I recently spent three days work-shadowing a Chief Operating Officer at Natwest Group. The idea came from our trustees, with the aim of giving me experience in a very different workplace to Learning with Parents (which is the only place other than schools that I have worked in).
I went into Natwest with three objectives:
- To learn from observing the behaviours of senior leaders in a large organisation
- To pick up ideas for things we could do differently at Learning with Parents
- To test the concept of work-shadowing, and consider whether it would be useful for members of the wider team
It was a hugely insightful and enjoyable experience. A big thank you to all the team at Natwest who made me feel incredibly welcome. There were too many takeaways to capture all of them, but to summarise a few:
Things I learned:
1. Make good decisions and stick by them
It was interesting to observe how different decisions were made. Some big strategic decisions had teams of people feeding into over a long period, with formal committees and processes. Others were simply made by the key person on the spot, based on their knowledge of the situation. One thing that was common was that the “why” behind the decision was always explicitly communicated and referred back to when evaluating the decision later. People were brave in their decision making, and stuck by them once they’d been made.
2. Default to transparency
Being fair and transparent was a recurring theme. In one example, a temporary travel ban was imposed and one member of the team wanted it not to apply to their team. I think I would have defaulted to having a side 1:1 with that individual to listen to and discuss their needs. The thinking at Natwest was that such an approach could lead to unfair adjustments, so instead there was an open conversation about what conditions would warrant an exception from the travel ban. This still gave the opportunity for the individual to argue their case, but did so in front of a group of peers who could then consider whether they also felt the exception should apply to them.
3. Be explicit about what you’re NOT doing
As with all organisations, they had too many things that they wanted to do and not enough time/capacity to do them all. Instead of just prioritising what they will be doing, they explicitly looked at what will be left off the list. This allowed them to explore the consequences of this inaction, so that they could put in mitigations or re-evaluate the prioritisation.
4. Structure your data
It is clearly a huge issue for large firms that their data has evolved organically over time as they acquire new businesses and expand in different ways. Even basic asks of their data become hugely complex and unreliable, and it’s going to take a lot of work to get them to a better place. We need to keep our data tidier from the off. The consequences otherwise are rather scary!
5. Be truly customer-centric
Although I believe our charity’s purpose is clearer than Natwest’s, they were impressively customer-centric. They don’t view their business through a typical lens (HR, tech, finance, sales etc), but instead through stages of the customer journey (“I want to open a bank account”, “I want to start saving”, “I want a mortgage” etc.). This meant that the typical team silos were somewhat broken down, but did risk a duplication of work across the teams. I am not sure how we could adopt something similar at such a smaller scale, but I do like the idea of thinking about all the things that feed into each stage of our beneficiaries journey with us.
6. Keep experimenting
For such a large organisation, I was impressed by how open they were to testing and learning at all levels. I observed a number of experiments, about things like running effective meetings, managing the appraisal process and nurturing talent. With 60,000 employees it is possible for Natwest to run statistically significant experiments within their own team, but I don’t think a lack of numbers should stop us trying something similar.
7. We should do more of this!
I ended the week feeling energised and keen to take my new reflections back to Learning with Parents. I am really keen that we become an organisation that supports its employees to take time to shadow others as part of their and our development. Next time I will aim to work-shadow someone in the same role as me, as it would be great to see their approach to more of the same challenges that I face in my work.
