Who's your mentor?

You're probably anticipating a more exciting answer than "my father" but I've been in general management for about a decade and he was a huge help to me. He was a managing director of an American multinational for 20 years and he was also chairman for TSB in Ireland. His involvement in general management is what attracted me in the first place. Once I'd qualified as an accountant my burning ambition was to get into general management. That was driven by him.

So how did he influence you?

Firstly . . . I learned by example. I used to do summer work in the plant that he managed in Limerick and I could observe him. I was always conscious of his leadership style and his general management skills. I always remember that he was held in signi"cant high esteem by his own management team at Howmedica in Limerick. It employed four or five hundred people manufacturing medical implants.

Watching him helped me to shape my own style.

Did he explicitly mentor you?

I took on a general management role relatively early in my career. At 36 I was made managing director of BWG Foods. He had also become a general manger in his early thirties, he had been an engineer, so he would have been a huge help to me. He mentored and coached me a lot in my early years in general management. How do you bring people with you? How do you develop a management team below you?

Nobody teaches you those things. When you're appointed you're just meant to have all those skills. But in my case I had my father to give me a good sense of things like that - leadership skills, team building skills, and organisational structures. I could always ask him questions. I would tell him about situations and he would almost role-play them with me. I was lucky.

What qualities did he have that made him a good leader?

He had great charisma and presence but he also had an exceptional mind and a very inclusive style. But most importantly he was also always learning himself.

Natural people-skills are important, but leadership is also a learned skill and he knew that you had to apply time to learn. So he was a great student of organisations and leadership styles. He had read all the leadership and business writers, like Jack Welch and Peter Drucker, and he received two honorary doctorates and was on the board of governors of the university in limerick. Personally it was a relief to "nd that if you kept developing your skills and learning that things seemed to come naturally eventually!

In conversation with Patrick Freyne