You CAN Teach an Old Dog New Tricks with Steve Roberts [Barclays Bank]
+ Notes
Katz explains how changing the visualise the dynamics inside your company will accelerate your journey along the road to successful transformation. Her guest this week is Steven Roberts who is the Head of Culture and Chief Scientific Advisor of Barclays Bank. He shares stories of how he succeeded in driving transformation inside Barclays, a 330 year old behemoth of a company. He will take you on an emergent, organic journey of trial, error, tears and unexpected partnerships. He’ll explain how a bank somehow became the largest retail distributor of wifi in Europe and much, much more.
+ Transcript
Welcome to humans leading humans towards a future of work that works for people. A smorgasbord of snackable stories that will help you be more effective leader.
My guest this week is frankly inspiring Stephen Roberts, who is the head of culture and the Chief Scientific Advisor at Barclays Bank. We had a quick chat earlier so I've got some ideas of the stories that he's chosen to share : of how he's managed to drive transformation inside Barclays which is a 330 year old behemoth of a company. So he's going to tell some stories about trial and error and unexpected partnerships, and sometimes tears. He'll explain how a bank somehow became the largest retail distributor of Wi Fi in Europe.
But first let me explain why you should dedicate 20 minutes of your precious time to listen to this podcast every week. Do you work inside a complex organisation, whether that be private or public do you lead teams or are you charged with making change stick. Do you sometimes feel that you're wasting your time, that it is impossible to succeed within the politics and complexity of your organisation. Bring on humans leading humans. This is your audio fuel kit, packed with the stories and the tools and inspiration that we all need to lead. It's for those times when you just need to be re energised, you need to be inspired, you need to believe that you can succeed because here's the thing; leaders across the world have succeeded. They have proved that you can teach an old dog new tricks. And they've seen the impact. So I'm on a quest to collect those stories, to give you the courage and the know how to lead more human. In the coming weeks, I'm going to be talking to Vint Cerf, the chap who invented the internet and to the Chief Culture Officer of Burning Man. I am loving this journey, and I hope you do too.
Before we listen to Steven stories, I would like to share a narrative that helps me, and the humans in the companies we work with, to reframe the reality of how companies really work. Heres the thing, your organisation, would be more successful, if it acted more like an octopus than a printing press. What on earth is she talking about you're thinking? Well, I imagine that right now you may be thinking of your company as if it's a machine. Most of the companies that we work with at beep, are all about the machine thinking, when we start working with. You know the the blueprints and the separate departments and every part having its own totally specific and separate jobs to do. Leaders believing, you can switch, one thing out and replace it with another, and that the whole system will continue to work as if nothing's happened. The thing about a machine is that it's designed to do one thing, over and over and over and over again until that thing is no longer needed. Then the machine becomes redundant. Just imagine how much better it would be if you can imagine your company or your organisation like an octopus. So just close your eyes and imagine how those incredibly agile, adaptable creatures work. Every single cell works together to continuously adapt to its environment. If an object or a predator is near the whole system works together to kick it into hyperspeed so it can escape. If the temperature changes it senses the change, and it moves to somewhere more comfortable. If it's in an environment with different colours, it changes it’s colours to fit in to the environment. It’s brain is distributed all over its body. Everything is connected in an always on system of sensing and continuous amends across all those feedback loops. If its tries something new works it'll try again and again until it becomes a new behaviour. It's part of a complex system is cut out every other polyp suffers. If a foreign body enters an organism every single cell works together to get rid of that body. We all know about corporate antibodies right?!
The entire system of an octopus is geared towards one thing and one thing only ; adaptation to survive. Now, the world is changing really, really fast. We all know that, and your company has to change to keep up. We all know that to. And to be more octopus. You need to change the way that you do things.
But according to behavioural science, humans are hardwired to resist change. We will do anything to hold on to the status quo. The good thing is there are core tenets to cultures where humans are most receptive to change. So to make those tenets easy I've collected 20 years of experience and pain and learning and science into the CREATE framework.
So my company beep supports all sorts of old dogs through the pain of cultural and operational transformation by helping them create emergent, agile cultures to evolve to being somewhere closer to octopus. And we've seen that the best, most effective leaders watch how customers are behaving, they look at the environment, they spot opportunities for improvement. They see what's working, what isn't and they adapt their thinking and doing according to what they experience. Carol talked about this a lot in last week's episode and Jim the week before. And enough of all this, think more like an octopus. And I can't wait to hear what Stevens chooses to say
Before we hear from Steven, I just like to share a couple of the stories that I heard in last week's humans leading humans clubhouse room. So the first one is from a woman called Malin who leads the people centered internet. She talked about her experience right, right at the beginning of Singapore's transformation. The people needed housing. A big housing problem called for big response. So the big companies swooped in and proposed a simple solution. All you need to do is to borrow millions of dollars from the World Bank, and pay us. We'll fix it for you. So, the Singaporeans were not terribly pleased with said proposed solution ; that the big boys would earn loads of money, and the people who lived there would have housing but no job and no way of earning money. So they did something really smart. They said, how about you give us the big engineering plans, and we'll break it up into small chunks so that our own mom and pop companies can win those contracts. Her point was, we spend a lot of time thinking about the complex macro challenges -in this case let's do housing. We don't think enough about how we can break that mammoth task down into achievable chunks, and let small teams really own them, which works. So long as everyone has that big picture, the big plan, front and centre mind.
So the second story is from an amazing man who I've known for years called John Bains, and he talked about the power of one of the “E”s from the CREATE framework. So he used to run a digital agency and when the.com Bubble hit, and the cash flow put the company into Stranglehold him and his board did something very unexpected, but very smart. He knew how important equity is by which I mean everyone across the company abiding by the same rules. So, before the Board did anything in crisis, they stopped paying themselves. Then they gave their employees choices, they could keep going as they were, they could go freelance, they could take a voluntary pay cut. They all understood what they needed to do was to extend the window to win work and get the wheels back on the bus. And guess what. everybody did something. Because they really felt they were in it together. Those leaders were utterly honest utterly transparent. They offered choice. By building trust. They build a community. And they won work, and they've got back on track. And when the business started earning money again they rewarded their teams with big bonuses. Not surprisingly, no one was leaving that company in hurry. That dear listeners, is the power of having skin in the game. Do what I say and not what I do style of leadership, just does not work.
If you have a story to share about what good leadership really looks like and feels like. Please DM me on Twitter. That's @beepmindshift or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Katz Kiely, obviously.
So Steve, you are the third person that I've had the honor of interviewing. As you know, what I've done is I've sent you the CREATE framework. The first time that I came across Steve, who is the head of culture and Chief Scientific Adviser for Barclays was at a big transformation program that we were running for a global pharmaceutical company doesn't matter which one. He was on stage with this amazing woman called Emma who used to work at freeformers and I was really struck by how human, you are. Which is why you're here. So Steve, tell us a little bit about how you ended up doing all of the absolutely amazing things that you've done at Barclays, over the last few years.
STEVE: First of all is very kind. Lovely to be on something called Humans Leading Humans. Because I think people are what makes a business, a little bit about me so I have four kids, and I'm married, and my career background is I did a degree and PhD at Cambridge in geophysics, and set up a startup that didn't quite work out the way I wanted so I joined the bank on its graduate program 30 odd years ago. I’ve been here ever since I've been very lucky to have a whole range of jobs in different parts of the bank from the investment business to the operational side. Up until about eight or nine years ago I was a traditional banker I was the Chief Operating Officer for the bank in the UK. And along came a new Chief Executive Ashok Vaswani. He asked me to stop doing that and help him with digital transformation, A job that neither of us knew what we were doing to start with, but learned how to do things differently. And I think that's where we've learned the most. Certainly the most fun bit of my career and continues to be so. So I'm very happy to talk to anyone about our experiences, because I think there are lots for everyone to learn from.
KATZ: So it's so many things today and so you know just to let the people who are listening to this know, I've already had a chat with Steve and we've talked through the three stories he's about to share and oh my god. It doesn't really matter whether you're in government, or whether you're in a big corporate or you're working for pharmaceutical companies rhe things that Steve is about to share are kind of counterintuitive. They’re exactly the kind of stories that you need. We all need to believe that change is possible, and how it can be. So Steve, gone, tell us story, number one,
STEVE: I’m going to tell you first about digital eagles and in all of these stories they weren't done to a plan. A lot of it was through trial and error and some parts accidental but what's consistent all them is to keep learning and keep reflecting on what's happened and seeing how you can improve things. So that wasn't that we're especially clever, it's just we're quite good at learning stuff. So when digitally eagles, we wanted to do digital translation, and we thought we would do that in a typical bank way spending money which was to put free wifi into all our branches. And we were the first enterprise purchaser of iPads in the world we bought 20,000 iPad 1. Back in the day to show to staff that we were serious about digital transformation, by giving them some equipment that we wanted them to use in a very different way to traditional bank to get equipment. We left, almost everything working as it should on an iPad and encourage the colleagues to take them home and to use all of the facilities within them, and on the Wi Fi side the very unexpected consequence was putting the free Wi Fi in - which had a business reason, which was to enable us to help customers download mobile banking while they were with us because that showed. We proved that was much more effective than giving them a piece of paper and tried to do it at home.
KATZ: I think I’m going to stop you for a second because this is a really important point. What you did, and actually Lord Jim Knight, who was the first person I interviewed for this podcast, put a challenge out there. If you're working for a bank, and you're a senior leader, figure out what people are actually doing and make sure that you're working with that. So what you've just said is that people were coming in, you were giving them a piece of paper, and they were going out and chucking that piece of paper away. You saw that customer behaviour and realized that was never gonna work. So you made this incredible decision and gave free Wi Fi to everyone.
STEVEN: An interesting consequence of that was within six months we'd become the largest distributor of Wi Fi in a retail environment in the whole of Europe. We were only overtaken in that by ZARA are just because they had loads more shops than us. But what was even more interesting was on social media, we picked up how kids were arranging to meet in our bank branches. So for the first time in our history, we've got people wanting to come into our buildings. Not because they had to, because no one wants to come into a bank. People wanted to be in our buildings, and people were even moving offices to use the free WiFi. Nutty stuff
KATZ: …and you kind of looked at that as many people would have and said : “This is our Wi Fi!”
STEVEN: you look at who's taking the Wi Fi. I remember there was some guy in a little branch in Plymouth, which had the largest downloads that anywhere in the country. And we realised it was a shop across the road that was downloading videos. Anyway, I diverge. The other thing with the iPads that led to the digital Eagles was we've made this purchase of iPads. The interesting thing was that the colleagues didn't use them all applications didn't use them as expected the youngsters loved them, but anyone over 30 typically just used to like carrying them around. Or if you're a man and 50 didn't even bother taking them out of the box. And when we asked the colleagues so why aren't you using these things that we've spent all this money: I was a big deal having an iPad 1 when it first came out. The colleagues would say; “I’m worried about breaking them” and “I'm embarrassed to ask for help” The insight at that point, based on our own personal lives we're seeing how older people don't learn about technology from the next generation. Because the two of them wind each other up. If any of you have ever tried to get your parents to use an iPhone or tablet or whatever. But grandchildren will spend all the time in the world with grandparents, because children don't often get asked by an adult, to show them how to do something, but they do with technology. Grandparents typically love talking to grandchildren. And so we just decided in desperation more than anything, why wouldn't we try that experiment within the organisation, using the equivalent to the grandchildren so the youngsters who were enthusiastic and technically savvy to educate the rest of the organisation.
Thats what we did. We asked for 20 volunteers for six months secondments. 300 people applied, and we chose 20 of them : 10 women 10 men. Very junior people across the whole the organisation, and we gave them some what looks like quite crappy badges now, that said digitally eagle on and some QR codes, and off they went. We said to them: We think you're going to find in every branch that you visit as we mapped out how each one of them would be able to go around all 1700 branches in six months at least once. “You're going to find somebody just like you. And if you find someone like you, that might be like a teller or personal banker, ask them if they'd like to be a digital eagle and we'll give you a badge. And within two months with 3000 volunteers.
KATZ: Such a beautiful story and actually shows the power of reward and recognition, even something as tiny as having a badge to show you’re part of a community is so powerful. Your trusted these guys, some of the newest entrance to your bank, 10 Boys 10 girls, to go out there and be your change agents. How extraordinary
STEVEN : We're just putting together a compilation of the all of the various videos and adverts that were produced over the last eight years and they make you cry. I remember when we first did a video that we've made of the digital Eagles teaching each poor chap who's died now B was a pensioner in North Shields, how to get online so he could escape with his great nephew in Australia who we'd never met. And this chap was just a natural, comedian, but they're absolutely beautiful and I remember when we showed them to the, to hundreds, most senior people in the UK bank, and there were bankers crying. I never seen that before. And you knew that you've captured something that was really emotionally important and played that what the organisation's about in a very powerful way. So that's a lovely thing. If people are interested they can probably find those.
KATZ: It's really strange isn't it in corporate environments. and I work with a lot of them, people, somehow lose their humanity. Being able to trigger that and allows know who they are
STEVEN: A key, key thing with that, I'll just jump to the second example which Eagle laps. During the course of doing digital eagles, we ended up coming into contact with some amazing organisations that approached us or passed on our names to other people, as we started running a lot of digital education programs in the community. So, the digital eagles became something that moved way beyond just helping colleagues to become digitally savvy, but they did hundreds of 1000s of hours, outreach into the community.
During the course of those, all these lovely organisations like raspberry pi and CoderDojo that we ended up doing work with. We came across a fabulous organisation called Fab Lab, which is something that comes out of MIT or came out of MIT about 15 years ago which is connected to the maker movement
A chap wrote to me one day and said, Would you like to come and see my Fab Lab. So I went and saw this place and I thought this is amazing. We're full of 3d printers and laser cutters and it was like a techie man shed. We'd been thinking within the bank about where was technology going to go next, and I’d met with Raspberry Pi, who were a Barclays customer it turned out. And I thought this is what we should be getting into. So I persuaded the bank to let me have the upstairs of the branch at Cambridge. That would become our First Eagle Lab. It opened on the fourth of December, 2016, if I remember the Duke of York came to open it because he happened to be in Cambridge
KATZ : How old is Barclays
STEVEN: 330 years.
KATZ: Oh my goodness me okay so you're in a fairly significantly old traditional organisation. You’ve just done this beautiful program where you've empowered all these young people to bring the excitement and the community around digital transformation. And now, you have somehow managing to persuade the bank to get behind bringing Fab Lab, which is an MIT maker movement organisation into the bank. How did you do that?
STEVEN: Well, that's where you start immersing your peers and the other people into that environment,. You realize there's an awful lot of hidden engineers doing ordinary jobs in banks and things. Tthe enthusiasm of that environment and the people in it. Also because, in places like Cambridge, there are some very influential and wealthy people who were in the maker movement. So you mix all of those people up and you get the people together and people will be willing to say: “well you can have a little bit of money to experiment" We quickly moved from just being a maker lab into, we started renting desk space. And then we started realising that we could acquire customers from these Eagle labs. And then we realised that some of the eagle apps were becoming specialist in particular industry sectors. And so we thought, why wouldn't we focus on specific industry sectors like law tech. So we run the largest law tech incubator in the UK, probably in Europe. We now have an Eagle Lab Farm with the University of Lincoln. We also realised the power of collaborating with universities and city councils. So in Southampton, we run an Eagle Lab with the City Council for the sellout and conurbation this specialises in marine tech. That was a difficult journey convincing the organisation to embrace Labs and probably took about 18 months. And if I was to plot one of the key journeys, just going back to the original point about getting emotional contact; One of the early things that brightened Eagle lap did, when there were only three labs is: there's a charity that 3d prints prosthetics for children. There's a limb acknowledges in one in 10,000 children, and to get a prosthetic is typically a six month waiting list and costs I don't know £10,000. Whereas you can 3d print a prosthetic overnight for 70p. And so, the charity that runs this offers the measurements of choice and then people with 3d printers print them off. And we did that, but we did it for a little girl called Riley, who was the daughter of a manager in Brighton Barclays Bank Manager. And we filmed the whole process of her coming in to be measured. You can see that on YouTube if you just Google, and it's a beautiful video, it must be now five or six years old. But that happened to get distributed an early version, the CEO of the bank at the dinner that I was at.
All of a sudden, people got Eagle labs at a completely different level. And it's been very interesting that people that we have to the laps. Prince Charles along and lots of government ministers, and it's because we're showing we can do something that's useful for the community that's different, because we're bringing people together in a way that the origin of a lot of the banks like us and Lloyds were running coffee shops in the city of London, where we were good places for people to convene together, and that's what the labs have become. But they’ve become something that we didn't start them off to be. We just had an idea that we kept learning and twisting and adapting within the financial and commercial constraints, but to keep listening to customers all the time.
KATZ : And I think that something that you said that really touched me and is very aligned with the way that I believe the world works and the way that most corporates don't is, you can tell anybody as many statistic arguments for why they should do something, but you show them a story, It makes them feel something, you communicate with them, get the message from here into there and suddenly they're going: “oh yeah, we really want to do that. Now I can feel it, yes of course we want to do that.” So I love that Steven. Third Story
STEVEN: I used to go in. Probably four days a week for Canary Wharf and one day a week out visiting various branches and places around the country in my new role. And when the pandemic started, I ended up helping out at Brixton Barclays branch because so many people were ill, and it was somewhere near to where I lived, so I thought I'd help out. And then helping out in Wimbledon branch. I have ended up staying here ever since. And the reason I'm staying here isn't, because I'm serving customers downstairs because I'd be a bit useless at that, as I quickly realised, but it's how I help the colleagues in the branch, and how they helped me telling me about all the things that they're bothered about and things that aren't working for the customer. At the same time I was having this duality where I'm joining all of these calls, where people are presenting PowerPoint presentations on proposals for how things for describing how things are working. And I'm sitting in a place where those things are happening in real life, and the twodon't match. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they sort of do. And sometimes they don't at all. And being able then to take the voice direct from the colleague, or the customer and translate that into actions, has been an amazing thing. And so we're going to leverage my experience to the frontline colleagues, and the customer, inspired in part by the fabulous John Timpson who we've been working with he's a non Executive Director of the bank, and his work. But a lot through the personal experience I've had been close to the colleagues who were fantastic. That's my third story. Because I think we've run out of time.
KATZ: I'm running out of time, and all I can say is, there is something really powerful and shareable in every single story you’ve shared. So two last things before we leave each other. First one is if you had one piece of advice to give to the people who are listening about how you've managed to drive such extraordinary change in a very old organisation, what would that be.
STEVEN: My God, I don't think there is one piece. I was gonna say go visit an Eagle Lab. A lot of people don't get it, and think I'm bullshitting, that the reality is different. But you have to go and see for yourself. It is probably the thing I'm most proud, not for me but for the colleagues., A lot of the people who work in them, did work in branches and did work in the ordinary bank. And when you see them, and they say; “this is the best job I've ever had in my life” you want to cry. When you think why can't everybody have this?.
KATZ: I love that. And because actually people don't learn by hearing. They learn by experiencing. Then you can't argue, can you because you're here, you're feeling. I hope that you enjoyed that as much as I did, but I fiercely believe that everything can be better. Always. So I actively would like your suggestions for improvements. What can I do better? What do you want more of? Who do you think deserves to join our list of imaginal guests?
So if you've got any suggestions or comments or of course, a story that will inspire listeners in next week's episode please DM us on @beepmindshift or reach out to me on LinkedIn, you can find me under Katz Kiely
So next week, I'm going to be talking to the phenomenal Isabel Naidoo who heads up, inclusion and talent at FIS global and his delivery the physical manifestation of an imaginal leader. FIS global has 55,000 employees in countries across the world. I've had the joy of working with her and her amazing team, and they are living proof that leaders who CREATE culture can absolutely drive change in even the most complex organisations. I happen to know she has a lot of stories to tell and I can't wait to see which ones she'll choose.
You have been listening to humans leading humans towards a future of work that works for people. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with a marketing society, and PS. If you're a senior leader, and you need the know how, and the network to succeed. If you're not already a member, you should totally become part of that tribe. I'll put the link to their website in the notes A massive thanks to SuperTerranea for the magical sting of staying, go to www.wearebeep.com to find out more about the CREATE framework and how we support companies by unlocking the problem solving potential of humans. Thanks so much for joining me again.
See you next week, Be inspired Be imaginal Be more human.
Be inspired. Be Imaginal. Be more Human.
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