Episode 19 | GER MITCHELL | Group HR Director, Permanent TSB

Welcome to Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Welcome to Face Forward, the Inspiring Change podcast on everything internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. I've been really lucky over the past number of years to work with some of Ireland's biggest companies, in particular the banks, with a number of years in AIB and more recently for 6 months last year with Permanent TSB. And of course, the banks in many ways are, are re-finding their feet, and some are further along than others. What's been really interesting is that when you work in them, the people are the same. They're just people that come to work every day, want to do a job, and want to do the right thing generally, which is really, really good to see. I spent 6 months with Permanent TSB last year working with them on some of their internal projects and was lucky to work with Ger Mitchell, the Group HR Director, who I'm talking to today. Ger, hi there.

Hi, Scott.

First, let's kick off. It's nice to be back on Stephen's Green. Let's kick off for the first couple of minutes just with a bit of your background, what you've done, where you've come from, and your role here today.

Okay, thank you. Scott, I'm currently the HR Director in Permanent TSB. My role and my route to this job has been quite colourful in the sense that I joined Permanent TSB in 1993. I started as a bank teller and I worked my way through probably 9 or 10 different roles, mostly customer-facing, mostly in the commercial domain over the course of the past 25, 26 years. And moving into HR was a wonderful opportunity that I was really honoured and delighted to be chosen for. I hadn't come from an HR DNA gene pool, and this was the first time in this organisation's 200-year history that they had decided to appoint a non-HR person to lead the HR function. So I was delighted to be selected, and I took up the role formally on the 1st of May 2017.

And in terms of what you bring to the role, because I think their braveness in the organisation to bring somebody into the role that didn't come, to use your words, from that HR DNA is brave. What made them do that, do you think, and what is it that you can bring to the role that's different to perhaps somebody from a pure HR background can bring?

Okay, so I guess the first thing to say is that whatever about the title of the role, this is to my mind, a leadership position. This is about leading our 2,500 people who work with our customers. We have over a million customers spread across the 26 counties. And to connect with our people in both an intellectual and an emotional way, to help them relate to the society in which we are working, to reflect the changing face of Irish society and the diversity that has essentially grown through Irish society over the course of the last 30 years. So I guess the decision was in a, I guess, a positive attempt to try and bring the voice of the customer and how we connect as an organisation to customers through to our strategic HR team and helping us then to develop HR strategy that would connect enable and build the capabilities that the organisation needs to continue on its progress to connect with customers in order to rebuild our business.

It's really interesting, when I was in AIB and I used to work with a lot, as the business partner, used to work with a lot of the what might be termed support functions in inverted commas, HR, legal, finance, risk, and oftentimes you would talk to them because AIB's kind of purpose back then was customer first, And they would say, well, you know, that's kind of hard for me to relate to because I don't deal with customers every day of the week. So actually, how that relates to me, I can't really see. And I was always at pains to point out to them, there is no internal customer. There were always a bit of, well, my customer is the internal customer. There's no internal customer. The customer is the customer.

Yes.

And trying to create that link for people between what you do in HR let's say that's, you know, Kevin and the learning function, what he's doing and his team is helping the people on the frontline to be better, to serve customers better. Those links between what you're doing and people are really strong.

They are really strong and they're growing stronger every day. I guess one of the advantages I did have, apart from the face-to-face interaction with customers for over 20 years, was also the fact that I had led the operationalising of many HR strategies, both in the L&D space and also in terms of how the business was restructured and transformed over the years. So it enabled us to do a number of very important things. The first thing was it enabled us to embrace leadership beyond HR to help us co-create both activities and interventions and programmes that would connect in a much more meaningful way with colleagues right across the organisation. That's the first thing. The second thing was the fact that I had essentially worked in the commercial environment and in recent years worked on both legacy projects, marketing, product development and what have you, it allowed me to open the door for HR into parts of the organisation into which they had not been essentially— not that they hadn't been invited, but from a confidence point of view they hadn't felt equipped equipped going into those parts of the organisation given their lack of commercial experience and knowledge. So those two things in and of themselves allowed us to build a programme of work which was led by almost 40 leaders outside of HR across the business. And how we developed it really was we really got a strong sense of who we were as an HR function, which was we are a small HR function, a strategic HR function, where our raison d'être is to build the capability and to acquire the talent and to build the talent we need to deliver our future commitments. But big HR are our 500-odd people managers that lead 2,000 people right across the organisation. So essentially embracing the 500 people managers, or big HR as we call it, essentially has brought both advocacy for HR and has brought all of our people managers into the HR tent.

And as I've said hundreds of times on these podcasts, at events, workshops, and, you know, speaking engagements, that whole idea of using the people leader locally— when I look at it from just a purely communications perspective, you don't know 3,500 people around the organization, or 3,000 people around the organization, and neither does Jeremy, the CEO. The people that know those people the best are your leaders. So actually, that route to those people on the front line has to be through their leaders. So I think getting those people on board in the first place is spot on the right thing to be doing to make a difference. Absolutely.

And as an organization, we are a multi-campus organization. We have over 80 locations right throughout the country. So if I'm in Newcastle West in Limerick and I'm working for somebody, my leader essentially determines how I feel about this organization. In the same way as if I'm working in Hatch Street in our asset management unit the leadership team there really shape my view of the organisation. So when we speak about engagement in organisational terms, it is often too easy to roll it all up into a high-level aggregate score, but that does not speak to the local 80-odd feelings of engagement that people have right across the network.

Absolutely, because you know that whole idea, and again I've said 100 times, I must stop saying it and think of something different to say, the whole idea of engagement being a bit of a dirty word, actually it's just about making places better places to work, whether that be Newcastle West in Limerick or your AMU unit over the road. And that's largely down to leaders. So tell me, and I know you have some quite strong views on this, what is it that makes a leader a good leader in your opinion?

Well, there are so many things that go into the mix to create a a really great leader, not just an effective leader, but a really great leader. And for me, and I can only speak for myself in this regard, character is the foundation stone for any leader. And when I speak about character, I'm talking about sincerity, I'm talking about someone that's highly dependable, I'm talking about somebody that's full of integrity. If you do not pass the character test with people, it is It's maybe not irrelevant other facets or other skills that you have, but it is really, really difficult, if not impossible, for people to succeed if there are doubts about their character. So the character is absolutely critical. The second key piece for me is about the person's competence in terms of their knowledge, their wisdom, their skill, how they actually rationalise the logic. What value do they bring in terms of that kind of experience? And a big part of competence is not just intellectual competence, but it's also emotional competence to understand that nobody anywhere is right all of the time. And you do not need to win every argument. And it's wonderful to find somebody else with a much better solution.. So from a competence point of view, it's not just intellectual, it is hugely on the emotional side. And I guess the third one— these all begin with C as you can notice at this stage— I like it— is connection. So I often hear about communication and what have you, and communications are a very important part of connection, but connection for me builds on that piece around the emotional connection with the organisation. And that emotional piece is really, really important in terms of when we talk about building a trusted relationship between the organisation and society, between the organisation and customers, but also the psychological contract between the organisation and its employees. And a key part of trust is benevolence, and this is having the best interests of people at heart. So your method is one thing, but far more powerfully is your motive. Is your heart in the right place? Do you have the best interests of people at heart. And that doesn't mean that you have to agree to everything. That doesn't mean that you can't say no. That doesn't mean that you can't assert yourself. But you need to come to things from a really good place. And once people understand that you're a person of integrity, you have a fair sense of what you're speaking about, that your heart is in the right place, you start to connect. You start to connect on many, many different levels, and you start to build that very precious bond of trust.

Yeah, and that, for me, that whole bond of trust almost underpins everything else. Knowing that that person has your back, knowing that they'll stand beside you, knowing that you can put your hand up and say, you know what, I don't agree, and that that's okay, and that person won't rip your head off and move you to a different department.

Absolutely, absolutely. And, and again, this brings us on to kind of one of the most important and least talked about parts of communication, which is actually listening. Listening to what others have to say. And if I could do one thing across organization or organizationally in our company and elsewhere would be to get rid of mobile phones from meetings and allow people to listen to understand, to immerse themselves in the perspective of others as opposed to the default position of checking mail and going online in the middle of meetings. Apart from not listening to the person, it's highly insulting for somebody that attends, that has prepared assiduously, that has probably been awake the night before, before they come in to present.

Worrying.

And essentially, like, this is a key moment for them in the progression of their career, and they look around the room and there's 3 or 4 people on their mobile technology. So again, These are very, very basic tenets of respect for the person and respecting their opinion. And if we are to succeed today and succeed out into the future, we need to embrace the perspectives of others. We need to immerse ourselves in them. We need to identify and help them to help us identify patterns that we may not see. Relying on the past and trusting what we did 20 years ago is not good enough. It doesn't allow us to embrace the possibility of the future. And we need to embrace those perspectives and we need to engage in a much more positive way.

I think it was Jack Ma, the CEO, or soon-to-be former CEO of Alibaba, who did a big piece at one of— I think it was the World Economic Forum last year on education and how we're educating our children. And actually, the way that we're educating our children— and he's looking at this from a teaching background, because he's a former teacher, it's wrong. He says what we're teaching them to do and how we're teaching them is based on what we've done to date, not what we need to do going forward, not based on looking at how the world is changing, how the world of business and commerce is changing, and looking and thinking, well, what do they need to know to be really, really successful in their careers, in in 20, 30, or 50 years' time. And I know you have some thoughts on that around leadership capability as well in terms of us always looking backward for leadership capability as opposed to looking forward.

Absolutely. And again, the old adage of, you know, what has got you here will not be good enough to get you there. And it is very, very challenging for leaders right now to deal with an awful lot of complexity and a huge amount of ambiguity in today's society. And in the workplace of today. Because you are faced with the challenge of managing the realities of today, but you are also responsible for ensuring the organisation is fit for the future so that the organisation can essentially participate in the opportunities and the possibility of the future. So it's managing today, it's creating the future for your organisation, and in many organisations, no more than ourselves, you are also in some cases dealing with the legacy issues of the past. And trying to achieve a balance across those three moving platforms is incredibly difficult. But in terms of how to succeed in that environment, I don't have all the answers. I may have very few, but I guess what I have found through my own experience of managing a lot of complex legacy programmes, managing the day-to-day and trying to help the organisation get essentially fit for the future, anticipating the change and shaping the response and making time to do that is of paramount importance. Otherwise, we end up, you know, reacting and knee-jerking and reflexing into whatever comes our way. So being mindful of the fact that there is no predictability in this future and being open to the possibility of difference. And embracing and including diverse voices and putting time aside to embrace that is hugely important. The second key piece is our learning mindset and our willingness to adapt to the changing environment. And this means that all of us as leaders need to move from this, I guess, comfort blanket of experience and relying on what worked for us in the past. We need to be open about how we bring greater agility to our thinking and how we lead our teams in a much more agile way whereby we are optimising for the whole of the organisation and not just through the narrow strand of our function or of this particular project that we are working on today. It is about optimising for the whole of the organisation.

You bet your bum dollar there are learnings in one silo that will be as applicable, if not more applicable, in another silo if only the people in that silo got to hear about it.

Absolutely. But the reality is, going back to the first point we made when we started the conversation, is that why are we doing this? We're doing this to connect with customers. Customers do not need to know, nor would they pay us to find out how many silos we had or how many verticals or how many project groups or what have you.

And they don't care.

And they don't care. And they shouldn't care. What the customer needs is to be looked after and cared for in a way in which that they deserve. Customers pay our wages. Our colleagues that connect with customers, that magic 24 inches between the customer and our colleague, that is where the value of our organisation really comes to life. And investing in our people to invest in our customers in the right way is of paramount importance. Important to us. So we need to continually bring ourselves back to, well, what are we about as an organisation? What are we about as leaders? What do we stand for? Where do we want to go to? And then how are we going to mobilise the organisation to get there? And having that attitude of being open to adapting, being optimistic in our way and creating a sense of hope for the future is really the the responsibility of all leaders at every level. And in this organisation, we are, I guess, we've arrived at a situation whereby we've multiple different levels, but I believe in leading at every level. You do not need a stripe on your shoulder to lead a team of people. You do not need a stripe to lead a function. You lead at every level.

Agreed. One of the things that always struck me, and it's something that we kind of grow out of when we stop being children is inquisitiveness. And I think that back to that piece about a learning mindset and being agile and thinking differently, that whole idea of inquisitiveness has just gone away. I wonder what happens if, as my sister did when she was 3, if I stick this pair of scissors in this electrical power socket, which didn't end all that well, as you can imagine. But that inquisitiveness to try things and just see what happens goes away in business. Why is that? Why don't people try and see if things work, and maybe there's a chance of failing, but maybe not?

Yeah, so it's, it's a great question, and I don't think my answer is going to equal the quality of the question. And I think that the inquisitiveness, in my view, never goes away, but I do think it becomes very heavily masked and colored and and hidden. And one of the traits that I notice in the great leaders, and we all have a view as to who great leaders might be in different fields of endeavor, whether it be business or sport, is having the courage to overcome your fear, to overcome that fear of, you know, saying something that might be different, having the courage to challenge the status quo. It may not be like putting the the scissors into the light socket. Don't do that. You shouldn't ever do that. But there are moments in every hour of every day in meetings and engagements where you feel the tremble in your tummy and you feel that you have something important to say. And having the courage to say that in the right way, in a constructive way, is something we should encourage. When I talk about diversity, absolutely through all of the strands of diversity that we all know and we are working so hard to essentially include in our organisations, but to my mind cognitive diversity is as important if not more so in terms of embracing the different views of people and allowing somebody to say something that may not be on the agenda and creating a psychologically safe environment environment. So one of the things I think leaders can do more and more is to— and if I could drop an antihistamine of some sort into everybody's teacup, it would be to try and say, look, how can you make your meeting more psychologically safe, where it's okay to say something that, you know what, we may not have thought of before, or it may be a little bit from left field. It is only by creating that psychological safety and creating the environment that people will come forward with their views. And I think we need to encourage that more. The second thing I would say is that leaders' reaction to those ideas also need to be encouraged. And, you know, you mentioned a 3-year-old child, but if we think about child rearing in its most basic form, it is about affirming that which is positive. You don't rear a child through criticism. If you do, you're going to really, you know, create some a lot of difficulties for that child as they grow into an adult. So there's something about how we affirm the positive and welcome the difference and welcome the different view and allow some oxygen to go into those discussions as opposed to criticising or cutting somebody off too soon. So allowing some of those ideas to prosper and to grow I think would be enormously helpful for most leaders.

And I think it could only be a positive positive thing in general. I think you might, you know what, you might just get a nugget of a really good idea.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But it's back to the point of like, it's not about being right as a leader. It's about helping others be better. We've had our day in the sun. We need to find a way to platform the leaders of tomorrow and helping. And the more we can do to help our future leaders be better, and allowing them to have a voice and to helping them and to helping to stimulate and propagate courage so that they can find that voice. That is what's critically important.

We've talked a lot about leadership, and I know as an organization, you, as with all the banks, have gone through really fairly fundamental change over the past few years and actually, in my opinion, should continue to go through change. And actually, the whole idea being that change becomes the new black. And actually, if we're standing still, we're not growing. If we're standing still, we're not meeting customer needs. If we're standing still, we're not, you know, making sure that we're kind of upping the ante against the competition. In that whole idea of a change environment, what's the role of the leader, do you believe, in terms of helping their teams to be on that journey?

The role is just fundamental to helping us come through this.

This.

And so just to speak about banking first and foremost, and then I'll just maybe cover off some stuff. So banks across the world lost the right to govern themselves back around 2007, 2008. And understandably, banks went from a principles-based model of regulation to a rules-based one. And banks needed to change and banks needed to improve and banks needed to fundamentally address the behaviours that existed at leadership level and at management level and in other levels across the organisation in the years leading up to the financial crisis. So that is— I just want to be absolutely upfront about that. So change was needed, change was required. So in terms of dealing with that, 10 years after the crisis, a lot of the, I guess, decisions that were made were made pre-crisis and the outcomes of those decisions continue to come through today. And a lot of that is 10, 15 years old and it continues to feed the, I guess, the newsreels with regards to banks and banks' behaviour. In terms of dealing with banks' behaviour, behaviour in my view is fundamental to culture. Behaviour is fundamental to leadership. The behaviours that you role model outside of your title but as a person in terms of respecting the view of another person, allowing a contrarian voice the opportunity to challenge a decision that people feel uncomfortable about, taking in perspectives and immersing ourselves in perspectives that we hadn't thought of before, ensuring that we have a governance model that is fit for purpose whereby all of the considerations with regards to customer outcomes and achieving the right customer outcomes, because there are no two customers really the same. So we need to make sure that the outcomes for all of our customers are the right ones for them. And, and that needs to be to the forefront of our mind. And all of our behaviors and all of our interventions and all of our developments need to come through to deliver that, which is how do we deliver right outcomes for customers. And fundamental to changing the culture will be the leadership behaviours, starting with leadership mindset, and we spoke about mindset earlier on with regards to that, having that open servant-style mindset as leaders. The behaviours then that are required to bring those standards to life, and then how we embrace managers and people across the organisation to really mobilise behaviour. Behind the delivery of right customer outcomes.

And what does a leader do— let's pick Newcastle West and the branch down there— what's a leader doing there on the ground every day to help bring their people through that change?

Well, as an organisation, the leaders on the ground are the most— in my view, the most influential in terms of connecting with their customers in their localities. Our leaders in Newcastle West are in New Ross, Cork, Limerick, Galway, wherever in the country we have a physical presence but also a digital presence. So leading in the digital age and leading in a digital environment brings its own challenges as well. But in terms of building the relational trust with customers on a face-to-face, our Our teams right across the country have a huge responsibility. Our teams are trying night and day to connect with our customers in a much different way, which is why in recent times we have moved to remodel our network such that we have far more people out in the community meeting customers as opposed to sitting in a physical presence behind a desk. So we're trying to get out to meet customers on their terms. We're trying to create an environment whereby customers can deal with the to our organisation and interact with us across 5 different channels, whether it be through our branch network, through our intermediaries, directly through the digital facilities we have, or directly through phone, but also through the out-and-about people in your community, and they have a huge role to play. But I guess fundamentally the responsibility on the organisation to effectively set the espoused culture for the organisation resides with the executive and the leadership team. And in order to do that, we have worked over the course of the last 18 months to try and mobilise a programme of work which is called Our People, Our Bank. And essentially within that programme of work, there are 7 key objectives, and culture, identity, and values was one core objective that we started work on last year, and diversity and inclusion was another one of the 7 that we mobilised last year, such that by the time the Central Bank audit of culture in Irish banking came around in the spring of 2018, we were well on our way. We engaged positively with the Central Bank. I think their review was very, very well run. I think it was very thorough and it was very engaging in terms of the outputs of that review. With regards to how they reflected the journey in which we had travelled and that which now needed to be addressed as well. So, it is our responsibility, and we've worked over the course of the last 3 or 4 months to try and bring together that which we had started, reflecting what the Central Bank has come back to us on, and to bring that into an organisational culture programme that we are currently in the process of rolling out across the organisation.

Okay. To cut back to something you mentioned mentioned earlier on about leaders, whether they be in sport or business. Who are some of the people that you look up to? Who are some of your leadership role models?

Well, in a sporting domain, probably the person that stands out for me more than anybody else is Paul O'Connell. And Paul O'Connell epitomizes for me somebody that can He cares about the people that he has played with, worked with and supported. And yet at the time and in the heat of battle, he is the one that will assert himself more strongly than anybody else to bring a performance and to challenge the behaviour and to challenge the, I guess, the mistakes that his colleagues are making. And that's perfectly fair. And I think the way in which he does that achieves a balance that few others have been able to achieve. So he cares for people in a compassionate way from what I have seen and what I have read and heard about the man. And I have seen him in action as many other people have as well too. And there are many others in the world of business that I admire and rate, but Paul for me stands out above the others.

Okay. Just finishing up, one question that I like to ask every I ask everybody that comes on the podcast is, what's the one piece of leadership advice that you would give to your 20-year-old self? So something that you know now that you wish you'd known then.

I guess the main thing reflecting back on 20-odd years now at this stage is actually understanding yourself, is understanding yourself and your own in your own motivations. And there is something now that when I reflect back on things, you know, I, like many others, I guess, you know, we probably could have got our house in order earlier. We could have, you know, sorted out some conflicts or some differences that we had at an inner person level in terms of, you know, who we are, what we stand for, and why we want to achieve that. And I think, you know, had that happened earlier in my career, my career, perhaps I wouldn't have frustrated or confused as many people that I've worked with. But I guess reflecting on it and acknowledging it is the first step in trying to move forward. And I guess of the many people that I admire, having the humility to admit that things could have been better and identifying that you can actually improve if the attitude is is there, if the willingness is there, and the opportunity and the possibility is endless. And I guess the last thing is I came across— I don't know who actually made the quote, but I came across it a couple of— well, many, many years ago really, which was that when nothing is certain, everything is possible. And there's something about having that mindset in terms of painting a picture of hope and believing in the future and believing in the people that will deliver that future. Is something that I would encourage people to, to really embrace.

And I think that's a really, really great way to finish. Ger, it's been really nice coming back. It's been brilliant talking to you. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Scott, it's a pleasure. Thank you.

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