She got through 27 secretaries in TWO years and reduced staff to tears every day. Meet Labour's ambassador for women at work



Just how many not-up-to-the-job PAs can there be in London? One has to wonder if Dr Glenda Stone ever asked herself that question.



The high flying businesswoman got through 27 personal assistants in two years, to the point that when anyone visited her office she would roll her eyes, point to the desk nearest hers and say - with a peculiar pride, by all accounts - 'we call this desk the revolving door'.



Now you could argue, as she doubtless would, that Dr Stone's standards were simply higher than most. OK, so she presented each new PA with a terrifyingly detailed daily schedule which started '8.55am - turn lights on', but few entrepreneurs have made it to the top without a bit of control freakery.



Demanding: Glenda Stone regularly reduced staff to tears at Aurora

And Dr Stone had definitely made it to the top. The Porsche 911 she drove said so. So did the Gucci shoe habit and the six-figure salary she paid herself. So successful was she deemed in her specialist area of business - ironically, a 'female friendly' recruitment company - that the Prime Minister himself had asked her to head his task force promoting women in business.



You can see why.



Dr Stone was sassy, and media-savvy. She once wrote an article about equality in the work place, looking forward to a day when women returned to work immediately after having babies, and men stayed at home. She said it would herald 'landmark herstory' then added, 'oops - should that still be history?'



One can shudder at her taste for puns, but her dedication to the sisterhood seemed clear. Well, unless that 'sister' worked for her, it now seems. Poor Janette King did.



Despite having held down a previous job as an office manager in busy car mechanics factory for 16 years, she lasted all of two-and-a-half months before developing a nervous twitch. She went to see her GP, who immediately diagnosed a stress disorder brought on by bullying.



When Mrs King emailed Dr Stone to tell her what had happened, she was promptly told that she had failed her probationary period and would not be required to return to work.



Former employee of Dr Glenda Stone, David Collier, said: 'I saw her bully the men, but I saw her absolutely pulverise the women'

This week Glenda Stone's own 'herstory' was rewritten in quite dramatic form when she was exposed as a boss from hell in an employment tribunal. She was depicted as a harridan of a CEO, whose expectations of her own staff were less likely to empower them than leave them blubbering wrecks in the staff toilets or, worse, the doctor's surgery.



The tribunal found that Dr Stone had well and truly crossed the line between demanding boss and tyrant, behaving in a way that was not just mean-spirited and unfair, but illegal.



She was ordered to pay £28,000 compensation to an employee after firing him following a heated row about his workload.



The Central London tribunal found that she tried to force him to resign by threatening to reduce his salary by £15,000. When he refused, she spent 15 minutes on the internet finding out how to sack someone - then wrote him a letter saying he was to be made redundant.



What is truly shocking, though, is the picture that was painted by her staff about how Glenda Stone - this great adviser on equality - 'micromanaged' and controlled her underlings from day to day.



And it seems that what was heard in court was only the start of it.



'Glenda's not a role model. She's a disgrace'

Of course, all successful business bosses have high standards - and rightly so. But the Mail has spoken to many of Dr Stone's ex-employees, who have spoken of a 'climate of fear' in which they were repeatedly shouted at, undermined and bullied.



Some say they were questioned for spending too long in the toilet; others for simply talking to their colleagues. Many talked of having to communicate with each other via Post-It notes because they believed their emails were being monitored.



The stress of operating to Stone's exacting - some might say eccentric - standards drove some 'to the point of madness'.



Janette King isn't the one who blew the whistle, but her account of working for Stone encapsulates exactly what the problem was.



'Her level of micro-management was amazing,' she says. 'I had a daily schedule and every minute of the day was accounted for. There would be six minutes to open the post, another three minutes for another task.



'If I finished something early, I liked to get on with the next thing, but she would see what I was doing and emailed me once saying: 'Why are you doing this task at this time'?



'Nothing was ever good enough for her, and she would shout and call me unprofessional routinely.



'When I had to draft a letter for her, she would go back and change it. I would take it back to her, and she would put more red pen on it. It was like being back at school and you could never get it right. No one could.



'When she went for meetings she would always have a map printed out, with where the meeting was circled on it, so she could see how to get there from the tube station.



'Once she called me from Euston Station asking why I hadn't given her a map. I said I had, and it was in the same place it always was, but she said she meant a map of the station so she could see how to get to the taxi rank.'



Not exactly 'female-friendly' then?



'She's not a role model,' Mrs King concludes. 'She's a disgrace.'



Another ex-employee - who declined to be named - pointed out the irony of Dr Stone receiving a honorary doctorate (from Leeds Metropolitan University) and other accolades for promoting the cause of women, 'when the bottom line is that I don't think she likes women very much at all'.



'She is very bright, but I've seen her crush people'

In the end, it was actually a man who finally forced Mrs Stone to be held to account.



David Collier, 44, who was one of seven full-time staff in the office, brought the action after working for Dr Stone for two-and-a-half years.



A successful businessman, he had worked in the Middle East for some years, but on return to the UK, with a wife and young child to support, was urgently in need of a job.



He accepted a job as a PA to Stone, on a salary of £25,000, but quickly worked his way up the ladder at her company Aurora, to become project co-ordinator, earning £40,000.



He too was subjected to the hectoring and bullying Mrs King talks of.



'It was every day. I saw her bully the men, but I saw her absolutely pulverise the women,' he says. 'To people outside, she was a successful women who carried herself well, but what she did to her own staff was mental abuse.



'The website Aurora runs is called wheretowork.com, but we used to call it wherenottowork.com. We would be talking to HR directors of the biggest companies in the world about how people should treat their employees, but at the same time were working in this shadow of fear. There was an atmosphere of tension at all times.



'There was not one employee that I did not see cry when I was there. Every day there would be at least one person dabbing their eyes. There was no joy, no banter. I think I was praised just twice when I was there.



'We didn't dare talk to each other, or communicate via email, because she would monitor everything.



'There was solidarity between us - we were all going through the same thing with her - but it couldn't be overt. If I was going to the toilet I would drop a Post-It note with a smiley face on it on a desk as I went past.'



It was an environment from which people were simply desperate to escape.



'Of the 11 people who passed through when I was there, ten left under a cloud and with no job to go to,' Mr Collier says.



Even those who would have classed themselves as friends (and fans) of Glenda Stone have told us of the terror with which she ran her empire. Ruth Minhall, 35, from Canterbury, Kent, was a salesperson at Aurora for almost three years, leaving after the birth of her first son. She describes her time working for Dr Stone as 'a character-defining experience which I would not repeat'.



'I would never put myself through it again. Now, I would walk out on the first day. The irony is that I took the job because I was so impressed with her at the interview. You can't argue with her work ethic.



'Although she is a pain in the neck and her management style is lacking, she is determined and hard-working. I have a lot of respect for her business ability and her drive, but I have seen her crush people. Glenda is an incredibly bright woman, but lacking in empathy and impossible to please.



'I was told I wasn't professional, I wasn't doing my job. After the first five months it didn't faze me, but it destroyed a lot of people. I saw people being made to feel mad. The average member of staff lasted five months.



It's over: Witnesses Marianna Karas and Janette King leaving Kingsway employment tribunal that saw their former boss Glenda Stone pay £28,000 compensation for unfair dismissal

One PA's best friend died, and she asked on the Tuesday to have the following Monday off to go to the funeral. On the Friday, Glenda still hadn't got back to her letting her know if it was OK. In the end, she just walked out.'



So who is Dr Stone, and how on earth did she convince the Government that she was qualified to advise others on management issues?



A gregarious blonde, she was born in Australia and worked as a teacher before embarking on a government career in Queensland Education Department, the Cabinet Office, and HM Treasury.



'I grew up living in suburbia and much of my drive comes from wanting never to go back. It was so dull,' she once explained. 'My father ran an estate agency where my mother worked, and although we were comfortably off, they did not believe in flashing their money about.'



She was very different - money obsessed and proud of it. She has given interviews about her love of Gucci clothes and shoes and once said: 'What I love about being successful is the fact that you can treat yourself - our next goal is to own our own boat.

'People may say they're not in it for the money, but to become a millionaire you have to be money driven or you'd stay running a small business from your bedroom for ever. It's highly addictive.

'I had to resign to preserve my sanity'

'I pay myself a six-figure salary and I'm personally worth more than the business. Being successful gives you power and choice: having my own business means no one can tell me what to do.'



She met her husband - and business partner - Leigh in Greece, marrying him after a whirlwind romance. Their son Conrad was born in 2007. The couple settled in London, setting up their business Busygirl. It was later renamed Aurora Gender Capital Management Limited, and eventually shortened to Aurora GCM Ltd.



Aurora, of course, was the Roman goddess of the dawn - a symbol of powerful and successful women and seemingly ideal for Glenda's 'female-friendly' vision.



While Leigh provided the finance expertise, Stone provided the vision. The company's website boasts that it 'provides femalefocused corporate HR software and marketing services to over 100 bluechip clients', and its boss was a skilled self-promoter.



Some particularly gushing biographical notes seemed to suggest she had actually invented the idea of women in the workplace.

'Glenda Stone is pure inspiration for anyone who wants to break into the corporate world. She created a whole new market for women in business, a sector that never existed until she made it happen,' it read.



Still, she was convincing. Even her own staff were, at first, persuaded. One former account manager, who did not want to be named, tells us: 'Glenda hit a nerve by getting on the pro-women bandwagon, which was a big thing at that time.



'I joined Aurora because I was passionate about women in history and admire female entrepreneurs.'



This woman managed nine months on the Aurora payroll, even missing her first wedding anniversary out of loyalty to Stone, before it all ended in recrimination. 'You could never do anything right. Once, I went to the loo because I had a stomach upset.



When I got back, Glenda was asking where I'd been for a long time. It made me feel so worried that I'd spent too long there. I missed my first wedding anniversary because I had to go to a conference at the last minute and was told it would be good for my career if I did so.



'But by the end of my time with her I was suffering from depression and my doctor said: "This is not good for you".



Glenda questioned my performance and said that she was going to have to reduce my salary. In the end, I told her I would have to seek legal advice over some comments she made to me and she just said: "Clear your desk, and get out".'



An astonishing aspect of this case was that even being related to Dr Stone did not prevent some employees being bullied. Candy Dibley, 36, is actually her sister-in-law, but she too was made redundant.



Mrs Dibley did not choose to give evidence at the tribunal, but was forced to by a court order. She wept as she told the tribunal there had been a 'disagreement' on February 10 this year, and she had walked out of the office, telling Dr Stone that the way she was being asked to do her job was 'not right'.



Two days later, she was made redundant, she said, by which time she felt 'relieved' about it.



Pressed on Stone's management style, she described it as 'different to anything else I had ever experienced. Quite closely managed. Micro-management would be the correct terminology.'



Those who witnessed the pressure Stone piled on her sister-in-law are less reticent about what Mrs Dibley had to deal with on a daily basis.



'Candy had the worst of it,' recalls Mr Collier. 'Glenda and Leigh would have arguments where they would tell Candy she was useless. There was nothing constructive about it. It was full-on abuse.



'Candy would be in pieces, crying a lot. She absolutely hated it.'



Another former employee, Marianna Karas, 35, told the tribunal that the fact the two bosses were married to each other made a bad situation ten times worse.



'Glenda and Leigh are husband and wife. This was not an issue to begin with, until it became clear that both brought their personal matters into the office, arguing abusively and openly in front of others.'



She, too, could only put up with so much. 'In the end, I just decided to cut my losses, keep my sanity, and resign.'



And so it might have continued, had Mr Collier not decided that enough was enough. He claims that Stone's fearsome reputation was common knowledge even outside the office, and that at least one temping agency refused to place staff with her, so frequently did it all end in tears.



He claims 15 former colleagues got in touch to support him in the legal action against Dr Stone.



It's all a far cry from the accolade she was awarded last year - the inaugural Australia Woman of the Year in the UK. Back home in Australia, Dr Stone was understandably feted.



'This Brisbane woman has risen high,' crowed her local newspaper. Only now has anyone thought to ask how many other women, and men, were trampled underfoot in that giddying ascent.



