Helen den Held found her love for communications early on in her career. She discusses her well-traveled career with Andrew Thomas

Rules are rules and there are times when they can’t be broken. When Helen den Held, head of executive and internal communications for Cisco’s Asia Pacific and Greater China operations, went to enrol at Vaal University of Technology, fulfilling her childhood ambition to become a mechanical engineer, she was in for a shock. The university had just changed its admission policy – two weeks earlier it had become mandatory for mechanical engineering students to not only come armed with mathematics diplomas, but to have also studied science, den Held’s worst subject. She was no longer eligible for the course.

“I was literally standing there with my head in my hands, crying, saying what can I do,” recalls den Held. “So I went into the first recruitment agency I could find, and told them, I have no idea what I want to do, but I need a job.

”Like many comms careers, it was an inauspicious and accidental start, but one that led to corporate communications and brand management roles with some of the biggest firms in the professional services sector across three continents.

That first job, however, didn’t provide any life changing revelations. Effectively the office dogsbody, within six months boredom set in. On the advice of a friend, den Held enrolled at Vaal to study sales and marketing. Den Held loved the course and the people with whom she studied. Her parents had emigrated to South Africa when den Held was eight, forcing her to fit in quickly. This ability to integrate has been a quality she says has stood her in good stead throughout her career. “I often call myself a chameleon, I think by default when you travel and move companies and countries, not only to different jobs but to different industries, you have to be able to quickly adapt to the people around you. But with each move you also have the chance to reinvent yourself and how you would like to present yourself going forward.

”Her course at Vaal was part time, allowing den Held to work for a freight and logistics firm, Tanker Services, in an administrative, and not particularly fullfilling, role. When she left to do an internship at a local PR agency, Tanker realised what they were missing and asked her to return, but this time in a sales role, making her the only woman in a testosterone-charged industry. “I was only 19, but I suddenly found myself negotiating with very senior people,” says den Held, recalling negotiating liability clauses with BP’s South African head of logistics.

Sales skills came easy to den Held, but it was this success that made her realise the limitations of the sales role, “Selling is about building a relationship so that someone can trust you enough to buy from you. But there are only so many relationships you can build.” What started to interest den Held now was building that trust on a larger scale. “I wanted to understand how our clients trusted us and continued doing business with us. I started to realise the importance of communicating internally and externally in such a way that our employees, our investors, our clients got it and remained engaged with us.”

This discovery and understanding of the importance of communications was not to translate instantly to a new career. South Africa was changing, and although they moved in liberal circles and welcomed the release of ANC leader Nelson Mandela, the accompanying talk of nationalisation of farms and businesses led to den Held and her husband leaving Africa for the Netherlands. This was 1992, a time of endemic unemployment. Den Held’s career went on hold as she forced herself to take a job in a purchasing office of Saudi Aramco, taking her away from her newfound love of marketing and communications. Her view of the next three years, however, is more pragmatic, “I used it to learn Dutch. I spoke Afrikaans, but that’s a very different language. I was lucky to get any job – every vacancy had over a 100 applicants – but the woman who employed me was South African and she knew that South Africans had high work ethics.”

The importance of hard work is a theme to which den Held refers often, “I really think that hard work counts for so much. Hats off to my dad and my mother who taught me the importance of that work ethic.”The economy eased and den Held was able to move into a strategic marketing role, working for a process management firm, professional services firms would remain a constant in her career. Two years later she was able to apply that understanding to a management role, running the European marketing and communications operation of market research and analysis firm IDC in the Netherlands. IDC was a young and independent firm, and everyone was focused on the bottom line. “They were a lean company and encouraged the entrepreneur in everyone,” says den Held. “They really brought out the self-starter in me.”Den Held says that for everyone there is a turning point, in which the training, discipline and strategic insight start to converge. “This was my moment. For the first time my job became a career and I felt was on a journey.”

The next destination was KPNQwest, a joint venture between the Dutch national telco, KPN, and an American internet company called Qwest. During its brief, four year existence, KPNQwest developed a fierce reputation for fostering a gung-ho, aggressive, nothing-is-impossible working spirit among its staff. There are many stories of KPNQwest’s shortcuts and dubious practices. Den Held says, “Although I laugh, and say it was like the Wild West, there was a lot of wheeling and dealing going on.” Two years later KPNQwest called in the receivers. They owed €2bn.

Despite this, den Held has fond memories of the company that was later to be dubbed the European Enron, “It was the first time I felt I was doing a proper job. And I was learning so much. Crisis communications, branding, rebranding and so on. Our logo changed five or six times in the two years I was there.”

Leaving just before KPNQwest’s spectacular demise (It was at, at the time, the world’s biggest bankruptcy) den Held found herself working for accounting and audit firm, Andersen. Ironically Andersen had done the auditing of KPNQwest, as well as Enron. “I remember so well my father saying ‘What can go wrong? Andersen has been around for 89 years,’ and literally six weeks after I joined Andersen, the Enron scandal hit us.”

Enron was an American energy and commodities firm that had systematically used fraudulent bookkeeping to sustain its position. Andersen was its accountant and was subsequently found guilty of criminal charges over the handling of Enron’s audits. Most of its assets were acquired by the other big five accounting firms, and den Held found herself, by default, working for Deloitte as its marketing and communications director for the Netherlands – later EMEA – region.

For a communications professional, working for Deloitte was a challenging but rewarding role. Andersen had grown organically whereas Deloitte grew through acquisition. “At Andersen, people were very similar but at Deloitte their policy of merging and acquiring meant a constant challenge of integration, of making sure that everyone understood the Deloitte values,” she says.

Den Held believes that you should only stay with a company while there is not only something that you can give, but something you can learn. After four years she was ready to move on from Deloitte, partly to fulfil the ambition of providing independent change communications counsel to companies, but partly from a frustration with her role.

“Partnerships present unique challenges,” says den Held. “In the past, partners hired professionals to run their marketing and communications departments but didn’t necessarily take their advice. Whilst partners own their own business, they have the same constraints as any other kind of business. In non-partnerships, executives own the P&L and also have to justify their spending, justify their methods and hit their numbers. In many ways, at the time, I felt that I wasn’t being taken seriously; that I was just support staff.”

The next two years saw her consult for ABN AMRO, ING and others. She found that the counsel she was providing was changing. In her last year at Deloitte, she had been responsible for aligning the comms messaging from partners within the TMT sector. It was on this emphasis that she channelled her energies.

"Because of the way Deloitte had grown, the company had undergone many reorganisations. It made me realise the importance of keeping people engaged during change,” den Held says. Den Held is passionate about the importance of internal communications. She says the internal audience is just as critical as the external audience, but doesn’t think companies give enough credit to employees. “We spend most of our time communicating to our shareholders and partners and clients externally and we forget about the gold we have within our own organisation,” den Held says. “Without that gold there wouldn’t be a company because, and this is particularly so with partnerships, it’s not about the company, it’s about the people because they make the relationships.”

Consultancy life suited den Held – there’s still excitement in her voice when she discusses some of the projects she worked on. At ABN AMRO she created a cultural change programme to help the resilience of those remaining in a 3,500 strong division facing a 30% cull. She worked on the rebrand and reorganisation of Boer & Croon. But after two years away, Deloitte got back in touch – they wanted her to return to reorganise the comms function, increase Deloitte’s brand recognition and optimise employee engagement at a much more senior position.

It wasn’t just the seniority that led to den Held’s return. Attitudes had changed in her absence, not just at Deloitte, but throughout the professional services sector. “There is a greater understanding that senior partners and those facing clients should focus on what they are good at and let the other professionals within their organisation get on with their work. It doesn’t make any sense for partners to be involved tactically in marketing and support functions.”

Deloitte’s partners weren’t the only ones who had changed; den Held’s experience over the previous two-and-a-half years stood her in good stead. Many of the companies that she had counselled were either advising Deloitte or were its clients. “I had actually been out there fee-earning from these companies and I gained a lot of respect because of that. Partners understand that relationships are everything, and saw me in a different light.”

Although den Held was there for the next four years, in many ways she felt much of the reorganisation job she’d been brought in to achieve had been completed in her first two years. She’d wanted to move to Asia, ideally with Deloitte, but when there were no opportunities to do so, she found her current role, running executive and internal communication for Cisco in Hong Kong.

For someone with a professional services background it might look like an unlikely move, but although Cisco has been driven by its hardware, its aim is to position itself as a services company. Under the sterwardship of Martin McPhee, Cisco’s SVP of consulting services and a former partner of Accenture, the global tech giant has made great strides. It was this that attracted den Held and her role has been to advise the region’s senior management team on its external communications and to implement a change and engagement programme for the internal audience.

It’s clear, though, that den Held misses Europe. She talks about international perspectives as very much U.S.- or Europe-driven, and laments the lack of global positions based out of Asia.

Den Held says communicators reach a stage in their careers when their options become narrower, and to some degree limited by sector. Not because they can’t add value in other sectors, but because the extent of the advice they are able to give that sector is widened by experience. Yet working with both the internal audience and external stakeholders, den Held is able to fulfil the passion for communications that she discovered years earlier. Though she is far from where she started – the young graduate working in sales for a logistics firm was seeking greater responsibility – den Held has built a career on recognising the value of trust in the business and taking responsibility for building that trust.