Madeleine Gwynn

Madeleine is a creative business-minded, commercially focussed HR director. She has multi-sector experience in SaaS, Professional Services, Telecoms and Media, and has worked with manufacturing and automotive clients as a Leadership & Development consultant. She has extensive international experience implementing growth and expansion strategies, and leading HR teams in the UK and across EMEA, APAC and North America.

Summary

Madeleine enjoys helping companies grow, providing them with actionable insights and results that move their business forward. She’s helped companies such as the BBC, Thomson Reuters, the Telegraph Group and Cheetah Digital uncover and shape their culture. She has also designed, led and implemented engagement strategies derived from new employee value propositions, introducing HR policies and processes that build culture through key touchpoints on the employee journey.

Madeleine delivered multi-year strategic workforce plans achieving organic growth and target beating performance in the UK and international markets. She also has considerable Organisational Design experience, rationalising roles and responsibilities, implementing new team structures including regional sales models, centralised technology hubs, and product and services teams.

What our clients say

“When we brought Madeleine in, our firm was performing well—winning awards and gaining recognition for technical and design excellence and had a core group of employees that had been with us for over 10 years —but we were struggling to see a clear path for further sustainable growth and in particular to attract and retain young staff.

From day one, Madeleine embedded herself in the practice to better understand all the things that make our business unique, what we did well, and where there was room for improvement. As a managing director from an engineering background with no formal business training, I found her fresh viewpoint, observations and feedback valuable. She operated as a true strategic partner—combining the insight of a management consultant with a deep understanding of people and culture. Together, we created a clear growth roadmap, and a people strategy focused on retaining, engaging, and developing engineers at every level. Within a year, attrition dropped to a five-year low.

She helped us build on our distinctive approach to early-career development, worked with us to refresh our values, refined our Performance and Development Review process, and created clear career paths for every function within the firm. At the leadership level, she supported a shift to an EOS-inspired model, redefining roles and responsibilities and setting the foundation for succession.

Operationally, Madeleine was equally hands-on—procuring a fit-for-purpose HRIS, modernising our people policies and staff handbook, and launching our first apprenticeship programme in partnership with a local education provider, welcoming our first two apprentices this year.

We are grateful for the lasting impact of Madeleine’s work.” – Mark Skelly, Founding Director, Skelly & Couch

“Madeleine is approachable, excellent at influencing and managing at top management level; she takes genuine interest in the organisation, which makes her a sound person to go to for strategic advice.

Madeleine is extremely smart, confident and proactive, and able to engage with any professional group on any business topic in a way that adds value to others and the organisation. She is one of the most competent and well-rounded leaders I have ever worked with. She thinks broadly and is creative in solutioning. She understands and takes into account diversity of thought and approach. I have been impressed with her ability to act with integrity and compassion.” – Tom Walsh, CEO

“We brought Madeleine in at a pivotal moment when the board had aligned around the need for a major change in leadership. It was a sensitive and potentially difficult process, but she guided us through it with care, clarity, and sound judgement. She became a trusted partner to me and the senior team—bringing structure and momentum to a complex transition while keeping people engaged and the process well-communicated. She handles challenge with calm and good humour.

She was instrumental in securing a strong outcome in a senior recruitment and participated and assisted with the interview process. In addition, she also supported wider succession planning, coached mid-level leaders, and resolved sensitive employee relations matters with discretion and empathy.

She helped us revisit and realign our share option scheme to better reflect our goals and improve engagement—another example of her ability to combine strategic thinking with practical delivery. She has presented to the board with clarity and balance, and her blend of intelligence, pragmatism, and emotional insight has made a real difference.

I value working with her and expect to continue to do so as we enter the next phase of the business growth and reorganisation.” – Iain Martin, Chairman, Binding Solutions Limited