HE is one of the most respected industrialists in Britain today, but Sir David Lees, chairman of GKN, is not a name with which many outside business are familiar. And that’s how he likes it.

“This is going to sound a bit pappy,” he says, smoothing out the sheaf of notes in front of him, “but I believe in team play, not in business stars. The interviews and pictures and endless putting oneself forward, that’s not a hugely attractive characteristic in business leaders.”

Yet here he is, prepared to talk, because now, after 16 years at the top of GKN, his time is almost up. In a few weeks he packs his briefcase and walks, leaving behind a world-leading manufacturer of vehicle components and provider of aerospace services that is, in part, his creation.

Where other British engineering giants have withered away, the £4.6 billion-turnover GKN, which can trace its roots back to Welsh ironworks in the 18th century, is still going strong. That’s thanks to some adroit switches in strategy, but most of all to the careful, low-key approach that has characterised Lees’s reign, first as chairman and chief executive, then just as chairman.

It hasn’t always been that way. Over the centuries GKN has leapt from iron to steel, cannonballs to nuts and bolts, aircraft parts, army helmets and more. In recent decades, pre-Lees, there have been some wild diversifications that haven’t paid off — chicken farms — and others, such as its wooden-pallet business, Chep, that have turned out rather well.

Under Lees, however, there have been fewer surprises, just a steady development of the car-parts arm, and, with an investment in Westland, a shift into helicopters that gave GKN its valuable entree into aerospace.

“The lesson I’ve learnt,” says Lees with a slow smile, “is that it’s quite difficult for a company to stray too far away from its core competences.”

Sitting in shirtsleeves at the boardroom table of GKN’s St James’s townhouse base in London, Lees looks like a man who comes to everything well prepared. He has that sheaf of handwritten notes — things to say in interview — and photocopies for me to read.

Craggy, medium-height, balding at the back, he seems a good 10 years younger than his 67 years, and more tentative in manner than you’d perhaps expect. His eyes stare down a lot as he talks — a strange modesty to find in such a FTSE veteran.

Others point out that he is so shy that you can meet Lees a couple of times socially and still barely get a smile of recognition out of him. “You have to know David well,” says John Viney, boss of Zygos, a board recruitment and development specialist, who is a Lees adviser. “He’s very modest, but he has got a fantastic mix of business and people skills, and he’s a great listener, good at getting to the right answers.”

Others describe the Lees approach as “unostentatious”. There have been no fat-cat rows at GKN, no loud bust-ups. On his boards there has just been a regular mentoring of others who have gone on to become chairmen in their own right — Sir John Parker (National Grid Transco), Baroness Hogg (3i) and Roy Brown (who replaces Lees at GKN).

Parker describes Lees as “one of the real greats”, and his boards as “a terrific academy”. Everything stays steady-as-she-goes, however turbulent the times, which is just how colleagues and investors like it.

“I suppose that’s slightly in character,” smiles Lees. His father was a rear admiral in the Royal Navy. His younger brother is one, too. Lees’s single act of rebellion was to insist that he wasn’t going to join the navy, but would become an accountant, and then a businessman. It’s not hard to guess where the house style comes from, or the motivation to lead.