Victoria has learnt the invaluable art of storytelling

COMMENT: Future Female Leaders shone a light on the importance of collaboration and meeting new people during your career. It is not just about skills development but sharing experiences and challenges, whether it is on the industry, career progression, juggling work and family life or even making sure your voice is heard. Ensuring we, as a business, support and promote our talent as effectively as possible is a big part of our success. We want to attract the best people but make sure we retain them too. We have run a highly successful graduate recruitment programme for a number of years and this investment and long-term commitment to creating a pool of home-grown talent has made an important contribution to creating the “Cluttons family”. Our Future Female Leader, Victoria Martin, managed to juggle a very busy work schedule, participate in the programme and get married – a fantastic demonstration of time management. Having watched her make her final presentation, it struck me that having the opportunity to do something differently doesn’t always present itself in everyday working life. Victoria has been with us for more than nine years since joining the graduate programme and has benefited from exposure to all aspects of our business and now has extensive experience across the main residential surveying disciplines in central and Greater London. As a result, she is an accomplished property consultant. Victoria chose to tackle the topic of “resi is relevant” and why it suffers from a perception problem – seen by some as a more traditional and less progressive part of the property industry.  Interestingly, in Victoria’s experience, this problem starts with the education institutions that have a strong bias towards commercial property. This is even though residential property in the UK is a £6.5tn industry and touches all of lives, whether we are owners or renters. To her point, don’t we deserve to have the best people advising us? Victoria has been extremely proactive as a Cluttons employee in helping address these misconceptions. She has visited universities, colleges and schools to enthuse students of all ages in a career in residential property. As a leading brand and residential property adviser, Cluttons has a role to support her in this task and ensure that residential property is a diverse, thriving and well-performing sector that is able to inspire and attract the next generation of talent. I certainly see schemes such as Future Female Leaders as part of this process. Thanks to the programme, Victoria has learnt the invaluable art of storytelling and presenting in a way which doesn’t depend on words on a screen but creates a performance designed to engage an audience and encourage interaction. This is something that can be applied to everyday life, whether it is leading a meeting or a pitch for new business. Being able to conduct yourself with confidence and poise is a real asset. I am sure Victoria will share the skills she has developed thanks to the Future Female Leaders programme with her colleagues, whether they are new graduates or “seasoned” practitioners – we can all evolve and do things differently. Indeed, that is true across the industry. In recent years, we have seen the impact of disruptive technologies, new business models and changing consumer behaviours, coupled with a challenging economic and political climate which means that we have to adapt and change the way we work, both as individuals and as businesses.  Ultimately, the ability to continually thrive to learn will make the difference between success and failure. James Gray is managing partner, Cluttons