Each month we turn the spotlight on the leadership teams in our portfolio to find out what drives them, who inspires them and the biggest lessons they've learnt.

This month, we're delighted to welcome Ciphr's Sion Lewis. Ciphr is a specialist provider of SaaS HR, payroll, recruitment and learning software. Their cloud-based solutions help HR teams to streamline their processes, simplify time consuming tasks and spend more time working strategically.

With a 25-year track record of building and scaling successful B2B software businesses, Sion has been driving growth and innovation at Ciphr since February 2023.

Q: Which one rule do you expect your employees to abide by?

Working at salesforce.com taught me to always put the customer first, and it also taught me the power of being accountable. I expect all my team to be accountable. My job is to provide the environment to allow this to happen.

Q: What motivates you?

Ensuring my friends and family are happy. If they are happy, I am happy.

Q: What are you most proud of in your career?

Being part of the deal team at IRIS when we went through a successful exit. The whole experience provided me with a new understanding of “team”. I learned a huge amount about myself and those around me in a very hectic six month period!

Q: Who do you admire / who inspires you?

My wife Helen. She consistently provides unconditional love for our family and quite frankly is amazing!

Q: What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt?

Find the data! My time working in private equity forced the development of a whole new ‘data-muscle’, bringing a new dimension to the way I look at problems and has been a core part of my approach to business ever since.

Q: What do you think makes a good leader?

Teaching people to fish and not fish for them. An old CEO of mine told me to stop fishing for others and teach them how to do it themselves. I think it is such a simple and effective leadership skill. Thank you, Kev!

Q: Why did you choose Ciphr?

I chose Ciphr as I wanted to help make a UK business great. I knew the Ciphr proposition had so much potential, and I really liked Stephen Roberts (ECI Partner) and Ken Hills (Ciphr Chairman). Working with a great PE partner was mandatory so I did my homework and heard only great things about ECI.

Q: What do you do to relax?

I love the tv show “Would I Lie To You” so watching a few clips from the show or reading about my beloved Liverpool FC.

Q: Night in or night out?

I do love wine and there’s nothing better after a long week than a Friday night takeaway with the family and some easy watching TV. Dominos, Curry or Nando’s becomes a key question on a Friday afternoon.

Q: Favourite film?

A few Good Men. I will watch it at least once a year. Considering it was first released in 1993, that is a lot of times!

Curriculum Vitae

• Age: 54.
• Family: Helen, Josh (22) & Ollie (19). Two dogs - Bettie and Billie.
• University & qualification: Humberside Polytechnic (now Hull University). BA(Hons) Business Information Systems.
• Career summary: After university, I worked for Oracle Australia in their Business Intelligence team. Coming back to the UK, I moved into sales and had various sales roles before moving into senior EMEA leadership roles at Clarus Software, Salesforce.com & BMC Software. In 2010 I joined IRIS software where I worked for 8+ years initially as CSO before moving to a divisional CEO role running the Accountancy and Education divisions. Immediately prior to Ciphr, I was the General Manager Europe for GoTo.com.

Since Mike Edwards started his medical training he’s been making decisions and performing under pressure. The failure rate for medical exams was high enough and then when he first qualified his rota was 120 hours a week, working for four days straight without much sleep.

During his surgical training, Mike joined the Royal Navy Reserves and completed the Royal Marines Commando Course to get his Green Beret and then finished parachute training to get his Wings (awarded for military parachutist proficiency)

In 2003, as a Royal Navy Reserve, Mike was posted to Basra in Iraq as a trauma surgeon during the second Gulf War, where his field hospital was the closest a hospital had been to the front line since the battle of the Somme.

Having lived a substantial part of his career making decisions in stressful situations, how did Mike choose the right options and how can his lessons be applied to the business environment?

Here are Mike’s top five pieces of advice for business leaders to make the right decisions under pressure.

1. Find space to breathe

As soon as Mike reached Iraq the stress levels he was accustomed to increased significantly as a missile attack intensified the situation before he’d even reached the front line.

In a business scenario, you’re unlikely to experience such exceptional circumstances, but your body still responds to stress in the same way. Your breathing rate increases, you become more agitated, and your mind goes into overdrive. To combat this, you need to ‘get out of your head’ and ‘into your body’ to distract yourself from the pressure.

The best way to do this is to focus on breathing and only your breathing. Sit in a chair, close your eyes and breathe in and out without focusing on anything else. If other thoughts pop into your head, label them and let them go. It doesn’t matter what you call them – stress, a personality you don’t like, or a target you don’t want to think about, but let them go and come back to your breathing.

This approach brings your body back into a state where it’s not so stressed and transfers your brain from something wild and hyperactive into something much more calm. It's a physiological effect and allows you to be more focused on the problem at hand.

Although it’s unlikely you’ll ever have to make difficult decisions in a very short time span, as you might have to in a battlefield medical situation, the technique is valid nonetheless. With practice, you should be able to get your breathing and mind relaxed in less than a minute.

2. Never lose your temper

Early in my medical training I learnt one of the most important lessons in making decisions under pressure – never lose your temper.

A particular surgeon used to shout and scream at his team while performing surgery and, as a result, would lose their respect meaning procedures often didn’t go as planned. Once you lose your team, they won’t work with you to solve the problem.

My advice is to learn from anyone (and I really do mean anyone), be considerate and keep your temper well under control. If you let the stress take over, you’re thinking about yourself and not thinking about the situation or those that can help you.

3. Stay focussed and delegate

As an on-duty surgeon in a field hospital, you have a role, you’re scrubbed up and can’t stop doing what you’re doing to get involved in someone else’s problem. If you did, you’d stop concentrating on the patient on the table, you’d need to re-sterilise and you’d lose precious time, which could lead to catastrophic results.

While the same is clearly not true in the boardroom, the principle still applies. You need to concentrate on the job at hand and consider what can be delegated to avoid getting drawn away from the bigger picture. Know your team’s strengths and weaknesses (so you don’t delegate to the wrong person), discuss the situation logically, allocate the roles and then get back to focusing on what you personally need to do.

4. Constantly calculate the best and worst outcome (plus the options in between)

On one exercise, my parachute partly detached from the harness during a 1,000 feet night-time jump. Immediately I was weighing up the best and worst-case scenarios. Do nothing and leave it to fate (not an option) or deploy my reserve (as my main chute was already deployed, this was high risk). In the end, I managed to wrestle with the cords and landed without injury into the sea.

But that was just the start of my problems.

The sea was four degrees centigrade, and the cold quickly kicked in, but I knew if I started swimming, I would lose heat very quickly and I didn’t know exactly where I was or how far I had to go. So, I deployed the personal life preserver around my neck and tried to relax to retain heat. After a few hours, it was clear that a rescue wasn’t going to be imminent, so I curled up like a bean and let myself drift with the current in the knowledge that this was my best chance of survival and rescue (which eventually came early the next morning).

Throughout the whole experience I was constantly evaluating the best and worst outcomes of any decision I had to make and acted rationally, in a way that increased the chances of my survival. Basic sea survival training is essential before parachuting at sea.

It’s an extreme example, but you can relate the process to business scenarios. If you take the time to calculate the best and worst outcomes in any decision you need to make, you present yourself with the capacity to actually make a decision; and it will be based on your best assessment rather than simply reacting impulsively and doing something you shouldn’t do (which in this scenario would make my ‘demise’ quicker and more certain).

5. Balance courage with caution

Courage is always necessary when making decisions under pressure, otherwise there’s no progression or movement. But that courage must be applied with the knowledge of what a poor outcome would look like and your preparedness to live with that outcome.

In Basra, I was presented with a soldier who had a penetrating wound to the head. Because the injury was shrapnel penetrating the skull and into the brain, it was not my specialist field of expertise, but the nearest neurosurgeon was 100s of miles away on a battleship in the Gulf. The soldier couldn’t be flown as the flight would kill him, and a road trip would take too long and potentially end with the same tragic result. My colleagues and I discussed the logical steps and as the skull is a bone, it was decided I was best placed to handle it as an orthopaedic surgeon. On the face of it, the procedure was complex, but I dealt with each stage of the operation as one variable that needed to be addressed, a bit like unravelling a knot. As a result, I was able to slowly remove the shrapnel, stop the bleeding and the patient made a full recovery.

My experience and belief in myself gave me the courage to make the decision to treat, but it was very much balanced by the catastrophic outcomes that would likely have occurred should I have made a poor decision.

Mike Edwards is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at the Thornbury Hospital in Sheffield. Mike also has a keen interest in battlefield surgery both past and present and has appeared in productions for the BBC, the History Channel and the National Geographic Channel.

How did the likes of Google deliver 10x growth? How did Intel, the Gates Foundation, Bono’s One campaign and several ECI portfolio companies achieve transformative outcomes? They used the superpowers of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), the goal-setting framework popularised by John Doerr in his book “Measure What Matters”.

As mid-market businesses aim for rapid scaling, they can fall victim to strategic confusion without using OKRs. A lack of clear objectives often results in departments chasing their own priorities, wasting effort, and leading to the misalignment of goals. Equally, without measuring key results it’s impossible to track progress and identify bottlenecks, leading to stunted, rather than rapid growth.

The superpowers critical to driving business performance

Central to their framework, Doerr identifies the four "superpowers" of OKRs which provide a structured approach to goal-setting and execution:

1. Focus and commit to priorities

Growing companies are often faced with juggling multiple initiatives and this superpower emphasises the importance of identifying and committing to a few high-impact goals, ensuring resources and efforts are concentrated where they matter most. Everyone, from executives to frontline staff, can direct their energy towards achieving the goals that truly matter for growth.

2. Align and connect for teamwork

Rapid scaling can create silos within a company, but by making OKRs visible across the organisation they act as a common thread. Teams then break down internal barriers, align their efforts, and foster a collaborative environment where everyone is working towards common objectives.

3. Track for accountability

Without clear metrics, growth can become a guessing game. Regular tracking and review of OKRs ensure that progress is monitored, obstacles and roadblocks are identified early, course corrections happen quickly, and teams remain accountable for their commitments.

4. Stretch for amazing

To really drive growth, boundaries need to be challenged. Encouraging ambitious, stretch goals unlocks team innovation and achieves extraordinary results, driving growth and competitive advantage. These goals might seem out of reach at first, but they motivate teams to perform at their best.

OKRs provide a robust framework for goal-setting that has been proven to significantly enhance organisational performance. By embracing the principles, leaders can cultivate a culture of clarity, accountability, and continuous improvement, ultimately positioning their organisations for long-term success.

However, creating and executing OKRs isn’t simple. Doerr's book provides insights and real-world examples to contextualise their implementation and I highly recommend finding the time to read it. You can also read OKR expert, Peter Kerr’s top five tips for implementation here.

Having just had triplets, lost her job as a bank clerk, and going through a divorce, Ann Daniels felt she had lost her self-worth, wasn’t good enough and was desperate about what the future held.

But from the pain she was feeling, she knew she had to do something to change her life. So, Ann did something out of left field and responded to an advert asking for ‘ordinary’ people to join the first all-female team to reach the North Pole. 18 months later, she had conquered the Arctic, became a world record breaker and discovered her new career path.

Ann certainly isn’t ordinary, she’s an exceptionally resilient leader. In the face of the most extreme conditions humans can endure, Ann has gone on to conquer the South Pole and led 14 further expeditions for the likes of NASA and the European Space Agency. Described by the Daily Telegraph as one of the top 20 British adventurers of all time, Ann has worked with some of the world’s largest organisations, been interviewed by the biggest names in media, featured on Desert Island Discs and completed numerous TED talks on resilience.

So, what can leaders learn from such an exceptional individual? Quite a lot, as you might expect!

Here are Ann’s top five tips to becoming a more resilient leader.

1. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

Being fully prepared is key to developing my resilience and mental strength. Knowing that I’ve done everything I can to make an expedition successful is one of the most important elements of any trip (or project for that matter).

As well as ensuring I was as physically fit as possible, logistics, food, support and kit were always planned to the nth degree.

My focus then turns to the team. Are they fit enough, what are their individual strengths and weaknesses? I also made sure they were fully briefed - 100% clear on the expedition objective, exactly what was expected of them, and the role they were going to play in our success.

That way, when things went wrong (and they always do), I had the mental capacity to deal with challenges and focus on solutions. If every duck is in a row, it sets the right tone and you’re positive about the future, positive that you’ll be successful. If you can’t be positive from the outset, then the chances are something isn’t right, or you’re not fully prepared.

If you do fail, and there will be times when you do, you can be confident you did everything in your power to make it a success and remove the negative drag of ‘what if’ thoughts.

2. Believe in the vision, plan for success

When I set out on my first expedition, I wanted to dramatically change my life, my circumstances. I was compelled to provide a better life for my children and give them the best opportunities I could. So, the vision was there. I just needed a strategy to deliver it.

My vision is what kept me going in my darkest and most challenging moments. Focusing on ‘why am I doing this’ allowed me to dig even deeper and drive my desire to succeed. I could also draw upon friends to help me – collaboration is a really powerful tool, and you’d be amazed at the number of people who really want to help.

I think it’s the same in business scenarios. Having the objectives or goal completely nailed down is half the battle, and makes the strategy easier to develop and stick to.

3. Accept the uncontrollable, and control what you can

On expeditions you can’t control the storms, the temperatures and the ice movement (you can often move backwards while sleeping). There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

During one 500-mile expedition, extreme weather forced us to a halt after only 65 miles. For three days we couldn't move, couldn't erect our tent and couldn’t get warm. We were forced to lay the flammable tent lining directly over us, meaning we couldn’t light cookers so we’d hardly eaten, and a rescue plane was two days away. It looked like the expedition was over before it had really started.

I had to accept the circumstances were beyond my control. But as a leader, I could control my own reactions and how I dealt with the situation, I could control my attitude. I understood the situation, chose not to panic, accepted it, and spent my time working on solutions to put us back on track.

I focused on the vision and knew the storm would pass. When it did, we obviously couldn’t walk more than 24 hours a day, but we could add five more minutes to every sledging session to make up time. We could store snow bricks inside the tent where it was a few degrees warmer so they would melt and boil more quickly. Little contingencies like that made a big difference.

Tomorrow became a new first day. We worked on the little things that could ‘make the boat go faster’ and we succeeded.

4. Maintain a positive attitude

Accept, overcome and keep positive, is my mantra.

On a solo trip to the North Pole I’d fallen through the ice, been stalked by a polar bear for three days and was within touching distance of the finish when Russian officials pulled all permits and the trip was over. Just like that, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was beyond my control, but I took a positive view of the situation.

Getting on the helicopter was a positive as I’d escaped the horrendous weather. Then I thought if Russia hadn’t stopped me, the next polar bear encounter might have killed me, or I could have gone through the ice again and died. I’d spent 21 days on the ice at one with nature and lived with a polar bear, so I thought the next time I do this it will be for the good of the earth, which opened a whole new series of opportunities with many scientific bodies and the joy of working with NASA. Something I never imagined would be possible.

I'm also big on having the same positive attitude with my team. How you consistently turn up every day has a huge impact. Some mornings I’d have a little cry as I scraped the ice from the inside of my tent. But then I’d compose myself and put my game face on. Then I’d sweep snow from the team’s sleeping bags and bring them all a coffee. They were only small actions but I think they had a huge impact on morale. The opposite would have been true if they’d witnessed me at my lowest mood.

5. Don’t be afraid to ask for help

I’ve experienced numerous instances of injury or frostbite where individuals have required help, but refused to ask for it, and subsequently put the expedition in jeopardy. It tends to be more of a male trait, but asking for help doesn’t mean you’re weak or a failure. It simply means that at that particular moment you need something you don’t have.

Throughout my polar career I asked for help with kit, childcare, training, with emotional support, strategy, and with planning. It’s made me a much more resilient and successful leader with a greater capacity to solve problems, develop solutions and ultimately achieve my goals.