The Big Interview – Steve Holliday

Sportindustry.biz speaks exclusively to Steve Holliday, National Grid’s Chief Executive, about its partnership with Special Olympics Great Britain, and the difficulties with awareness issues.

For the uninitiated, what is the Special Olympics?

The Special Olympics is all about getting people with learning difficulties to play sport, no matter what the sport is; table tennis, soccer, running, swimming, any discipline.

It’s fundamentally about people who don’t often get the chance to play sport, so its about encouraging that help and enthusiasm they need to get out and become athletes, at any level, and it has been extremely successful in doing that.

So what does National Grid bring to Special Olympics Great Britain, and what does Special Olympics Great Britain bring to National Grid?

This is an unusual sponsorship in many ways for a company because it’s not really a case of just providing a lot of money and then standing back and letting the organisation get on with it. This is a partnership.

It’s a great cause, which also means we can get our employees involved in the local community, across the whole of the UK, and currently we have 850 people who spend quite a bit of their personal time volunteering, and getting involved in helping the event. So it’s not just about giving the money, it’s about putting these people into the community.

Why did you first get involved?

We’re always looking for things that can transcend the Atlantic to work on both sides, and the Special Olympics is an enormous movement in the United States. It is much larger than in the UK today, backed up by the Kennedy family, so this is something that works for us in business in the UK and the US, but we particularly look for things that involve people, getting out into the community, and that is why this partnership is so special to us.

Are you doing anything to try and improve awareness of the Special Olympics, either side of the Atlantic?

There’s a very different perception of the Special Olympics in the UK to the US, there’s more history in the US, it’s where it started, so there’s an enormous public awareness already of the competition there. In the UK people say ‘sorry, the Special Olympics, what’s that?’. But it is an organisation whose profile is on the rise.

It’s an unfair comparison to make between the Olympic Games and what we do. It is different as well because it is actually the real Olympic ethos, it sounds clichéd but it’s not all about winning, it actually is all about people taking part in sport.

It’s also about getting people who often are not able to take part in sport and spend a lot of time sitting down can become active, and it’s a huge advantage to have something like this to encourage them.

And you’ve extended your deal for another three years?

We took this on for three years initially, and towards the end we reviewed the partnership, asking ourselves ‘is this the right thing for us?’ and frankly it was a short review.

It’s been a huge success I think, not least because it’s captured the imagination of so many of our employees, so yes we’ve now extended our contract for a further three years.

So what are your ambitions for the next three years?

Certainly the ambition is we want to increase the number of people that are involved.

What seems to happen regarding volunteering is very interesting, a little bit of arm-twisting early on, just little favours to start with ‘would you come and help officiate, will you come a take a five-a-side session, can you come and do some timing at a swimming event etc’.

And what ends up happening is that when someone goes and volunteers, they go back.

They go back time and time again after that, so hopefully the 850 volunteers that we have at the moment, will grow well over a thousand.

The competition begins imminently, do you have any plans to activate your sponsorship at all?

Well, it goes back to the point that unfortunately this is not high profile, the majority don’t really understand what the Special Olympics is all about, so when an organisation is trying to get its image out there it’s very helpful when people like David Cameron are glad to host a selection of the athletes at number 10, as was the case last week, to help with understanding.

The athletes all flew out at the weekend and a visit to Downing Street has certainly helped with a bit of PR and the awareness side as well.

Hopefully from this many families who have a child who could benefit, might not before have understood how to get them into their local club. Now hopefully with increased awareness, we can slowly improve that knowledge.

The Olympic Games come to London next year, how important is it that the Special Olympics utilizes the popularity of the Games?

The whole concept that our Olympic bid was built on was ‘sport for all’, and about encouraging the country to become a more sporting nation.

This is a great opportunity that won’t really come along again, to really up the profile of the Special Olympics. You only have to look at some of the people who are involved in the event – that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting – kids that were very shy, and didn’t really socialize much because of their learning disabilities, started to play sport. Now, with a bit of help, they are different people.

There’s a guy called Greg Sylvester who works for National Grid now, we met Greg through the Special Olympics – he’s been all over the UK talking to employees, making us all feel quite humble too be quite honest, talking about the challenges he has faced in life and how he’s taken them on, and he’s a very different person for it.

So it is about sport, but we don’t think about it just as sport, it is enormously helpful to a lot of people, so if we can springboard off of the Olympic popularity in the UK and ultimately get the Special Olympics more understood, with more people volunteering, then I’m sure we’re in for a successful few years.