The Briton behind wheel at Citroen
Trust is key for ground-breaker in the driving seat at Citroen
LINDA JACKSON only joined the motor industry ‘by accident’ when she got a summer job in Jaguar’s accounts department in Coventry through her uncle. She wanted to ‘earn a little bit of money’ before going to university. Now she is the first woman – and first Briton – to become global chief executive of French car giant Citroen.
Jackson, 57, is wary of predicting what might happen following the Brexit referendum result. She says: ‘We have the ability to manage these situations, but until we know what it’s going to mean, who can say what we need to put in place? What we need to be is very agile.’
She lives in Normandy – a 20minute train ride from Paris or a 40-minute drive in her C4 Cactus – and she prefers to commute by car.
With fluent French, she rarely visits the UK, spending her weekends in France. Her employees still laugh at her love of tea, but she hopes that they think first and foremost of her skills, not her nationality.
She says: ‘I love France, I love the French. They’re very creative. At the same time Anglo-Saxon people are very good at being pragmatic and direct. The balance of the two is quite a nice mix. The French know I am very direct in meetings. I will get to the point. French people do tend to discuss the point at great length, and they’re very good at it.’
She adds: ‘Hopefully they don’t think “we’ve got a British woman”. Hopefully they just think “we’ve got a great boss”.’
Her directness is evident in Citroen’s response to the crisis sparked by Volkswagen’s use of software to cheat US emissions tests, which became a worldwide scandal. She says: ‘What happened creates a lack of confidence across the industry, a lack of credibility.’
Citroen makes 1.2million vehicles a year – about half of those made by the wider Peugeot-Citroen, or PSA, group – and Jackson says: ‘For the PSA Group, we have already adhered to all the regulations.
‘Indeed, ten years ago, I had already introduced a particular selective catalytic reactor to make sure that we had very low CO2 emissions.’
She adds: ‘What we’ve done is introduce a further test for realtime consumption, which is being managed by a third party.
‘All manufacturers test to agreed rules, which says so many miles per gallon. We’ve taken it a step further. We’ll test the cars with passengers in, with luggage in, with a mixture of driving that would be representative of our consumers, sometimes rural, sometimes urban, sometimes motorway, and publish that.
‘We will progressively publish that from all of our models across all our brands. For us that is saying that we are being totally transparent.
‘This is what real-time consumption is and it’s important to create that transparent relationship and credibility for the industry.’
She also has plans to introduce a CO2 emission calculator to the website. Consumer trust is at the core of her thinking. She asks: ‘What is the most important thing for us? It’s our customers, and what they think of us. People want confidence in the brands they buy. We felt it was extremely important. That’s why we’ve gone out and been the first. If other manufacturers follow I think that will be great for the customer.’
Jackson is confident in her ability. She has just won Autocar’s ‘Great British Women in the Car Industry Award’ and plans to use it to encourage more women and young people into the industry. But she is strongly opposed to diversity targets.
She loved the industry from the moment she joined Jaguar and had a chance to see ‘the lines, what cars they were making and how they generated a marketing campaign’.
She says: ‘Cars are a sexy product to sell, because people buy a car based on emotion 99 per cent of the time. You like the car, you want to personalise it – it says something about you.’ But she says it is a struggle to attract new talent as she worries ‘there’s a misperception it’s a very macho, very engineering-led world’. She says: ‘Clearly I prove it’s not, because I’m not an engineer. My background is in finance.’
Jackson, who has an MBA from Warwick University, says: ‘Fifty per cent of my sales on average are to women. We all know that women make a lot of the decisions about which car to buy, so we need more women.
‘And we need to encourage young people with new experiences to come into the industry, because it’s changing.’
She says she has never been discriminated against, and targets only make her uncomfortable. The crux of the issue is work-life balance, she explains, adding: ‘My job is 180 per cent of my life. I spend a lot of time travelling, I spend a lot of time doing presentations, and it’s all about Citroen. You have to recognise that it takes up an enormous amount of your time. It is hard work to manage a family at the same time as trying to move up a career path, travelling all the time and giving everything.’
In Jackson’s case, she was fortunate to have a ‘very, very understanding husband’. He died last year from cancer, but she says he ‘always recognised that I loved my job and supported me in every way’.
Her children are now grown up and live in the Midlands with their own families, and she jokes that it is easier for them to visit her in Paris than for her to go to the Midlands.
She has a rule that she doesn’t send or reply to emails at the weekend, and doesn’t schedule meetings before 8.30am or after 6.30pm.
She says: ‘I think there’s a lot to do about work-life balance these days, and that’s relevant to everybody – not just women.
‘We’re starting to look at how we encourage working from home, but it’s only now really starting to evolve. I think that’s one thing we need to improve in our industry.’
Jackson is certainly not working from home herself. She explains: ‘I’m based all over the world. I travel a lot. The first market is China, so I’m normally in China five to six times a year.
‘We have five other regions, so I go to each twice a year – to South America, for example, or the India Pacific region.
‘I have to be honest – I spend little time in the UK. I’m based in Paris.
‘I probably spend 30 per cent of my time in the office and 70 per cent out meeting customers, going to visit different markets, going to visit my dealers as well. Every time I do a visit I try to see three or four dealers. So that is my life.’
Though she shatters the illusion of her driving a state-of-the-art Citroen around the capitals of Europe – she admits that she probably spends more time at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport than anywhere else.
The French are very creative while Anglo-Saxons are pragmatic, direct. It’s a nice mix
Your car says something about you. People buy on emotion 99 per cent of the time