Episode 38 | Aisling Press | Head of Branch Banking, Danske UK

If people understand their purpose and the reason why they're here, then that connects them in much more clearly to the job that they do. So I think we've got to try and give people a reason to perform and actually a reason to want to perform.

Welcome to Face Forward, the inspiring change podcast on all things internal communications, engagement, leadership, and change. Hi there and welcome to this edition of the Inspiring Change podcast. We are knee-deep in the coronavirus, everything kicking off, everyone self-isolating at home, and all the schools are closed here in Ireland and no doubt further afield as we move through this crisis. So today's guest is dialing in via Skype from the north of Ireland, She's somebody that I worked with closely during my days at AIB and has since moved on to work in Danske Bank. It seems fitting again that, you know, following International Women's Day last Sunday on the 6th, that we have another female executive on the podcast. We're about 50/50 now, which I'm really pleased about because it's great to have that balance. So with that, I'd like to welcome Aisling Press onto the podcast. Aisling is the Head of Branch Operations Banking in Danske Bank. Aisling, good afternoon.

Hi Scott, good to talk to you.

Thank you very much, and we're just grabbing you just in time before you head away, possibly on your holidays, so I'm sure you are up the walls. We'll try not to keep you too long, I promise we'll be in and out, but I'm sure you'll have some, some great insights and experiences and advice to share with us. So as I always do on this podcast, let's just ease you into this conversation by letting you talk for a while about you, about maybe your career, and about your role in Danske.

Okay, thanks, Scott. So I guess you've outlined, Scott, that we worked together in AIB Bank a few years ago, and that's exactly where I started my career journey just a few more years ago, back in 1987. And I guess I've worked in a wide variety of roles across the company in Northern Ireland. Starting out, I joined banking at entry level. So rather than going to university, I went straight into the world of work. So for many years, I guess, my education, my knowledge growth, my expertise was actually primarily built through the school of life and work. At one stage then, I subsequently realized that actually, if I wanted to progress into true leadership roles and work towards achieving my ambitions, then it was going to be important that I got some academic credentials, I guess, just to underpin the experience that I had in the workplace, but also to help my personal growth as well. So, probably fairly early on, Scott, I embarked on a journey of continuous learning, working through the Institute of Bankers qualifications, gaining a diploma in financial services qualifications and business banking lending accreditation, and that culminated with me undertaking a master's programme in executive leadership back in in 2009. And I did say during that experience, I promised my family that that was the end of the extracurricular study.

Everybody always says that. Everybody always says that. I'm done with the study bit.

Famous last words. Yeah, so I had to backtrack on that. And, you know, maybe we'll come on to it during our conversation in terms of the importance of continuous learning. But I've subsequently gone on to do certification in banking in a digital age, customer experience management, and a business leaders program at the W.J. Clinton Institute at Queen's University. So my leadership experience is across branch banking, business banking, retail banking operations, some strategy and transformation and project work across an ever-changing financial services landscape. So I spent 29 very happy years at AIB working across the business, as I say, and about 4 years ago I decided that actually I'd like a fresh challenge and I joined Danske Bank UK. And, you know, for the listeners, Danske Bank UK is the largest bank in Northern Ireland. We have about 1,400 people employed, about 460,000 personal customers. We bank 1 in 3 businesses, 1 in 4 mortgages, and last year we were awarded Northern Ireland Company of the Year, which is a Business in the Community Responsible Business Award. So I guess that underpins our focus on our societal responsibilities. As you've outlined, Scott McInnes, my current role, I'm head of branch banking. That involves leading up to 400 people. Currently, I've done a short-term secondment to undertake a strategic initiative, but that's the day-to-day role.

Excellent, excellent. That's really useful insight. Thanks. It's actually interesting because it's that branch banking role that I'm really keen to get into a wee bit more, not necessarily specifically yours in there, but just some of the thinking around the whole area these days of branch banking and financial services and the impact that has has on people and customers. For me, one of the big things, one of the big drivers of really good experience for customers is the culture in an organization. Of course, through the Irish Central Bank, that's been certainly a big focus for the banks down here, has been the whole area of culture in banking. For any listeners who want to have a look, and it doesn't include Danske, I don't think, you can maybe correct me here, Aisling, but the Irish Banking Culture Board down here in the Republic published their report last year. Just about culture and banking and maybe what organizations had to do differently in order to get away from some of the things that had perhaps happened during the banking crisis. So that's worth a look, the irishbankingcultureboard.ie, if anybody wants to have a look at that. But I don't think that includes Daska, right?

No, no, I don't believe it would. We don't have a retail bank in the Republic.

Perfect. So from your perspective then, I'm interested, you know, they're talking a lot about culture. I think most central banks are probably talking about culture now, but from your perspective, What do you think a great culture looks and feels like?

That's a pretty dangerous question actually to ask me, Scott. Did I ever tell you I wrote a 20,000-word dissertation on culture in retail banking for that master's program?

If you had of, I wouldn't have included that question in the list, Aisling.

Oh dear, well listen, that was 10 years ago and a lot has changed in that time frame, and I guess continues to change. You know, perhaps it's that pace of change, Scott, that actually makes culture so vital and so interesting for us. You know, what is culture? In its simplest terms, it's the organization's personality, isn't it? It's how we do things. But in real terms, culture is never that simple. You know, I worked for AIB in the north with a parent company in the south, and Danske Bank has a parent company in Denmark. So you've got that parent culture, you've got the country culture, You've your company culture, and then of course you've all your subcultures and microcultures across the various divisions and physical locations within the company. So navigating a great culture through all of that, for me, needs to be done purposefully and with intent and with skill. So, you know, you've got the cultural piece from the Irish banking crisis and, and that whole transparency and integrity and senior manager regime piece, which is so very critical critical. It's the, it's the very foundation on which we build our businesses. But over and above that, what's a great culture for me? Well, I guess it's a culture where people collaborate, where they work together to create success, where people feel enabled, empowered to achieve, a culture where they're invested in, where we develop them to highly perform, and we recognize that performance and encourage them to celebrate together. And I think more and more the need to focus on innovation is infiltrating culture. So essentially, I think an important part of culture today is a continuously developing culture where the growth of ideas is cultivated. If you look at the landscape around us, you know, your previous guests, and you have alluded to it, Scott, we've got our technology, automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, data analytics, We've also got changing consumer habits and expectations. So, you know, the culture can't stand still in a landscape where all of that's happening. The digital impacts, that demands that we change from an analog culture to a digital culture. What does that mean? That means that we're more customer-centric than ever, that we're able to serve across channels, that we are adaptable, agile, that we work in cross-functional teams. So it's It's a really dynamic subject to get into, particularly in the banking landscape. And I mean, collaboration and partnerships are key to all of that today. You know, we've even set up a co-working community here in Belfast. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that, Scott. No, no. Yeah, so we have a co-working community set up within our own building in the center of Belfast beside the City Hall, and that's a co-working space to create an ecosystem for startups where entrepreneurs entrepreneurs can work with other like-minded entrepreneurs to grow and scale businesses and ideas. Now, that's a responsible business initiative on our part, but actually it's a really interesting dynamic for culture because that's creating a physical work environment here where entrepreneurial culture is prevalent, and I think that's really good for our people. You know, if you think about all the work out there, all the research and thinking on future of work and what we all need for the future of our businesses, isn't it that sense of creativity and innovation, more entrepreneurial culture. So we're trying to blend the traditional robust culture of a good robust bank, but also embrace that opportunity for the future to branch out.

And I think in many ways, you know, by doing exactly that, you know, what that does is in many ways make you an employer of choice. It creates an organization and a workplace that people want to come and work in and therefore attracts better quality of people.

Absolutely, absolutely, because you're giving opportunity, you're creating breadth, and you're future-looking, which future-proofs people's skills and creates longevity in terms of their careers. So it's really interesting stuff.

Hmm, so let's have a think about leaders, and because I hold very dear to my heart, and as I know you do, that leaders have a massive role to play in making sure that organizations have great culture, but I wonder specifically what you think a leader's role is in bringing to bear some of those cultural things that you spoke about earlier. What are leaders doing? What should they be doing?

Yeah, look, I mean, culture is part of everyone's role and everyone's accountability, but I guess leaders are especially critical in pursuit of the culture that the organization espouses. Leadership has changed so much over the years. Leaders now need to continually grow and adapt. Nothing stays still, you know, and people look to me, Scott, to help navigate the way for them and with them. So I think leaders now more than ever need to have a growth mindset. You know that saying, we can't become what we need by remaining what we are. So that sense of challenge and again being forward-looking and leading in that world of complexity and uncertainty requires leaders to have a greater degree of self-awareness, to be braver in empowerment, and to create the environment where people can grow. Thinking about agile values, you know, leaders need to influence agility, they need to embrace innovation, they need to encourage and enable the free flow of ideas, and that's not always comfortable in traditional banking because that's pushing all of us outside our boundaries. You hear lots of talk now about, you know, fail— failure is a success. You must fail and fail fast, and that is absolutely right, but in a banking environment that has to be within the right construct. So we've got to be brave enough to encourage people to try stuff. You know, I like to desk surf, engage, make people feel safe about having conversations, listen, get opinions from them. And, you know, sometimes even from a leadership perspective, culture can be informed by the language that we use. You know, we no longer talk about employees, we talk about colleagues. And that whole organizational infrastructure and structure, as leaders, we can't allow that to limit or block the desire for agile working, for innovation, and for espoused colleague behaviors. I think a leader needs to be able to articulate the culture they aspire to, but more than that— and I'm thinking about branches here, Scott, where you have teams in very diverse geographical locations and sometimes small teams— leaders need to be able to not just articulate that culture but actually describe for people the behaviors that are aligned to that culture, and to understand within their own roles how can they demonstrate those behaviors.

And I think the demonstration of those behaviors through story from to me is something that's very, very powerful. You know, look at what Aisling did in this situation where she did this with a customer, the outcome was amazing. That's a great way of showing our customer-first value or our working-together value, and it's only when leaders, I think, start to use stories that they can do that really effectively.

Completely. I mean, ultimately, storytelling, you know, telling the stories of behaviors and engagements that you want replicated, shaping those stories, recognizing and rewarding the behaviors aligned to those stories, you know, that just draws out the actions that you want to be the DNA of your company, and it's really important to publicize those.

Mm-hmm. So I wrote, and I think back to that customer piece actually specifically, you know, when you look— we're gonna, we're gonna talk a little bit about change in a while— but when you look at how the banking model has changed, a lot of that, as you said, due to the fact that customer expectations are changing. You know, people want digital, they don't want to go to branches anymore, they want to be able to apply for a mortgage online or, you know, apply for a loan online and have the money in their account the next day. So we have to make sure that as organizations, that organizations like Danske or AIB or Bank of Ireland or whoever have the ability to be able to serve that customer need. But of course, there are still customers who do like to go into the branch and who do like to go and speak to Mary and who do like to lodge a check every week and that kind of stuff. And it's interesting, I'm very much— and I've said this on this podcast before, and I wrote a blog about it a couple of weeks back if you want to look at it, inspiringchange.ie/blog— blog, there's the cheap plug. But that whole idea of really good customer experience is driven by really good employee experience is really important to me. And I'm much more— and again, I've said this on the podcast before— I'm much more in the Richard Branson camp of look after your staff and let them look after your customers, rather than what's become rather trendy in the past few years, which is let's put customers first. And it's nearly a case of let's put customers first to the detriment of the staff, because if it's good for the customer, that's what we should be doing. For me, if it's good for the customer and it's not good for the staff, organizations shouldn't be doing it because it's the staff that have to still drive that customer experience. So I wonder, you know, when you look again back to, back to leaders, because that's what I like these, these podcasts to be about, what do you think leaders should be doing to be able to drive that real really good employee experience so that translates into an amazing experience for customers?

Yeah, you know, I'm gonna start that, Scott, with sharing our customer or our company vision with you. So we have a company vision that we describe as: we want to be the best bank in Northern Ireland by making more possible for colleagues, customers, partners, and society. And I'm sharing that, I guess, to demonstrate that I totally agree with you, and we have seen that as an organization and as a business. So we're making more possible for customers, but actually colleagues are equally important. And that's from the genesis that, you know, whatever field your business is in or your company is in, every company needs their people to be the advocates for that business. Because, you know, colleagues won't encourage customer business, and you won't attract new talent to the organization if you don't have a clear your colleague proposition, and if you don't have a goal for employee experience. So I think to create that advocacy, you certainly need strong employee engagement and experience. How do you do that in practical terms? You know, for me, that starts with a sense of belonging, a sense of value and recognition. You know, everybody will be familiar with creating customer personas and mapping out customer journeys when you're undertaking a piece of research to understand pain points and remove them in pursuit of customer or continuous improvement in the customer experience. Why not do that for colleague experience as well? So, you know, I'm a fan of having colleague personas and mapping colleague journeys, understanding their pain points and the roles that they do, and trying to remove those in pursuit of improving employee experience and engaging colleagues on that journey with us. You know, as leaders, being conscious of the pace of change and the impact on people of their changing roles, and acknowledging that some of our work will be replaced by automation, but robots can't ever replicate the emotive experiences. Only people can do that. So investing in people, giving them the skills to move beyond routine transactions, investing them in the future, and overall showing you care about their future— for me, that's pretty powerful. In the employee experience piece. I think a lot of companies talk about it. I think the secret is it needs to be real and it needs to be action-oriented.

I think that whole idea, I think you've hit something on the head there with the realness. You know, organizations can say one thing but do another, and I think where you have, you spend, organizations spend so much time coming up with a perfect purpose and great values and and then they put them up on the intranet and they celebrate them and there's balloons on everyone's desks, a nice mouse mat and something on the wall, but when they don't actually, they might espouse them, but when they don't practice them, there becomes that gap between what we say and what we do, and that's not good for morale, it's not good for engagement, it's not actually good for a really good customer experience.

No, the behaviors and actions need to align, and it is really about understanding our people, investing in our people, creating opportunity for our people, developing our people, And, you know, something so simple like, you know, recognition, saying thank you, publicly praising, those are so simple but so ultimately important to people. And I think sometimes we underestimate the power of the more simple actions.

Yeah, it was, it's really funny, when you and I worked in the bank, I used to spend a bit of time talking to new leaders on one of the new leaders courses, and we would talk a lot about recognition. I would say them, you know, people crave recognition, and it's important for exactly the reasons that you just outlined there. So what's the easiest way to give somebody recognition? And they would all sit there looking blankly at me until somebody had the lightbulb moment, and they said, just saying thank you. And I went, yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. That's all that needs to be sometimes, just saying thank you. Maybe it's a balloon on somebody's desk, maybe it is take half an hour off early. Actually, that reminds me of another piece where, you know, a recognition program in a call center that I used to do some work with. If you got— if you won the recognition award that particular week for doing something amazing, they let you off half an hour early. Now, you might look at that and go, that just doesn't seem like very much at all. But perhaps that half an hour means you could get a bus, you know, earlier, which means you get home an hour and a half before you, you know, you would normally get home. So actually, that's a really big thing.

Yeah, totally. The leaders across our business have all sorts of initiatives and celebrations, Scott, and you're dead right. You know, sometimes it's just on a Friday evening, the team voting for their own colleague of the week and giving a little cup, or, you know, in the time that we're in, an Easter egg. It doesn't have to be anything big. It's the fact that there's a public acknowledgement, very powerful.

Yeah, really, really powerful. Interesting you talk about change, and, you know, it must be hard for leaders to continue to drive drive those levels of engagement, to try and embed that sense of culture and that sense of employee experience when banks are going through such massively significant change. I mean, when you think about, you know, only 10 years ago, from where we were then to where we are now, the banks have changed immeasurably. You know, you can often go into a bank branch now and barely see anybody from a staff perspective, yet they're all there and working in the background. And of course, with all the new you know, techie upstarts coming up and over the wall and grabbing bits of banks' lunches, you know, that makes it hard as well. So how do you keep people motivated when you're going through such significantly massive change like you are?

Yeah, and it's certainly challenging. You know, everybody's got to constantly work at motivation across the business, and that's about helping people understand what their purpose is. And, you know, you and I did some work on Purpose and Culture in the past together, Scott McInnes, and that remains for me very relevant today. If people understand their purpose and the reason why they're here, then that connects them in much more clearly to the job that they do. So I think we've got to try and give people a reason to perform and actually a reason to want to perform. Branch banking is changing immeasurably, there's absolutely no doubt of that, and whilst footfall may fall in some areas, actually Some of the work that we do in branches now has become actually more important because branches are becoming places where people go to get their problems solved. They can't do it online or they can't do it on the phone, and they present in branches where they want someone to really help them solve complex problems, and that's really important. And of course, we have vulnerable customers who have a preference to meet and speak to somebody face-to-face. So I guess it's about connecting people into the why. Start with the why. You know, if you can't paint the vision, you can't bring people with you. So taking time to really articulate the organization vision and strategy, yes, of course, but more importantly than that, what's the purpose of our team? What is it we do around here, and what is my role within that? How do I contribute to the to the team, and actually, if I wasn't here, why would that be important? So I think that that's really key, helping guys understand their purpose and showing them the value of what they do and keeping them motivated that way. You know, there are other conversations you have to have in terms of showing people what the future looks like, and maybe that's a future which is delivered through motivation, engagement, hard work, and success. And sometimes you've got to show them the alternative future What happens if we don't do this, or don't get it right, or we aren't successful? And I say that against a context of never seeking to create fear. You know, so why are we doing what we're doing? How do we want people to do that? It's equally important as what we want them to do. Create that environment where communication is so open, so straightforward, and actually, you know, good robust conversations are just a day-to-day part of how we work. And again, back to that, that same sense of recognition, ensuring that everybody gets recognized for their contribution and a job well done.

And I think you touched on something there for me from a leadership perspective, is the ability for those leaders to have those conversations around purpose in the context and translated for each of their teams. You know, when you look at— you've got 400 people working in branch banking, you know, you can provide a message to those 400 people, but it needs to be reasonably generic and it needs to be reasonably vague, obviously, at that level. Because you're not talking directly to each one of those 400 people, whereas the branch managers or the team leaders within each of the branches that you run and that your team runs, they can have a conversation which is much more, for us the purpose means X, for us the vision means Y, the bit that we can do and you specifically can do, John or Jim or Sally, is going to help us deliver our strategy here. And that's a really powerful thing to be able to do for leader.

Yeah, and yeah, you're absolutely right, Scott, and we've got to empower and entrust all of our leaders across different teams to be able to do that in their own style and way. And, you know, beyond that, creating opportunities for people that maybe aren't as connected into the engine room, who are maybe more geographically spread, but creating opportunities for those guys to get involved in stuff. And it might be the responsible business agenda or supporting the charity partner with initiatives or giving insights into vulnerable customer work or diversity boards or any sort of change initiatives or product and process design that impacts the customer, because those guys are the guys that are dealing with the customer day and daily, and they can be ambassadors for the customers. And in connecting them into that kind of change work and that ongoing work, actually you can create ambassadors across teams that help connect the rest of the people into what the organization's doing. So I think it's important to remember that piece as well.

Yeah, really, really powerful. Very, very powerful. Let me ask you who some of your leadership role models are. Who are the types of people that you kind of, you look up to or have really brought you on in your career and your thinking?

Yeah, so there are, you know, I could give you probably a list of all the famous people that inspire me. But actually, if you're asking me about role models, Scott McInnes, I would say not any one person, but probably more a series of collective relationships and influences over the years. So what do those people look like? Well, they're leaders who have been authentic, passionate about what they do, leaders who are real and genuinely care about the business and their people, leaders who've been professional and committed across good times and bad, who have defended their people when things aren't going so well, and leaders who give their people the credit when things actually have gone well. I've definitely responded to leaders who have been great communicators, who are able to communicate the vision, the why, the imperative. Those guys that both command respect from their people and who give respect to their people. I have to say, I also think I've equally learned from some of the worst leaders I've worked with, if I'm allowed to say that.

Of course, yeah.

I think they're great guys. I owe them a great debt of gratitude. Those are the guys—

to the really bad leaders?

Yeah, they're the guys that show you what not to do, and actually that's the stuff you never forget. You never forget when you've seen seen a really poor leader, you never forget how they've made you or their team feel. And I think that's when you make a commitment that you'll be a good and an authentic leader to the best of your ability, but you'll never set out to make people feel that way. So we do owe those guys an equal debt of gratitude as well.

Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think that it's— I'll just clarify that when you use the term guys, it's guys and girls.

Oh, sorry, in the most generic sense.

That's okay, in the most generic, non-binary, non-gender sense. Yes, yep, totally. So I think, yeah, I think, and the same carries through feedback, you know, people often will say, you know, the more useful feedback is not the, my goodness me, look at what a great job you did here, Aisling. The more useful feedback is, here's how you could perhaps have done it a little better.

Oh, completely.

Here's how I would have perhaps done it a little differently. And that's the same with leaders, looking at the backgrounds and thinking, oh my goodness 'Oh my God, I must never do that,' because we know how that makes us feel.

No, completely.

That's powerful stuff. Last question, and this is, this is what I ask for everybody, and I keep saying, I think, I think this is perhaps, I think this might be episode 36, and I keep saying I'm gonna do just an episode of these pieces, these gems of advice. If the last question is always, what advice would you give to your 20-year-old self around leadership based on what you know now that maybe you didn't that you didn't know then?

Ooh, the world has changed a lot since I was 20.

Not that much.

It wasn't that long ago. And actually, it's changed especially for women in leadership in that time. It's a very, very different environment now than the environment that I worked in when I was 20. What would I say to my 20-year-old self? I would say, get to know yourself. Get to really understand your strengths and your weaknesses. Know what you're good at and what you're not good at. And know who to connect out to to help you with what you're not good at. I'd say believe in yourself, get over the fear, you know, be courageous, get comfortable with the knowledge that it's okay to be uncomfortable, shed the voices and the imposters, don't worry so much. Yeah, trust yourself, be yourself, and do it with skill. Brilliant. I think that's what I'd say.

Trust yourself, be yourself, and do it with skill. What a great way to finish. Aisling, bizarrely, that has been actually over half an hour, nearly 35 minutes of chat, and it's amazing, they always fly, they absolutely fly. So listen, it's just one last thing for me to say, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I really appreciate the time. It's been wonderful talking to you, and I think there's been some really good insights there that will be very useful for listeners and very applicable, not just within a banking context, but within a broader business context too. So thank you very much, you've been a star.

Oh, thanks Scott, great to talk to you.

All right, you take care, good luck, thanks.

Thanks now, bye-bye.

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