stuart@wickland-westcott.co.uk Walk With
Stuart O'Reilly
Stuart is a Consultant whose expertise lies in assessing and developing senior executives and in benchmarking the capability of management teams. In particular he is interested in how experience and personality combine to impact on executive performance.
Previously a member of Whitehead Mann's assessment and development practice, Stuart spent the early part of his career with British Airways and Dixons Group, where he held a number of Human Resources and line roles. In his last role with Dixons he was responsible for group resourcing.
He is a Chartered Psychologist with a degree in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh and a Masters degree in Occupational Psychology from Queen's University, Belfast.
Interests
Running, history, wine, hill walkingArticles
16th January 2012RBS - Lessons from Failure
Wickland Westcott reviews the Boards of many of the UK’s top organisations. Here, one of our Senior Consultants Stuart O’Reilly, distils the key learning from the failure of RBS. In October 2008 RBS failed and was part nationalised.The reasons for the failure were much debated in the press, with sentiment largely centring around an ambitious Chief Executive who over reached himself and whose domineering style neutered the Board. ...
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13th September 2011Delivering Change at Severn Trent
Tony Wray has been Chief Executive of Severn Trent Water Plc since 2007. When he joined the organisation was still in the process of recovering from the reputational damage caused by a ‘whistleblower’ and the subsequent charges laid by the Serious Fraud Office. In this candid interview Tony speaks to Wickland Westcott Consultant Stuart O’Reilly about implementing change at Severn Trent. StuartWhat...
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10th February 2011Psychological Assessment
Executive assessment is changing, and here we outline the latest trends. The traditional one-to-one assessment model deploys a number of questionnaires and aptitude tests to build a deep understanding of the individual. There are usually two participants in the process, the person being assessed and the assessor, who is often, but not always, a psychologist....
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18th October 2010Hard, Soft or About Right?
Making judgements about people has been at the heart of management thinking for over 100 years. A landmark 1903 paper by Frederick Taylor focused upon how to identify "first class men" on the grounds that "a first class man can do between 2-4 times as much work as can be done by an average man". Since then a series of tools and techniques have been devised to help managers make judgements about their staff, and thereby improve individual and organisational performance....
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25th October 2007Severn Trent - Assessing Senior Management
Does this Functional Head have the potential to be a CEO? Is our Executive team able to take the business to the next level? Where are our future leaders going to come from? Many organisations retain Wickland Westcott to help them answer these questions. They use us to assess their senior talent, possibly as part of an external recruitment exercise, more commonly as part of personal development or organisational change project. A...
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