The November 2025 Employee Owners Knowledge Share focused on the topic: role models.
We were fortunate to be joined by a panel of role models: Hayley Russell, Sophie Yarworth and Gav Richards. Hayley is Marketing Manager and EO Champion Lead at Matrix Booking, an employee-owned business since 2021; Sophie is a Principal Business Change Consultant and previous Employee Trustee at CMC Partnership Consulting, which is approaching their 5-year anniversary of employee ownership; and Gav is the Coaching & Culture Champion at Aber Instruments.
Employee ownership role models
When a business transitions to employee ownership there will be varying levels knowledge of what that means. People will look to leaders, managers and their role models in the workplace for guidance. What does it mean? What is going to stay the same or change? How are they expected to change?
Role models are not always part of the leadership team, but they will have influence over the engagement that all people make with employee ownership, and they set the tone for what it might now mean to act like an ‘employee owner’.
Role models are therefore very important. But how do you become a role model for employee ownership? What does it mean to be considered a role model? Are there shared characteristics that they all possess and demonstrate?
Our key takeaways from the November knowledge share are:
Becoming a role model is a personal journey
None of our guest speakers planned to be involved in the ways they have in their business through employee ownership. The chance arose and through their curiosity, values, and desire to embrace opportunity, they grasped it.
Each found a unique way to contribute leveraging their personal skills or character – they wanted to engage. If they had been asked to deliver to a fixed criteria perhaps the journey might not have been as it was.
People are role models for things they are engaged with, unsurprisingly. So, to create more role models in employee owned businesses, perhaps the key is to support people to unlock the value they add to the business in the way that is unique to them?
Role models encourage engagement and involvement
Where role models shine is in showing people what they ‘didn’t know that they didn’t know’. Role models in employee owned businesses demonstrate the behaviours of ‘employee owners’ that benefit a business and if replicated across a whole workforce could deliver sizeable positive change.
They take opportunity, they are advocates for the business, they display the organisation’s values, they communicate, and they encourage.
Role models will support others to step up, make involvement approachable and communicate consistently, because engagement with employee ownership and the business outside of someone’s role description can often be a challenge and hard to grasp unless there is guidance.
Perhaps you already have the people in your business with these attributes but maybe they don’t have a role or the responsibilities or the scope to be seen by others as a role model.
The effectiveness of role models can have a limit
Achieving good or great employee ownership is no simple task, it requires effort, consistency, time and often a strategic approach. Regular challenges for employee owned businesses to overcome are managing expectations, sustaining engagement, maintaining communication and building transparency.
Great role models can help a business to overcome these challenges but not in a silo. If you have great role models, they are most effective when supported by, for example:
- A leadership team that engages with and promotes employee ownership.
- Clear boundaries and communication about what employee ownership is and is not.
- Structured opportunities for employees to use their voice (e.g. voice groups, councils, all-company sessions).
- Processes in place to process what happens when employee use their voice.
Role models might not receive obvious public recognition
It can be the case that role models appear as opposed to having been purposefully created. Employees follow an opportunity because they are personally inclined to and the outcome is a delivery of behaviours that would be favourable if shown by more.
As such, ending up a role model is a chance output. The person having gained from the experience of the journey what they sought.
Recognition is of course favourable to receive and motivating but it might often be informal and ‘noticed rather than officially acknowledged’. Having gone through the journey the role model will have gained much: confidence, knowledge, influence and reputation.
Stephens Scown hosts the Employee Owners Knowledge Share monthly to help create a community space for employee owners, and those looking to transition. If you are interested in joining future sessions, please visit our Events page.