“And what do you do?…”

What is your reply when you get asked the cliched dinner party question “What do you do?”. Do you talk in general terms? “I am in finance” – worried that you will be judged. Or do you mention your job title? “I am senior vice president of [insert very important dept name]” hoping to impress. Although most of us hate the question the truth is that work defines us, it is part of our identity. Maybe there is a more thoughtful way of thinking about our jobs. Interestingly research tells us that people who are happier at work have a different response to the question.

People are happier when they define themselves not by industry or title but by how their work has a positive impact on others whether it be customers, fellow employees, suppliers, communities or even future generations. It is easier for employees to take this approach when they work for companies that also define themselves in terms of how they improve lives. Purpose is a strong motivator.

Yet most companies struggle to get it right. They understand that employee experience is important, not to help with progressing company purpose but because, as we were all taught at business school, happy employees make customers happy and happy customers make shareholders happy. Leaders tend to focus on the extrinsic motivators such as pay and perks. However these are table stakes.

As the late great Clayton Christensen points out in his book “How to Measure Your Life” being a leader is a noble profession and it comes with great responsibility. Just as leaders of construction companies need to ensure the physical safety of their workers by providing helmets and hi-viz jackets, leaders of all companies are responsible for the mental wellbeing of their people. If your people dread coming to work and have that sinking Sunday evening feeling you are shirking your responsibility.

Meaningful work is the most important factor in enhancing employee wellbeing. To unlock the passion of your people you need the power of purpose (eat that Peter Piper). I will be writing about what it takes in future posts so if you would like to receive my pearls of wisdom in your inbox enter your email here.

Being Data Driven

One swallow does not make a summer (a fact that I have found to be oh so true since relocating to Edinburgh!) nor does one pie-chart in a powerpoint make you a data driven company. When I became Chief Data Officer at DBS in 2016, I was tasked with making DBS “data driven”. How hard could it be? We had several successful transformations under our belts and surely this one would be just a rinse and repeat. As it turned out it took me three years simply to figure out what a data driven company actually was and then getting to be one was the biggest challenge we had ever faced.

Prior to 2016 we had been operating as a “powerpoint driven” company where decisions were taken in meetings by the most senior person in the room based on the content of a slide deck. So when I took on the role I asked many leaders within and outside DBS what they considered a data driven company to be. I was told that data was the new oil or water or even blood. People referenced TV shows and movies – Minority Report anyone? Every software vendor claimed that Artificial Intelligence was embedded in their products – data was clearly becoming the new snake oil. Of course as soon as we announced our intent to be data driven there were claims that we were already data masters – “We are a bank – we use numbers all the time”, “Look at the pie chart in my powerpoint”. We knew we had to do some heavy lifting in terms of addressing data quality, bringing all the bank’s data into a new tech data platform, investing massively in training and attracting the best talent. However we did not have a clear view of what the end state looked like.

Three years down the line it felt like we were in good shape – most of our data was of high quality, referenced with metadata and residing in a leading edge data platform. We had trained huge amounts of people and attracted some great talent. Because we adopted our tried and tested approach of encouraging people to just dive in and have a go, we had over 100 projects underway and were starting to deliver real benefits. However what we really had was just a bunch of projects. We were not running the company day to day using data. Powerpoints still ruled the roost.

Then the epiphany came. We were inspired by the evolution of data use in Formula 1 Motor Racing. Over the past few decades the sport had gone from using signboards at the side of the track to sophisticated instrumentation on the cars that transmit huge amounts of data during the race to allow the pit-wall crew to make real time adjustments to strategy. In between races experimentation and data analysis’s results in continuous incremental improvement. We asked ourselves what would it take to run our business this way.

We realised that to be data driven we needed to completely re-imagine how to run the company. Despite the progress we had made, this final step was going to be the largest and toughest. We needed a new approach so we developed the following 5 steps:

Be ultra specific about what constitutes success of the business. What is the exact outcome measure that needs to optimised. In F1 it is obvious: “Did you win the race?”. In business it can be less clear. Through discussions on outcome measures we highlighted some mis-alignments in our strategies that we were able to iron out.
Identify 3-5 drivers that have the biggest impact on the outcome. I am no expert but I would imagine winning a F1 race is impacted by engine performance, tyre strategy, driver capability, pit stop timings etc. In business there can be a tendency to analyse the outcome – in review meetings leaders tend to drill down on revenues by geography or product rather than focus on what they can influence i.e. the drivers. Furthermore there is scant thinking about the relationship between the drivers and the outcome. If training improves the performance of a sales team, what kind of training works best and by how much? A data driven company seeks to continually improve their understanding of the causal relationships between drivers and outcomes.
Identify opportunities to apply machine learning to improve the drivers’ impact on outcome. Machine learning can beat humans in predicting outcomes given the right data. Therefore developing models that take some of the guesswork out of people’s job makes sense. Who is the best customer to call next? Does this transaction look suspicious?
Relentlessly experiment to test hypotheses. In order to continually optimise, previously held beliefs need to be challenged. A data driven company is an experiment machine and focuses on accelerating the speed of learning by investing in experimentation infrastructure, processes and training. Which leads to the big one….
Change the leadership culture to start asking questions rather than giving answers. The big tech companies who excelled in an experimentation-led approach consistently told us that only 1 in 20 hypotheses are proven to be correct and therefore leaders should expect to be wrong. A HIPPO culture where the HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion always wins results in learning opportunities being blocked. We therefore encouraged leaders to ask 2 questions of their teams. “What experiments are you running next?” and “What did you learn from the last set of experiments?”. Oh and this helps create a culture of psychological safety – an essential ingredient for innovation.

Leadership Lessons

Spend an inordinate amount of time aligning leadership understanding of what is meant by “being data driven”.

Focus on improving drivers and not acting directly on outcomes.

Expect to be wrong and therefore focus on test hypotheses through experimentation.

Becoming data driven is a culture shift more than an investment in technology, process and data scientists.

The essential ingredient for a successful transformation

Do your leaders expect their already over-stretched workforces to implement change whilst striving to meet their near term business goals? If so, it is unrealistic. It sets up transformation for failure. Leaders must make sure they set up and support a dedicated team of transformation specialists whose day job is to convert the company’s vision into an executable program of work and support businesses in implementing the change.

At DBS CEO, Piyush Gupta described the transformation team as his secret weapon. He realised he needed a small team of people who had built up a capability in transformation to define executable programs of transformation, align the leaders, train the people and support the businesses in implementing new concepts. This was my team’s role and we became pretty good at it simply because we built up over a decade of experience. Many companies see such centralised resources as an overhead. However such a team is essential and if supported by leadership will pay for itself many times over. Having a transformation team avoids the need to pick up the phone to a favourite and expensive management consultancy every time transformation work is required. It builds corporate capability to allow new ideas to be adapted to suit the context. It helps provides a sounding board to the executive team as they evolve vision and strategy, it acts as an independent assessment of progress and most importantly provides the necessary resource to work along side business teams as the change is implemented.

I set up DBS’s transformation team up shortly after I joined DBS in 2009. Initially the “team” was myself and one other person I had hired from my previous company. The two of us ran process improvement events or PIEs, but when Piyush Gupta joined and saw what we were doing, he got right behind the team and we grew the team to around 40 people (DBS was around 25,000 employees at the time). We chose people from a variety of backgrounds avoiding traditional bankers. We looked for people who had the courage to stand in the front of a room and get people excited by change. People who could create psychologically safe environments and unlock passion. As we became more successful we started to attract amazing talent from around the world as well as some of the best talent from within the company. Over the 12 years I ran the team, we designed and executed roughly 10 bank-wide transformation programs that collectively delivered DBS’s renowned transformation. If there had been no team there would not have been the success.

Internally there were inevitable pressures from businesses. Although we did not charge out the team’s time there were the inevitable comments from businesses about the value of a central team. However when we adopted an approach of supporting the willing volunteers the most, those businesses that were most enthusiastic about the change got the most “free” help and the laggards got the least. This created a very healthy tension. Piyush never swayed from his support. Once we agreed the approach he actively challenged business and support functions to embrace the change.

Leadership Lessons

To be successful in your transformation you need to provide bandwidth within the company
A central team creates capability, context and capacity
Ongoing executive support for the transformation team is essential