The Hidden Career Currency That Shapes Who Gets Ahead in Financial Services | Janet Pope, DCMS Audit & Risk Chair. Chair CAF Bank. RemCo Chair, Environment & Social Purpose Chair at Yorkshire Building Society

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to FinTech's DEI Discussions podcast series. We are, uh, here today to celebrate the wins, raise awareness of the challenges and walk the talk for change across the entire financial technology industry. Today we are joined by Janet Pope. She's a NED and multiple chair, including Caf bank and Yorkshire Building Society where she's the REMCO Chair and she sits on the board of Step Change and um, and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, amongst many other things. She's also the former Chief of Staff and Chief Sustainability Officer at Lloyd's Banking Group and she is here today to share how she walks the talk for inclusion in our sector and of course, what more she wants done. Janet, it is great to have you with us. Welcome.

Speaker A: Oh, thank you for inviting me, Nadia. This has had a long gestation. I'm pleased we're having the conversation.

Speaker B: Me too. Your career has had so much impact on others. I would love for you to open up by telling us about what's driven you to open doors for others and to share some examples, please. Yes.

Speaker A: So, as I think about that, I think probably the most important thing is having been fortunate myself. So in my early career there was one kind of a constant who was a chap called Malcolm Williamson, for whom I worked in my very first job at, uh, Gyro bank, which was the, the banking arm and the post office. And he gave me a number of opportunities and then he continued through my career to give me some opportunities. And so I think when you've been the beneficiary of somebody just being very thoughtful. I was talking to someone the other day and I said, you know, Malcolm made the whole difference. And they said, that's only because he thought you were good. He wouldn't have done it if you thought you were useless. So, you know, you have to work hard to get that recognition, I guess. But, but so I had that enormously fortunate start, um, with somebody who took an interest in my career and I once had a performance appraisal from him that said Janet is without doubt the most talented woman in the organisation. And I was deeply offended thinking I don't just want to be the most talented woman. But, you know, this was the 1980s and things were a great deal more old fashioned then. So I think having had that opportunity myself and also arriving at, uh, Lloyds in my late 40s and I ran the savings business for a while, but then I went to become the Chief of staff and had the opportunity to kind of fashion the other things that I did off the side of my desk and I was hugely fortunate to be able to bolt onto my role, things that I was deeply passionate about. So the role was cast as Chief Sustainability Officer. But the breadth of it included inclusion and diversity and all the philanthropy work that Lloyds did, the Lloyds bank foundations, um, and doing work seeking to make Lloyd's a more inclusive place. And, um, that just gave me an opportunity to try to figure out how I could make more opportunity available for more people, people for whom opportunity wasn't. It was often kind of closed off. So then it became about, so how do we really make this happen? And we had a board member, Deborah McWhinney, who'd been at Citibank where she had done some work. She'd said, I took the top 40 women who I thought were going to make it because success begets success. And I worked with them on what they felt they needed. Was it opportunity, was it training, was it confidence? Building whatever they as individuals needed in order to try to move the dial. And the underpinning for that was if there were more women in senior management than then it would be easier for women to be in senior management because it would just become more normal. And so we copied what Debbie had done at, uh, Citibank and did it at Lloyd's, initially with 15 senior women members of staff. And rather than kind of going round to each department and saying, could you please give me your best two, we just placed best bets on the 15 that we thought were going to make it. So some departments weren't represented. We just wanted the 15 who would really like to make it. And we got Egon Zehnder involved in that effort. And we sat down with each of the women and said, what do you need? And I was very clear with them, this isn't about fixing you because very often the kind of opportunities and support that's provided is about saying, this woman is deficient in this way and we need to fix her. So it came from a place that said, in order for you to feel better about how you show up at work and to feel liberated, to be the very best version of yourself, what do you need? And some people did need some help with, you know, I don't feel very confident when I'm doing, uh, a presentation in a board meeting or I don't feel very confident about how to pull through strong team members or. I mean, we even did. And this is, this is a little old fashioned now, but we even did the kind of, you know, how should you dress? I don't think I dream of doing that today. But, you know, some women said, I really feel it's easy for a man. They just get out, they reach for the suit, and away they go. And for women, it's a whole lot harder because they've got to think hard about what goes with what, and they're much more under, um, scrutiny than the average man would be. So we, as a gift, really, we gave those 15 women the things that they felt would arm them to be the best version of themselves. And then we gave them masses of support around what it felt like when they showed up. So some of the things that I did, which I became known for, I tried to make it really safe. So we had a very scary group executive committee at, uh, Lloyds Banking Group. And when you walked in the room, you'd be feeling super nervous about whether you were going to remember to say all the things that you'd come ready to say. And so I would get up and I'd walk down the room with the women, and I'd stand at the front and. And I'd say, I'm really pleased that Kate or Jane or whoever is here with us today because they've been doing great work on whatever the subject matter was, and they're going to unpack their story for you. And then I'd go and sit down. But with that little gesture, I've made it possible for that woman to perform so much better because she'd got a kind of positive gloss on what she was going to be doing. And then I felt. And over time, more women started to do this. I felt a real obligation for making sure that that woman succeeded. So if she got herself into a tangle, which we all do, you know, we start explaining something and we've lost our thread or something's gone adrift, I feel a really strong obligation to help out, uh, and just dive in and get them back on track, or to suggest, you know, Kate and I were talking about this ahead of time, and she told me that a really important point was good, and then, then she'd be back on track. So there's an amount of generosity attached to that. But success begets success. And once you've gone in and you've done it once and some kind person in the room has made it possible for you to be successful, you can do it the next time and you can do it the time after, uh, and you don't. You're not in a panic in the same way that you were. So it sounds like a really simple thing. And then afterwards, I'd send an email to Say, this was really great. The points that you made about X, Y and Z were really powerful and it would have been even better if you, uh, know, whatever that development point might be. And quite often I'd end up then with an ongoing relationship with whoever that woman was because they think, janet, help me be successful and I'd m like to reach for her. And you know, over time people become perfectly competent doing it for themselves. And I think what motivates, what motivates all of that for women is that particularly, you know, all those years ago, that's like 10 years ago a bit more. We didn't have enough role models and so we were all trying to be like the alpha men who were in the control positions in the organisations that we were working for. Uh, and what all of us know for certain is that we're never going to be an alpha man because that's not who and what we are. And so getting to a place where you've got more women succeeding in senior roles and doing it their own way gave more women the opportunity to think, I don't have to be totally word perfect, I don't have to be mean, I don't have to be shouty. I can be whichever version of me is going to be the most successful at, uh, running complaints in Lloyds bank or managing our way out of this current challenge that we've got. I think it's about making it safe and comfortable to be the person that you are, because that's going to be way more successful than some imitation of somebody that you can't, um, properly imitate.

Speaker B: In any case, I totally agree and really enjoy listening to all the stories that you share. I wrote down and underlined it. What do you need to feel liberated to be the very best version of yourself? I think the way that you said that is so spot on because I think more and more people are asking the question what you need to thrive. But the word liberated, I think is super important when we're talking about the marginalized, the underrepresented, the only one in the room with everything that comes along with that. So I really, really, you know, enjoyed that, that part of the, the conversation. But also as you were talking, the examples you were giving that moment of walking somebody down a room, I can visualize that, but also I can visualize their nerves. Uh, I can see myself walking through rooms and feeling sick before I'm about to start talking. And of course the whole plan has left my mind and how much I would have wished having you walk me down the Room just to know, breathe, take, you know, take. Take your, you know, take your time. But also the fact that you would essentially set the scene for somebody so you just get them, get their mindset on track and ready. You would be setting them up for success, really.

Speaker A: I mean, you can. Creating a kind, um, of safe space within which they can be successful. Somebody said to me when I left, you know, Janet, the biggest thing that you've done for me, and it wasn't even somebody I knew particularly well, is you go and you stand on a stage and sometimes you muddle your words and you'll go, I can't even talk today. And you just make it possible for us all to not be perfect. You can go up and you can do the job that you need to do. You can communicate the things that you need to communicate, but you don't have to be word perfect. And I used to start a presentation, I'd say, I've got three points to make today, and I'd make the first two, and the third one would have left my head. And so there are things that you just need to learn about yourself, around how you can be good in the moment and also know that you don't always have to be brilliant. You just need to be competent and to know your stuff.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think there's a lot that you said here that will solve conundrums for people in businesses right now. So there's many businesses right now where they have implemented policies, but no one's necessarily taking them up or the policies aren't creating the safety that's needed. So shared parental leave is a perfect example where not even 1% of the men in the business have taken it because they don't feel safe to. And there'll be a million other examples like that. But just as you were talking and just, just that as well, your authenticity on stage and showing, we don't have to be perfect, we don't have to be exceptional. And, you know, a lot of us are exceptional. Please don't let me take that away. Yeah. You know, like, like you have to be, to just enter the room. I think that's really a really interesting point. And it takes me to a conversation I love having, which is around the psychological safety, which is around having people that will back other people, and how detrimental it is when you don't know if you've got an ally in the room and how obvious you have made it throughout your career. Not just, I will be your mentor and I will follow up on this, not even using you didn't use the word mentorship at all throughout all of that. But you're an advocate, a mentor, a sponsor, a coach in everything that you've just spoken about. So I really believe that we've all got a role to play in this and you've espoused so much of that in your stories.

Speaker A: I think the critical thing, Nadia, is that people need to feel it as an obligation and they need to understand that it's more than just giving people a little bit of time. M and you and I spoke previously about the difference between mentorship and sponsorship and allyship, and all those words that are used slightly interchangeably without people really knowing what they mean. And I think because I'd benefited from real sponsorship earlier in my career, I always try very hard to take it to the next stage, because for me, it's not just about giving someone a few gentle pointers, it's actually about helping them to find the things that are going to help move them forward. And so, as a sponsor, I think you have an obligation, actually, to help people find opportunities, to put opportunities in front of them, to talk to others who might have those opportunities available and to say, you really should talk to Person X because they're fabulous and they maybe don't have a profile that would cause you to shortlist them, but please give them a hearing. And quite often people would come through, people who just hadn't had somebody who'd been advocating for them before, who'd been just very overlooked. And we found that at Lloyd's, particularly immediately post Black Lives Matter, um, where we were seeking to find the same story, really, to try and find black colleagues who we could help get into more senior roles in the organisation in order that other black colleagues could just see people who look like them higher up in the organisation. And, um, you know, these things are always about merit. You wouldn't ever dream of putting somebody into a role if they weren't fully capable. But what we found with a lot of the black colleagues was that they'd been perfectly promotable for long periods of time. It just hadn't happened. And so we needed a program that helped to kind of push people into that next role. And again, not sufficient to help lever them into the next role. You need to work to try and figure out what it will require to be successful in that role now that you've arrived, because quite often there's that organisations, big organisations, particularly to do this. Well, here's the job. Off you go. Uh, and you need a whole bunch of people around you to help you to be successful and to help scoop you up when things don't go quite as well as you'd hoped and to share some of the pain and the burden with you. Most people, generally speaking, I find if you approach somebody and say, could you help me with something? Most people are willing to help, but people don't know who to go to for help. They're too shy to ask for help. And so just setting people up for success and making it more normal to have more senior women, more senior black colleagues, more senior Asian, other minority ethnic colleagues in the organization, it just becomes easier.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And look, we've spoken a lot about successful succession planning and actually how that's just not. It's not the norm anymore. Well, has it ever been? It's, uh, definitely something that I talk to many, many clients about, especially the ones that ask me, oh, you know, why, why haven't women put themselves forward for this leadership role? And that started to be the conversation and we all read the. I think it was McKinsey that did the report that suddenly all the headlines were the ambition gap, which actually didn't tell the whole story or the fair story. So I'd love for you just to share some of your work on succession planning and some of these themes that I've just mentioned.

Speaker A: Yeah, so it was quite, it was quite analytical really, because I think at the end of the day there's no substitute for that. And so what we did was to try and we did lots of colour coding. We loaded women into the bottom rungs of the succession chart, so you'll be familiar with that structure where you've got emergency cover and ready now and one to two years and three to four and so on. And so we started loading women and other people with diversity characteristics into the bottom rung into the three to five years. And the deal was they shouldn't just be a year older by the time you came to look at that report again next year. The deal was that you'd figure out what that person was going to need so that over the three to five year period they could get to a point where they were ready now. And so it wasn't just a name on a chart, it was a name on a chart with a plan attached. And there was nothing quite like doing that colour coding and seeing that some whole divisions had no women who were, uh, making their way through the ranks. And you'd apply pressure. I mean, I do quite of this kind of one on one. I'd go around and talk to the individual director and say, hello, chief internal auditor person. Well, how comes there are no women on your chart? And they'd, they may have reasons, but you could start to put pressure on them to try and figure out, okay, so who are the most promising of our women and how could we help them to be successful. And so there's a real what gets measured gets done. I think with succession planning, particularly if you take a kind of five year time horizon so that you can see people moving up through the ranks. And then another really important component was that you might feel that that individual wasn't necessarily going to make it in the vertical that they were working in. I'm, um, trying to think of a good example. They may not make it to be the most senior lawyer because they may not have that legal qualification. They might be working, you know, doing something else in legal. And so where else could they do their thing? Which other divisions might enable them to flourish and be more successful? And so we engineered quite a lot of cross company movement. So there was one particular woman who'd worked for me in savings who I promoted. She then came to people's attention and um, she went and did a second in the Commercial bank so that she, she could run both verticals. She could either become more senior in the retail bank or she could become more senior in the Commercial Bank. And she ended up leaving Lloyd's and she's gone on to really senior things in a very prominent building society. But, but that kind of twin track of uh, being a general purpose business person who was credible in multiple different areas really kind of propelled her forward. And it comes really back to sponsorship. It's somebody taking ownership for you in your little bit of the box on the succession plan and making sure that you're not just a year older by the time you come to review them again.

Speaker B: And I really liked what you said earlier about sponsorship because, um, I think a lot of people would like to call themselves an ally, a sponsor or coach without really defining that support structure. And there was something that I just want to pick up on where you said you've got a team of people around you for when things go wrong. You know, if you get put into a new, a new role, if you're looking to solve a new problem, of course things are going to go wrong. It's the first time you've been in this. And you know, most m people when they're put into a, uh, new position will have a team of people around them. They won't have a, an audience watching, waiting for them to fail. I think that's a really important responsibility to sponsorship, so I see that as a responsibility that someone should always hold on to. What would you add to that?

Speaker A: I think, uh, helping people to understand how to be successful is. Is important because I think you arrive in that new job and you feel like you can't admit to any weakness. You've just kind of got to get on with it. Uh, and, um, it's always shocked me how few people really understand that building relationships with senior management is really important. And I saw one particular colleague at Lloyd's who did this incredibly well. Whenever she was handed something difficult to do, she'd go around and talk to each of the group executive committee members and say, how could I make this successful? What would success look like from your perspective? And so she'd have gathered all that feedback. But possibly even more importantly, she'd have been starting to build a relationship with the senior stakeholders in the organisation, which would mean that when she was coming up with her recommendations or her findings, they'd find a more willing audience because they'd know her a little bit. But, you know, barging your way into a senior manager's office is something that somebody needs to tell you to do, because most of us are going to be too shy to do it kind of off our own bat. Another one that I've always personally struggled with is asking for feedback, because I'm my own worst critic and I'll come out of a meeting and I'll think, well, 50% of that went all right, but the other 50% of it wasn't. And I don't really want somebody to say, well, Janet, here are all the things that you got wrong. But actually, we all grow so much from feedback, so being kind of bold enough and daring enough to ask for feedback and to ask for it in the moment, because if you ask somebody a couple of weeks later, it's kind of. You've gone past that point. So, you know, as you're leaving a meeting, how did that go? And then I think there's something about understanding how performance is really assessed. What. What is the organization looking for? What are the things that are going to count? How will they judge whether I've been successful or not? It will be different in every role. But, uh, I think there's something around the things that you draw out of others that. I remember my daughter. My daughter, when she. She went to Exeter University and she was helping disadvantaged kids in the local sixth form to crack how to get Grade A levels. And, um, my daughter sat them down and she said, you need to look at the marking scheme. So there's no point just telling them everything you know about Macbeth. You need to know what points the marking scheme is calling for, because they can't give you maximum marks for writing something brilliant that doesn't mention some critical things on the marking scheme. And I think there's a. There's an employment equivalent of that. Uh, it's like, what are they looking for? And how will they judge whether or not I've been successful? And let me not excel in two of the five and being also ran in the other three. Let me figure out, you know, what the basic thresholds are for all of the things that I need to demonstrate prowess with. So there's an amount of decoding. And I think working class kids don't get it, women don't get it because they've not been doing it for long enough. Black, Asian, minority, ethnic kids don't get it, or employees don't get it because they've not necessarily grown up in families where that's been the norm. I remember talking to one of my black mentees at Lloyd's and she said, I'm the first person in my whole family who's done anything outside the music business and been successful. So she didn't have anything in her kit bag that would say, this is how you're successful in banking. She was dependent on others to kind of find signposts for her, give her feedback, you know, help her to course correct if things weren't going particularly well and kind of build the employment capital that we all need to be successful and which those alpha males have had a bit of a kind of monopoly on for. For such a long time. It's about trying to share some of that out.

Speaker B: And that's a great phrase, build employment capital. Something I'll definitely follow up on and see what I can do to support people with that, because I think that's hugely, hugely important. So thank you for sharing that. I can't believe it, but we are already at, uh, the last question. I feel like me and you could talk all day and that people would listen as well. But the last question I love to ask everybody is what more can we all do to drive inclusion in.

Speaker A: In all of our workplaces? I think probably the most important thing, which is. Which is what's lingering behind your question, is to recognise that it's not the job just of one individual. And so I had a title that would suggest that it sat with me to make inclusion happen. But unless you make it an obligation on everybody. It will sometimes lurch forward because there'll be some enthusiasts and then we've been going through a bit of this during the course of the last year or so. It sometimes slides backwards because there's an excuse to not carry on working on it. I always felt hugely fortunate at Lloyds because Lloyds was always, even before it became as committed as it is today to inclusion and diversity, it was always a very respectful organisation. And so it was tolerant and encouraging of definition of difference in a way that meant generally speaking you could rely on people not to be exclusive. It's not to say that, you know, everybody was always exemplary in their behaviors and you definitely needed catalysts to make it more inclusive. But it was founded on respect and I think that's important. Some of the things that we did, Nadia, were just bound up with what gets measured, gets done. Um, so everybody had a target for more women in their division. And it wouldn't be a silly, you know, the organisations at, uh, 27%, we need you to get to 40. If today you were only at 11, then you'd have a target, you know, within two years to get to maybe 14 or 15 and everyone would know that that was contribution towards the organization moving further forward. But it was a realistic target that you. And it was in people's balance scorecards. So some of it became kind of non optional. And over time, after we'd been successful with women, uh, we added other diversity characteristics. And as I was leaving, we declared targets for people with disabilities in senior management roles. And I see in the reporting accounts that Lloyd's continues to make progress on all of those fronts. But I think the critical thing is to make it everybody's responsibility and then to call it out when things go wrong. And John Amici, who helped us enormously with the work that we did on Black Lives Matter once kind of handed to me but what feels like an obligation, he said to me, janet, you're as anti racist as the most racist thing you're prepared to put up with. And when somebody said that to you, you know that anytime you encounter something where you think, oh, I wish that person hadn't said that, you need to name it and you need to call it out. And you need some people in senior roles who are prepared to do that. And it applies equally to, you know, women being subject to misogyny and people, uh, discriminating against colleagues with disabilities. It's on all those fronts. And once one person starts to do it, others start to do it and you don't have to be in your face and angry, but you can say, oh, I think there might be a different way of phrasing that. It might look like this, because in a respectful organisation like Lloyd's, I don't think most people intend to be rude and exclusive, but sometimes they fall into old language patterns and don't take the time to express things carefully and thoughtfully. So I think calling it out, but making it everybody's responsibility.

Speaker B: And Janet, thank you. It's been a brilliant podcast today and I know that there's so much that you have said that others will now be able to go and implement. That's everything that I hope for in these pods. So thank you for joining me on, um, FinTech's DEI discussions. Let's listen, let's learn, let's walk the talk.