Tailor Made

Improving the customer experience will be another one of Shrewry?s main challenges to grow Transguard.

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Established as a support service provider to the Emirates Group in 2001, Transguard has grown into the region’s biggest facilities management and security services company, counting Emirates airlines, Emaar, Atlantis hotel, and eight out of the UAE’s top ten banks as its customers.

Its new deputy managing director Geoff Shrewry has been in the job just five months, yet has already put plans in place to grow the business and show ‘visible leadership’ to his staff of 20,000 employees.

“I want to get in amongst the people and make sure I’m aware of what’s going on, make sure they know who’s running the business,” said Shrewry, “but I’m struggling with that at the moment,” he said.

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“How do you actually get that visible leadership; how do you get that feeling into the business?”

Part of the solution, Shrewry believes, will lie in getting out and meeting people. “I’ve done quite a bit of that already. I might meet 30, 40 people in a day, but if you work out how long it’s going to take to get to everyone… impossible.”

Another priority will be using Transguard’s internal communications network to open new channels for staff to interact with him, and each other.

“That’s a big drive for me and something that we’ll be working hard on now. I’ll do it slightly differently to how I’ve done it in the past.”

Though Shrewry’s career experience has trained him well for the new challenges that await him, he admits that managing such a large workforce will be a new test of his leadership skills.

“When you’re talking about 20,000 staff – that scale is so difficult to comprehend. It doesn’t determine how I run the business, but it’s the greatest challenge I’ve got personally.”

Prior to taking up his position at Transguard, Shrewry headed the Middle East operations of facilities management company Emrill, where his duties included changing the culture of the company to resemble a more Westernised model.

Having started his career as a civil engineer, Shrewry moved into project management for Forte Hotels, before moving on to general management and eventually taking a role as managing director for Romec in the late 1990s.