A phone call from the industrialist Sir John Parker set Sir Philip Hampton on his non-executive career.
Parker had just become chairman of RMC (Ready Mixed Concrete). He wanted Hampton, a chartered accountant, to lend his financial acumen and help turn around the FTSE 100 company.
After three years, it was in smart enough shape to be sold to a Mexican rival. “It was a good outcome for shareholders,” recalled Hampton, 68.
It was for him, too. That first post 20 years ago was the starting point for more than a dozen non-executive seats, including as chairman of Royal Bank of Scotland, which propelled him into the nation’s consciousness, and Glaxo Smith Kline.
For his distinguished record, particularly his work on improving gender diversity in boardrooms, Hampton is this year’s Lifetime Achievement winner.
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He sees the key to being a good non-executive director as finding a way to “balance challenge and support”. “Both of those are very important. You have to be able to challenge the management and it’s also important to support the management, particularly when things get a bit tricky,” Hampton said .
“The support bit is easy,” he added. “Finding the best way to challenge is harder.”
For Hampton, non-executive roles were the third stage of a career that began in the 1980s with ten years as an investment banker at Lazard, where he thrived on long hours of brutal negotiation over deals.
At 37, he took a new direction, becoming finance director of British Steel — a Lazard client. He went on to be finance director at a number of blue-chip companies, including at British Gas (where he first met Parker, who was a non-executive) and at British Telecom, just as the dotcom bubble burst and the privatised telecoms giant was laden with debt.
In 2002, he joined Lloyds TSB, but his tenure was cut short when he resigned after less than two years in a disagreement over the need to cut the dividend. That was his last executive role. Within months, he was named chairman of Sainsbury’s after Sir Peter Davis was forced out in a bonus row.
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Unusually, Hampton took the chairman’s seat without having been a chief executive first.
“The common theme [to my career] is I’m basically a financial person,” Hampton said. He claimed it made him laser-focused about the allocation of capital.
Hampton also played a landmark role in promoting women in boardrooms after leading a review named after him and the late Dame Helen Alexander.
He credits his time chairing Sainsbury’s, then run by Justin King, with giving him an appreciation of the importance of women in boardrooms (King wanted to bring more women in to boost performance). He said: “My education was almost all male — all-boys schools [two grammars in Manchester and Sutton Coldfield] and an all-boys university [Lincoln College, Oxford].”
Hampton said non-executives should decide what experience they can offer when taking on a role, one of the reasons he has never accepted a position at a Russian company.
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“An awful lot of companies just want people to be on the notepaper,” he said.