How I met my operations manager

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    Life got easier for Gerben van der Werf, director at PMP Supervisor, when he met his future operations manager at Meet Berlage in Amsterdam, where he had organized a session of his ‘PMP Café. He tells his story. 

    ‘I love to meet people, and I love it especially when I am able to unite talented and experienced people who can help each other move forward professionally. So it is no surprise that our aim at PMP Supervisor is to bring people together. We do this by matching up the demand and supply of Supervisory or Advisory Board Members, by means of a secure online platform. With this platform, we want to improve the quality of management and governance in the Netherlands.

    Every once in a while we invite people to our ‘PMP Café’, where we give professionals the chance to interact with their peers, to ask questions and to help each other in an inviting and informal setting. Meet Berlage, inspired by Seats2meet, offers the perfect location for such an event. A few months ago we launched ‘PMP Dares to Ask’ together with Nils Roemen – the founding father of the original ‘#Dare to Ask’ – to bridge the gap between experienced Supervisory Board Members and good initiatives looking for high-end input. This proved to be a great success. People felt free to ask each other whatever they wanted to know, in a relaxed and inspiring atmosphere.

    And it was there that I met up with Frans van der Storm, an independent management consultant who specializes in the field of professional ethics. He was interested in PMP Supervisor but also in my role as director. A few days later we came to talk about the amount of time I was spending on my work, which was a lot, and most of all, about how I could ensure the company’s continuity. We discussed the need for a fulltime operations manager. Little did I know then – and neither did Frans at the start of the conversation – that afterwards he was getting interested in taking up that role. He made that clear to me in an email that I received soon after.

    We agreed to each put our ideas about the role of an operations manager on paper, to examine the differences and similarities. When we put our ideas side by side, it turned out that we had basically written the same piece. It felt good. Ten days later he got the job and it is working out fantastic. It is great to realize that I organize these PMP Cafes for people to meet and find each other, and that I end up finding my operations manager there myself.’