What is a CPO? with Sean Mileusnic

Speaker A: You're listening to the People Agenda podcast brought to you by leading HR workforce and, um, payroll transformation specialist place partners.

Speaker B: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to the Pupil Agenda Podcast. My name is Debbie Mitchell from LACE Partners and today I'm talking with Shaun from the RNIB CPO on our what is a CPO Podcast. So, Sean, delighted to welcome you today. Hello.

Speaker A: Hello. Thank you. That's very kind.

Speaker B: So I think where we're going to start, actually is our, uh, what is a CPO Podcast. Let's just give a quick headline around that. We love to explore the role of the CPO in different contexts, different environments, different geographies, different types of business, from startup to major businesses to charities to utilities organizations. So we've had a range of guests on the podcast and we're just really interested in exploring what is the role of the CPO from all of those different contexts and where are their differences and where are their similarities, commonalities, and also what does it take to be in the CPO role? So we'll explore a little bit around the mindset or the behavior or the capability or the experience, background and knowledge. And we're really just exploring that sort of that variance around the CPO role. So, Sean, tell us a bit about you, your background, where you are today,

Speaker A: what you've learned, what I've learned, a huge amount. I think my background is quite diverse, so I've tended to, when I move job role, I move job role, company and sector. So I've worked across a range of different sectors. I won't list them all because that would be really boring for any audience, but includes things like financial services, logistics, infrastructure. And I recent, most recently, before I came to the charity sector, uh, I worked in global technology for what was then a FTSE 100 company called Avast in the kind of cyber security space, which was fascinating. And now today I'm Chief People Officer of rnib. So, uh, Royal National Institute for Blind People.

Speaker B: So it's quite a varied career that you've had. Any highlights, any bits that you passionately loved?

Speaker A: Wow. All of it's been really cool. It's fascinating, I think, moving from different sectors. Uh, I think if you stay in a sector, uh, it's easier to kind of take some of the things that you did previously and use them in the new organization because there are some similarities. That's much trickier moving between sectors. So I found the easiest way to do it is to go and then put a huge amount of effort initially into really understanding the organization and Its history, some of the context as well as understanding how people work in that particular sector. I moved to the charity sector this time where I've never worked before and it is. Whilst it's fascinating and it's fantastic in terms of you seeing the kind of real value that your organization is delivering to society, it is quite tricky. There are some things that I've not dealt with before and some are really transactional things like the way that we capitalize things in the charity sector is slightly different to what I've seen in other sectors. So some of the financial rules are a little bit different, which is a sudden surprise when you think something is going to work a particular way and then it works. Yeah, but, yeah, otherwise fascinating moving between sectors. I'd highly recommend hard work, but very

Speaker B: entertaining and we'll come back and explore a little bit of some of those differences in a minute and. But I guess where we like to start on the pod is the killer question in your mind, what is a cpo?

Speaker A: I think honestly a CPO is dependent on the individual doing the role. So I think it's unlikely that anyone else does the role exactly the same as I do. I'm sure I don't do it anything like the CPO of Aviva or Barclays or any of those organisations. So I think it's very much dependent on the individual and how you want to influence the direction of travel of the organisation. I think it's also dependent on the organisation, on the rest of the executive on the board and where that organization is. For example, I've taken more ownership uh, for transformation and kind of research and development around our future business model in this organization than I might have done, done in previous organizations. But I think there are also some consistent things that I'm sure everyone on here says similar. You've got a responsibility for working with the CEO and the chair to ensure the board and executive interaction works effectively. You've got a responsibility for uh, ensuring that uh, the executive and the board have got a full understanding of how colleagues feel about the organisation. And then obviously you've got functional responsibilities for culture and organisational design and all of that kind of delightful stuff as well as some m of the more transactional things that if we don't get right all of the other stuff becomes unimportant, like paying people the right amount at the right time in the right way. So I think it's a, uh, it's very much dependent on the individual. It's very much dependent on the current position of the organization and what's required. And then I think it's dependent on what the organization wants to do over time in the people space.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And how do you quickly get a sense of that when you land as a cpo, new CPO in an organization? How do you quickly get a sense of what is the agenda going to look like? Or are you doing that as your due diligence before you even join?

Speaker A: I think you're doing an amount of that in your due diligence because obviously once you get to a certain point, I'm sure this is the same for all executives and for people at multiple layers of leadership below that. You, uh, want to know what you're walking into. You want to have some degree of kind of opportunity to think about what you might want to focus on. When you get to an organization, then I think that always has to be supplemented by the insight and evidence that you generate when you then land at that business. And for me, I try and get around as many people as possible as quickly as possible and try and then generate a kind of themes of things that perhaps need focus some more quickly and then some strategically. So I think you're trying to manage that balance between. Look, there's some things that I urgently need to deal with, otherwise it's going to create a massive problem. At the same time, you're trying to get a fix on what are the kind of. I don't have a precise number, but the three to five key strategic things that are going to make a difference to that organization over time that really need work. But whilst you can't necessarily do something immediately, you need to start the work now to be able to have impact over time. So for example, when I first joined rnib, we had some immediate problems. So I had more grievances and legal cases just in the people directorate than the rest of the business combined. So it wasn't in a great position. It had previous leaders who had left the organization quite quickly and for various different reasons. And that created a lot of complexity. The union had a really bad relationship with us, we had a bad relationship with the union. So they needed fixing really quickly. At the same time, the organization wanted, was really ambitious to be more impactive for blind and partially sighted people. And that meant we needed to work on engagement and cultural change and organizational design consistent with the strategy. And those things take time. So I had to nail down what are the things that I urgently need to do and then what are the things that are going to be strategically impacted that we need to start quite quickly as well, yeah, I think you learn when you land.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I guess there's something around. Have you got the right team around you for that? So I don't want to get into the detail of who's in your team, who's not in your team, but it's how you structure that to be able to manage both those long term and those short term hits. So was there some, um, was there a need to reshape within that team? Was it more around the cultural aspects of it?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think unsurprisingly, and this is, I have a tendency to have gone to organizations that need some work in the people space. Probably to a degree. That's every organization, no organization's perfect. Right. But those that require, uh, a greater degree of kind of movement, particularly in the transformation space. So I've done a lot of transformation over the, and I know that's a really broad word, but evolution of businesses over the years. And I think whenever you land, you always need to take a view on the culture of the team, how it's structured, the kind of organizational design and how it operates with the rest of the business and then the kind of capability. And then when you're looking at the capability, it's that kind of decision around what is absolutely spot on now. So there'll be a set of individuals and a set of capabilities that are right now and will be great going forward. There'll be a set that probably you need to move out because either those are the wrong individuals for a lot of different reasons or they're the wrong capabilities that you don't need anymore. And then there were some that you need that you don't currently have. And some of that is about hiring new people, some of that is about developing current people. And I had a similar balance of that kind of internal conversation in my head when I first joined rnib. As it is, we have transitioned quite a lot of people out of the direct people directorate and moved quite a lot of people in. But I've got some individuals that kind of back burn individuals who were there, uh, from before I joined and are still there now and have made a phenomenal contribution. So it is a balance and I think you have to be careful with that evolution as well. Some people want to go on that journey and are capable of going on that journey and some are not. And I think the way I try to do this is I try to be clear really early on exactly what the future is going to look like. And obviously we can't predict the future, but in the Sense of understanding where we are now is what not where m we're going to be in X number of years time and there's going to be quite a lot of change to get to that point. So uh, if you really want to come on that journey and you're prepared to develop your capability and work really hard and all of that lovely stuff, uh, fantastic. That's really good news. If you're not and you want to do something we're doing now that we're not going to be doing in the future, that's not an issue. We just need to have a conversation about what that might look like then. Yeah, some organizations don't like turnover. Uh, I'm not of that view. It needs to be managed and it needs to be the right turnover. But uh, people need to start new journeys. Somebody who I can think of, I won't mention a name that left us early in the time that I work that I joined and moved their career on. Fantastic. They wouldn't have necessarily been able to do that with us but they come with the next.

Speaker B: Yeah, I remember having some of those conversations very early on in my career around an adult to adult conversation with somebody about where your opportunity lies and not always describe a really good leader as an exporter of talent and that sometimes within the business or sometimes outside of the business. Right. So and to your point, if I've got aspirations that can't be fulfilled here for whatever reason, then let's just have a grown up conversation because that allows me to openly kind of think about what my options are. But you as my leader to also think about what your options therefore are and how you can support me but also manage beyond kind of my tenure with you. So it just is always baffled me really that it's such a kind of a secretive process in some ways that we don't like. It's almost dirty to talk about. Yeah.

Speaker A: And I think it's tricky. Right. I'm not underestimating. Look, if you have a conversation with somebody where you're saying to them look, you're not necessarily a fit for us in the future or you haven't got the capabilities right now that we're going to need, you might need to do some work on development etc, etc they can be tricky conversations particularly if somebody is departing and it's hard to make it not feel personal but fundamentally that has to be the way to go. I think where I've seen large and small organizational change happen well and badly is how personal or uh, not personal that is made to feel I did some work in a previous organization where I changed the construct of the directorate quite heavily. But I spent a lot of time early on helping people to understand, helping colleagues who were in that directorate to understand exactly what I wanted to make the change to and why that needed to happen. And I think that made it easier for people to make a choice as to whether to stick around or leave. And a number of people left. Nobody's happy to find themselves made redundant or having to look for another job. But what feedback I did get through colleagues and directly to myself was that the decision to leave was made much more by people themselves, intellectually, before they'd even got in a position of potentially being made redundant because they understood enough about what was going to change and that it wasn't necessarily for them.

Speaker B: And a great deal of trust as well in you as the leader. So that's important. I think the other thing that, uh, I'm just interested in is I know we shouldn't have favorites, but the kind of roles that you had to bring in, what were some of the critical skills? So we weren't. That's why I'm not talking about favorites. Right. Isn't it? But it's what are some of the critical skills that you immediately had to think we need them in this team to make the strategic ambition a reality?

Speaker A: Yeah. So I think, first thing, do I have favourites? Look, everyone has people that they like working with. I think the kind of big test is when you've worked in organizations and colleagues from those organizations want to work with you again. That's a good test of you as a leader. And thankfully, and fingers crossed, this continues over time. I've worked with a number of people on multiple occasions. So I've got a few people who are working with me now in RNIB that have worked with me previously. I think then, going to the other point of your question, I quickly realized, and to be fair, the CEO, uh, and the chair already recognized this, that there were some quite significant strategic people, things that needed doing in the organization. So I quickly reconstructed my director and, um, the capability construct to be able to bring in a higher degree of organizational development, skill and experience than what the organization had previously had. And to be honest, I've probably got a slightly bigger OD team than most charities and almost certainly will have than, I'd say almost all charities of our size. But there were a really good reason for that. We were starting from zero on a whole range of strategically impactive activities. Capability. We were starting almost from zero culture, starting from Zero. Our approach to engagement starting from zero. Organizational design starting from zero. Those are things that need real skill sets and you can just use generalist HR people to do those things. I mean you can do. It just takes a lot more time. And I wanted to inject the right quality and capability of individuals to supplement the quality I already had to get those things moving. And so I brought in a director of OD who I'd worked with previously. That individual came from a number of years ago, came from marketing, so wasn't a HR person into od. And I've got her and another person who worked for me at the time to thank for creating that situation. And she's probably amongst the most accomplished OD people I've ever come across. And I'm from an OD background myself. And so she then worked with me to build a team of individuals and we've got some fantastic people in that team that would easily translate to other sectors. I think the benefit of the charity sector is you've got the sales pitch of look, we're adding actual physical value to people. We're not just making very rich people a tiny bit richer, which I have done in the past. But the offset to that is it's a lot harder work in the charity sector than you'd think coming out of the commercial world. And you've a lot less of the levers. So you don't. So can we explore some of that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'd have to explore some of that. With you around your breadth of IT experience, what do you call out then as some of the core differences, Good, bad, indifferent between working in a corporate shareholder type environment to working in more the charity sector, trustees, the different kind of cultures. What kind of things do you experience as CPO that kind of stand out to you as different?

Speaker A: So I think there's a couple of things. I think the construct is different. So working with a trustee board is different to a non executive board for a whole range of reasons, but not least that, uh, trustees are voluntary. Despite that they're voluntary, they actually hold more personal responsibility on exec directors, which is an unusual idea from my perspective, but that's the case. But they're generally speaking they're there because they really believe in the purpose. They may have a portfolio career, but they are specifically there for the purpose. And so they're really often emotionally tied into what that organization is doing. And that can be great and fantastic and really supportive. As an executive, if the trustee is a recent executive and uh, maybe the organization is not performing as well, as it might do, that can mean people on that board can push down into the executive space much more than you might see commonly in non executives on, particularly on PLC boards. So that, that can be challenging. It requires quite a lot of management. And I'm not saying PLC enlisted businesses don't require effort to manage the kind of boards. I'm not saying that all because they do, because I've had that experience as well in the past. But it's quite a different dynamic and it can require more effort, uh, to keep that moving in the direction that you wanted to manage that as an executive, particularly for the CEO and in my experience for the CPO as well as for the cfo. So that's, that could be quite different. There's a commercial difference and it's not as obvious as you'd think. So uh, I think there's a, for loads of good reasons, there's a greater commercial understanding across colleague sets in commercial organizations than there is in charity organizations. But I think that goes up and down the organization and it's trickier to manage in some context. So uh, in the sense that uh, if you sat in a commercial environment and you are producing a service or a product that is hitting a limited number of people and for you it's not profitable, you just come out of that place, you don't provide that service, you don't provide that product, if there is still some demand, a smaller organization might meet that demand. In the charity sector it's more complicated. So uh, if we are providing a service that's even for, for 10 blind and partially sighted people and we remove that service, it may be that no one replaces that service and 10 blind and partially sighted people don't get something they might critically need. So uh, making commercial decisions is trickier than it has been for me of different commercial businesses. And then I think you've got some practical things that can provide real value but need a lot more thinking. So for example, we've got a much higher distribution of protected characteristics in our organization than the average commercial business. And there are some great things about that. You get a much higher degree of diversity of thinking. And so that's fantastic, generates ideas and creativity, but it does require thinking. How you manage transformation requires a lot more thinking. When you're having to look at uh, accessibility and a whole range of other dimensions, you necessarily put the same level of thinking in. If you've got a lot lower distribution of protected characteristics, it's just quite a different environment to work in. And when you've never Worked in the charity sector before. That's. That takes mind blowing. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: I remember talking to one of your colleagues about this is quite a small, much lower level of detail. But I was talking to one of your colleagues about the purchase of a new technology. I think it was an uh, engagement survey type technology. And it just never occurred to me that the kind of list of requirements you would have given that most of your organization or a lot of your organization is dealing with blinded, partially sighted people. But also all those other characteristics that you would have to have that on a very tight shortlist of kind of expectations of that technology. You can't just buy one off the shelf and say that'll do. You've got to really think about what the technology can do to accommodate all those different needs you might have in your organization. And it just, of course it's obvious you go, of course, but you don't think about it. And I guess uh, at micro level that's the kind of thing you've got to think about. A macro level there's probably much, much more. Yeah.

Speaker A: And some of those things like practically are quite tricky conversations in the organization. So for example you might need a specific set of technology but actually there is no purely accessible technology in that space. What do you do? Question. So these are some of the kind of tricky conversations you have to have because if we want something that is completely accessible, then we can't have anything. We're going to need to do that manually or we accept something that we are going to have to put separate measures in place for certain parts of our organization to be able to get that technology in place. So there are some decisions that end up uh, at uh, a much higher level than you would expect in charity organizations because there are some things that just are naturally really complex.

Speaker B: Yeah, we're coming close to time. But I'm just really interested to know again that sort of the senior leadership board level positions, what they want from you as a CPO in a charity organization. So what are some of their sort of key expectations of the CPO role?

Speaker A: I think the final point in there, just bringing that together is that I do think the demand for chief people officers in the charity sector is increasing. I think the value of the chief people officer role is being increasingly understood by boards and executives. I think the sector as a whole, and I've had multiple exec search agents talking to me about this in the last six months, more exec search organizations are coming into the sector and some of that is about volatility of the of the market. But the charity sector is moving much more quickly than it has done before for all of the reasons that I talked about in terms of the context it finds itself in. And I think the CPO role and getting that person into the CPO role. That's right. That's got the right capabilities, the right experience, I think is really crucial. And I don't see that changing over the next few years. And from my personal perspective, I'd highly recommend working in the charity sector. Uh, you may well not get paid. Paid what you might have got paid in FS or some of those other organizations, but having come from Global Tech and then before that fs, it's definitely a fascinating place to work. And I've learned a lot being here. It's been fab, I think, as well.

Speaker B: The bit that's interesting you described, I mean, I could talk to you for hours. Sean, we're probably gonna have to pause in a second, but you described your agenda being quite heavily around, uh, transformation and R and D of your organization in design, development, effectiveness. Just talk to us briefly a little bit about that. How does that kind of sit with you? What is the role that you're playing in that space?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I think it's not uncommon, maybe not overly common, but not uncommon that a CPO will own transformation. Certain individuals have got quite a lot of experience of transforming organizations. I think that probably the unusual bit that I've had sat with me here, and there are a whole range of internal reasons for this is the R and D piece. So I've looked after, uh, a kind of program of activity that we've got going on that's about what does the future of RNIB look like? So understanding what we think are the possible scenarios for the future of the charity sector and the future of the world for blind and partially sighted people. And then what might that mean in terms of the types of choices we might have to make? So I work really closely with the previous CEO, uh, and the current CEO on what that might look like, and it reported into me through the transformation director. And honestly, that's been fascinating. It's not something that I've worked. Worked on heavily previously. As I said, I'm not from the charity sector, uh, but I think the organization, particularly the board and the CEO, uh, developed a sense of. Kind of faith in me in terms of what I'd done when I landed with the organization, with the people directorate, and some of those things that are more naturally sat with cpo, uh, and as a consequence, when an Opportunity came, I was able to slightly broaden out my portfolio and some of which is probably more in the COO space than the CPO space from my perspective. Fantastically interesting and great for our development.

Speaker B: And again, it's really interesting because we're seeing it more and more and certainly on this podcast we are seeing who are, um, I'm going to say bolting on an extra. No one else describes it like that if they're doing the role, but that's just my trying to describe it visually and a lot of that is around. So we see transformation coming in. We see comms, external internal comms coming in. We see customer experience. So we're seeing lots of role. Isn't traditionally now just I lead the people function? And I think on the very first podcast we did, somebody said, I see the CPO as a leader of an enterprise first and the function second. And I think that's where the trend is going. More is your skin in the game is in. Sorry, the CPO skin in the game is in leading the business, driving the business forward. And there's a people specialism to that. But it's not only that kind of narrow pillar of I do people process or people technology, whatever. It's much broader to I've got a piece of the business I can really contribute to. So we see much more of that kind of activity coming. Coming in.

Speaker A: Yeah, 100. In certain sectors as well, you see slightly different things. So I owned up until recently, I own safeguarding, which is something that, unless you're from the charity sector or specific organizations, you weren't before. I've not owned it before. The fact that I work for the police, I've got an understanding of safeguarding, but I've not owned it as a function. I've got legal currently, which is quite unusual. I've got internal comms. So I've managed internal comms for the last. About last year, I think maybe 18 months. That wasn't with me initially. Eight was sat with external comms together. We split them out because my view was that I needed to earn the kind of building of the narrative to be able to underpin the culture journey as well as the transformation journey. So I think there are different functions that move in and out of your responsibility dependent on what the organization needs. And I think, yeah, I agree completely with the person who said you're an enterprise leader first and then you're a functional leader second. Completely agree with that. That's always been my approach to life. But I think there's more feels like more of that, uh, now.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Than perhaps there was in the past. And that's purely my own view. I could be completely.

Speaker B: It leads me to my closing question which is what do you think the future is of the cpo? We often land on a kind of AI question, but I'm just. Aside from AI, just have a different topic of conversation. What do you think is the future of the CPO role? How do you think it will evolve? Evolved?

Speaker A: Yeah. That's a tricky question, isn't it? I think the future of any role is quite difficult to answer, uh, at the moment with the kind of influence of AI as you've described. I think markets are more volatile, investments different to what it has been a number of years ago that we've got leaders in some of the kind of world powers that have increased the level of volatility of working in most sectors now. So I think executive roles are not going to get any easier. And let's be frank, they're not exactly straightforward. Now I think for CPOs there's going to be much more of the kind of strategic activity is going to become increasingly important. I think it already is. Right. And in some organizations it's different to others. But I think the requirement for a CPO fundamentally understands how to change a business model. Who understands the interaction between the purpose, the strategy, the operating model, the organizational design, culture. All of those kind of strategic elements I think is really going to be where the money goes and the kind of focus goes in terms of the types of individuals that will get the kind of bigger, uh, best CPO roles. Doubt that's going to change because I think organizations are having to operate in more and more volatile environments and that makes investment trickier. Uh, it makes strategic decision making trickier. Uh, so I think for all execs it's going to be, be. You can look at it two ways. More hard work, more entertaining. Yeah, depends on your view of life, right?

Speaker B: I said non entertaining. It feels brighter.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think more entertaining from my perspective. Like all the jobs I've done have been really cool, really interesting and I've got to do some fantastic stuff and been paid a decent amount. I can't really moan about it, but I think it is going to get more complex. I uh, think it's probably the easiest way of describing it.

Speaker B: Yeah, this is great, Sean, thank you so much. I've loved this conversation. It's been really interesting and again it's just interesting for us to hear some of the differences, but also those commonalities between your sector and some of the other sectors that we speak to. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Speaker A: Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Mhm.