract that was excellent although unsuccessful, than when they had been awarded a contract following a substandard bid. This commitment to excellence was paramount to their longterm reputation and success.

Steve’s core principles as a leader have been “to be contemplative and humanistic” despite the constant pressures of running a business in a very competitive field, “to inspire myself, and not to compromise on right and wrong.” These are key characteristics of highly effective trusted leaders. “The things that really matter are inviolate,” Steve comments, “values, and for me the quality of being in tune with the ethos of an era.”

In 1991 Steve arranged for ownership of Xansa to transfer to co-ownership by the staff – another rare and innovative move in entrepreneurs and one which saw the staff fulfil her hope that they would take just as much care in its ownership as she had. Now retired and an honorary Life President of Xansa, Steve has since devoted her time to philanthropy.

Driven by the experience of her son Giles who was autistic, Steve has used her wealth to seek to have a profound impact in the whole area of autism. She established the specialist school for autistic children, Prior’s Court in Berkshire, UK, and has funded medical research and other pioneering projects aiming ultimately to defeat the condition entirely. One of the highest givers to charity in the UK, she is renowned as an example of good practice in philanthropy. She has earned this reputation for focusing intently on a particular cause, for funding projects that have a strategic impact, and for seeking an exit strategy of sustainable financing of a project when she first looks into the case for funding it.

Steve is that rare combination of a dynamic, driven personality who yet finds time to remember people she has met along the way, and who believes in a flexible, sharing working culture. Her role models include William Lever of Lever Brothers for his doctrine of prosperity sharing. She also cites the many people who have to contend with far less fortunate health than her own.

Her own childhood was influenced by the Quaker movement and she admires the way Quakers “believe in the beauty of work when we do it properly, and in humility.” The movement is also renowned for aiming for unanimous decision-making as far as possible, creating a shared sense of purpose that has characterised her own business and philanthropic ventures.

Steve is a leader who has clearly been shaped greatly by her upbringing and her fortunate escape from the Holocaust, yet she also advocates the study of leadership as a means of personal development. “It is important to study it to develop a toolkit of skills,” she comments, and she especially advises reading case studies of other leaders.

So what challenges remain for Steve? The ongoing pursuit of a cure for autism is evidently a strong motivator, and she has still not lost the desire to continue to grow herself. “I am still searching for those drivers of change,” she reflects, “and for the continuous improvement of knowing I can be better tomorrow than I am today.”