00:00:00 Paula: Welcome to “TesseTalks” with your host, Tesse Akpeki, and co-host me Paula Okonneh, where we share with you top leadership and management strategies. This is and continues to be a journey of discovering. We are learning that leadership is personal and professional, and we hope that you our listeners will walk with us in this adventure. Today we have a phenomenal guest, his name is Stephen Sidebottom, and let me tell you a bit about Stephen. Stephen is GEAPPS’s Chief People and operating officer, and he has had over 30 years international experience of building organizations primarily in global financial services, in both the private and public sectors. He is responsible for building “GEAPPS” global operations and managing the enabling functions including people, finance, legal, operations, risk and technology. And he’s the chair of the Institute of “Risk Management”, warden of the Company of “HR Professionals”, and a fellow of the “Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development”. Welcome to “TesseTalks”, Stephen, we’re so glad to have you here.
00:01:34 Stephen: Thank you very much indeed Paula, it’s a thrill to be here.
00:01:38 Tesse: Hi, Stephen. It’s lovely to meet you again. And when you said yes to coming on the show, I was extremely excited. And I remain curious, because I’d really like to know about your thoughts on transformation and change. What inspires you, interests you on this topic. Cause every time you speak about it, my eyes light up because I see the light in yours.
00:02:00 Stephen: Thank you Tesse, it’s lovely to see you again. And I guess, I first came across the idea of organizational change when I did my MBA, which was at London Business School over 30 years ago. And it was a relatively new idea then that there was a discipline around thinking through organizational change. And it seemed to be driven by one of two things, a sort of a differentiating capability around technology and a differentiating capability around people. And that was the point at which I started to think about people as being a bright light, a narrative thing that would underpin my career for the rest of my life. Of course that paradigm was fundamentally wrong because it is technology and people. But my approach into that change has been through the study of how people work in organizational context, what needs to be true to succeed.
00:02:57 Paula: Loving that, what needs to be true for people to succeed. Well, the theme for today is the power of transformation. So on that note, do you have any tips for sustainable transformation? And this is a two part question, and what have you learned along the way?
00:03:15 Stephen: I’m not a big hints and tips person, to be fair. There are stories to tell or there are ideas to share, but I mean, there’s no such thing as a solution for one person or an idea for one person that this journey. I mean, you could have great hints and tips around how to make a perfect pie or something, but not around creating a the perfect life experience that you want. One of the things that I’ve talked about to lots of people when I’ve been, I guess, mentoring them or talking to them about their careers, is the idea of constant reinvention, and the idea of serial expertise. So plenty of that is rooted in the way our idea of career and life has changed beyond recognition in the last decade or so. Obviously driven by much, much longer working lives, driven by the dramatic change and radical changes in skills and job types. So the idea of serial expertise, the idea of constantly renewing yourself, trying new things, beginning again. It seems to me a fundamental way to think about your own life. And if that’s transformation, then that would be by hint, by tip, which is always be prepared to reinvent yourself, always be prepared to start again, be in fact better than that. Be ready to plan, to expect to think of your life and your career and your experiences as a series of journeys that may be consecutive, they may be concurrent, but they’re about the exploration of variety of things and opportunities. Ideally united by some passion, some thematic links that bring you joy, but with that as the only underlying narrative. Find what you’re passionate about and reinvent yourself against that space time and time and time again.
00:05:11 Tesse: I really love that, the different journeys, the reinvention, and you know, I love what comes to me as a tip, even though you don’t do tips, is the place of purpose, the place of passion and the importance of people. Three Ps there. And I’m curious Steven, because for many years I’ve worked with a lot of boards and people who are executive teams, et cetera. And the private sector’s much easier where you have a unitary board, much harder in the not-for-profit world. And I’m just wondering with this in light of what you’ve just shared, are there particular elements of transformation that can be seen through a different lens if and when someone’s on the governing body and when they are on the executive team, chief executive, chief people officer, et cetera. You know, people say the governance management interface. Is there, is it the same similar variations? I’d love to hear your comments on that.
00:06:09 Stephen: That’s a really interesting question. I don’t think it can be the same. The way you approach thinking about purpose when you are in a non-executive role is different because you are holding the space of big outcomes. You should be, you have to be, you have to be looking at long-term purpose, long-term translation into impact and outcomes. But in an executive role, you also have to hold much shorter term, much more transactional versions of it. And the risk is, it’s hardly surprising, the risk is that the short term, the immediate, the urgent can get in the way of framing the bigger opportunity stepping back. And that’s not to say that executive teams don’t do amazing jobs at that and aren’t really skilled at it. But you would want them to have an even more skilled board, which could help create the right pressure container for them. The one that just takes them that little bit further that just looks beyond the horizon. That challenges a dominant logic or a way of thinking, which has informed a series of often really good outcomes. But if you are looking genuinely at a purpose driven way of thinking about your work, then that additionality that can come from holding a slightly bigger frame of reference is hugely valuable. I mean, the marginal impact of that is very, very significant.
00:07:37 Tesse: I really like that. Paula, what thoughts are coming to you?
00:07:41 Paula: Well, you know Tesse, you mentioned something about the three Ps, the place of people, passion, and there’s something else you mentioned.
00:07:50 Tesse: Purpose. Purpose.
00:07:51 Paula: Purpose. All right. I love that because I wanted to find out from Stephen, coming back to talking about the board, people, passion and purpose. How do you engage and encourage the participation of members of the board?
00:08:08 Stephen: Oh okay. I mean, I think listening to people is a really useful way of encouraging participation. I mean, I’ve not generally find board members to be particularly reticent at coming forward with their ideas. And sometimes people require more structure around it. Sometimes they require more playfulness around it. Of course people just have different styles and, some people like to be asked, and some people you actually need to manage them to say less and to listen more and their contribution grows up. I mean, I’ve certainly worked with board members and talked about, well, coached them through thinking about how they are and roles that they see themselves playing. And use that model of advocates, challenger, bystander, and follower, and supporter, so that people understand their preferences in some of these conversations. So do they like to be the person pushing for an idea? Are they actually the person who has an amazing ability to take those ideas and say, yes, but what about this and building on them and sort of challenging and reshape. Or do they prefer roles which are in fact equally powerful, but are in the space of listening and reflecting back, or in the space of getting behind an amazing idea and turning it into something real. And by helping people think through those different roles, it also starts to help them understand the value that they bring by being them in that context. And they don’t think I am less successful and less important because I’m not advocating, or I’m less impactful because I don’t rip something to bits and say, here are all the things that are wrong with it. Instead, I can watch and listen. But they then need to have the confidence to bring their voice. So if you are a more passive listener, you still need to contribute with your perspective, but in a different way and at a different time in the conversation. And what I would then try and do is to bring them in in a way that is consistent with their preferences and their strengths.
00:10:20 Tesse: Well I really wish that we could bottle that and put it in a kind of manual of how to engage board members, because I think we’d have a lot of happier boards, you know, if they’re brought into their greatness by noticing the different elements that they bring and the different angles they bring. You know, there’s another level, another layer of governance that doesn’t really get talked about enough in my opinion, and that’s members. You know, members and stakeholders. And again, I’m really curious about your take on how members of an entity and members of an organization network, whatever it is can be more engaged, can actually feel that they’re not an odd part of a wheel. They’re actually an important part of the spoke of a wheel to make it go round.
00:11:05 Stephen: I’ve been involved in professional membership associations for 40 years in with the “City HR Association”, which is an HR, as one might expect from the name, an HR association, which supports HR professionals working in financial services in the UK. And then through to the company of HR Professionals, which is a city company. And then also with the Institute of “Risk Management”, which is a professional membership on qualifications and educational body. And the role of members does vary depending on the nature of the organization. I think there are a few things that are always fundamental to me though, and that I think are in all of those contexts as being important. One is fellowship and a sense of being part of a community where you value where you are in turn valued. And the nature of that fellowship will change depending on the nature of the organization. So sometimes it’s more social, sometimes it’s more professional and about becoming part of a collegiate group of people who have demonstrated their professional and their technical expertise together. But there is, at the heart of it, the idea of being in some way connected and linked. And that link is more than just, I know you. It is a link of my reputation is linked to yours. My standing and my effectiveness is linked to yours, which leads to very interesting ideas around, rising tides and lifting the quality of everybody. And that’s why professional associations and membership bodies focus so much on education, because they did the process of learning and teaching. And the more it becomes a formal professional qualification, the easier it is to learn to lose some of that. And certainly for the Institute of Risk Management, one of the things that we’ve been focusing on very much is strengthening the communities that exist within the institute. And to my mind, that actually is the magic of it. I mean, we do extraordinary qualifications, we do great training. The you know members recognition and support. It’s hard. These are communities of people coming together to achieve something, in this case the furtherment of the risk management profession for the public good. But how that plays out it has to be rooted in a connection relationship with other people, people you could talk to and learn from. And I would like to root my thinking about membership organizations always in that space.
00:13:43 Tesse: Wow. You know, what you have confirmed for me is that importance of community, connection, a place of compassion. You know, the valued, the valuing and the feeling worthwhile. That is so beautiful. You know, before I came on this call with you, I attended a session on mental health and wellbeing, and it was from all levels. And what really struck me from going there, they said that increase of mental health incidents have gone up, and people wanting to be cared for and supported in the workplaces, workspaces. And they also went on to talk about the pressure of performance, which is making people feel very stressed. These were all, and the figures, et cetera. So from your really deep and wide range of experiences, again, I’m curious about, I wonder what you would see success as being post COVID in the post COVID environment, is this normal or abnormal? What is your take on what success is or could look and feel like?
00:14:47 Stephen: In the context of performance and mental health and those things?
00:14:51 Tesse: Yeah. Yeah. In the performance of that, because I see this all as a new ecosystem. I think the way that things are showing up now and the attachment people are having on what’s important, I think I’m actually experiencing a big shift in this post COVID environment than it was before. Is that what you’re seeing too?
00:15:11 Stephen: I mean, who knows the answer? I mean, I struggle with the idea of a new normal. I mean, I think there is a, I mean, the old normal was not normal. It was just a construct that had developed with some successful factors, but many deeply, deeply flawed ones. I mean, the human condition is one of constant change, constant weakness, constant finding of strength and making choices. So I think we remain in that space. Obviously the speed of change is a truism to say that this is getting faster and faster. And of course it is in some respects. There is a constant adaptation. But again, I mean the human experience through history has always been constant adaptation. And when we look at one measure of change and say, well, now our technology does this, this, this. I mean, that’s no different in a sense from the traumatic or significant change that would, that have happened through history. As cultures have changed, died, the environment has changed around people and they’ve had to adapt. I mean the idea that there is any equilibrium that we operate in is in itself, I think, and we have periods of relative stability, and they mean that we’ve become, well, they mean mainly complacent. Well, at least I should say those people who benefit from that stability become complacent. These changes create new opportunities for everybody, and they also remove opportunity from people who were successful and content in the old environment. So the question of what does success mean? Is a really interesting one. I mean, if you are suffering from mental health and the anguish of that, then the measure of success is being able to recognize and talk about it. There isn’t a success, which if you are not you having that experience. The only success is from the experience that you have. What develops? What’s your state of being in relation to it? And what’s the response of the community in which you operate? Now I hope work environments and society in general is more understanding of that. I mean, in the UK, I think our provision of actual support services is woefully short, but the conversation about it feels, these issues feels much healthier. I mean, my own experience in the work environment is that people are comfortable at a level. I mean, the same way that there is always a discomfort in talking about perceived weaknesses. But my experience is that people are able to say, I have mental health challenges and I’m going to make these adjustments so that I can succeed. In the same way that they would be about any other kind of physical issue that they needed to deal with, or a period of illness or something. And that feels to me to be very healthy and to be able to talk about these. I mean, stress is always a really interesting thing, because too much stress is damaging, not enough stress is damaging. There is such an extraordinary optimal level of stress to keep you alert, excited, effective, efficient. So find keeping that right balance and being able to move through when, of course it’s going to get too much. So I think this question of a new ecosystem is a really compelling one for us to think about. But to be honest, I see it less as a personal issue, because I think my thesis here is that people are actually extraordinarily adaptable. The idea that people don’t like change is, I think fundamentally false. What I think is true is that organizations don’t like change. So the construct people are asked to operate is rigid and fixed, and the mechanism for adapting and changing those constructs, whether they’re social constructs or organizational constructs, are much slower than the mechanisms by which people themselves change. So the tension between through adaptation, through the new ecosystem is usually between the constraints of what an organization can accept and what people want. And a great example of that is the whole return to work rhetoric. As if people didn’t work when they were at home, as if virtual working and remote working hasn’t been, I mean as if this is a strange thing. I mean, it’s always been a feature. I mean, they worked remotely across the Roman Empire and were able to rule from Rome perfectly well. Admittedly on different timescales and with different tools. But the idea is that you have to be physically sitting there doing your work is a construct of managerial thinking rooted in factory work. It’s not true, but that’s the case. And in fact, the evidence from virtual and remote working through the pandemic, and this is now something that we have proper research evidence on for the first time, it does increase productivity. It’s often less good for managers because they have to engage in a much more structured way in how they work, want work done. They often have less experience of people around them asking to help them and to support them. So they have to change and that I think is the reluctance of managers stepping away from historic models of success and status, is probably a bigger issue than the reality of can people perform remotely. That said, the question of loneliness and disconnection is a really important one, and one that organizations have to design into, create opportunities to connect. Not do the that awful version of it where people sit in a room on their own all day on endless zoom meetings, and that is not a healthy model to work. So there’s a whole set of how do you make it work questions, but they’re not, can it work and should it work and does it work?
00:20:58 Tesse: I really like your take on this. You know, a few years ago there was a book published on congregations, and it got to be the bestsellers in the world. And the woman wrote it because she was lonely in New York and decided to have this thing about the beauty and the power of bringing people together and engaging and connecting. And I wasn’t surprised it was the bestseller, she was. So thank you for reminding us of this challenge of loneliness, but the fact that it’s something that we can do together and have a sense of belonging, have a great sense of productivity, and have conversations which really matter and make a difference. So that’s why I always love working with you, Stephen, because you’re so real in that. But these things are not really hard to do if people pay attention to what really matters. And that’s the thing. Paula, over to you.
00:21:46 Paula: Wow. I listened to how Stephen, you answered that question of success, and what I took away from that, is that people are adaptable, organizations may not be. And you know, I marveled at that, because you hit the nail on the head. You know, during Covid we adapted to being at home and being on Zoom, and now that Covid is over, then we came up with a hybrid way of working and now there’s a move to get everybody back to work, and that again takes some adaptability. So thank you for answering that question. So we are about to wrap up, but do you have any other words of wisdom? I mean, I’ve been, as you can see, enthralled by all the answers you’ve been giving us, and I know you have something up your sleeve that you can still share with us.
00:22:33 Stephen: What would you word around about Paula? What topic would you like me to?
00:22:42 Paula: Well, okay. You talked about serial expertise at the beginning. I love that phrase. I love when it’s like that. Yeah.
00:22:48 Stephen: Okay, fine. So we need that. I mean, my, my career. So the fundamental premise of this is, is that you should not plan for a single career, a linear view of your life where you start junior in a topic, you learn how to do it more. You become a professional, you become, and then you become a senior person and then you retire. This is not a model of paradigm that has any relevance to most people in the world nowadays. But the idea of becoming a serial expert does rooted in some common thread of passion and expertise that you reapply into different contexts. And those periods may be longer or shorter. I mean, I’ve certainly reinvented myself at various stages through my career, and I started as a banker and that was my first experience. I then became a consultant. I then became a line manager in HR. So doing HR and become learning how to be an HR professional. Really, I was doing other things like becoming a partner and becoming a father at the same time, which were just as important in terms of life, well, more important actually in terms of life journey and the things that you learn. And then I became a senior leader and was involved in strategy and leadership as much as I was in any technical delivery. And then when I stepped away from my role as HR leadership, I thought, I still need to do this. And I got caught for myself in that trap. What do I do next? That’s the same as what I’ve done before, and I suddenly realized that I was completely failing to take heed of the advice that I would give to anybody else in that position, which is do something different, take the things that you care about and deploy them and take the risk of deploying them in a different context. And so that’s what I did five years ago when I started doing HR, working with small creatives, then getting more involved in some startup work, doing some non-exec work. I was chair of a community bank here in Kent, and chair of the “Institute of Risk Management”. And then more recently have started working with Jain in climate change and energy, which is just an extraordinary area which is all new to me. I mean, I’ve never worked in philanthropy before. I’ve never worked in energy climate change we’re all learning about. But I do know how to do some of the things that they really need. I do know how to set up global organizations. I know how to operate. I distributed organization and create culture. I know how to set up and work in emerging markets across Africa, middle East, India, and Southeast Asia and Latin America. So I take bits of that expertise and apply them to a massively different context. I think that’s just such a fun thing to do. Of course it’s dramatically scary at times, but it’s really fun.
00:25:44 Tesse: You know, Stephen, I never, ever fail to come away from a meeting or encounter with you without a smile on my face, and that’s because of your love of adventure, your ways of making dots connect. Your love for people, and the way you just pivot and challenge yourself to go into new areas, do new things, be in a roller coaster, have a bit of fear, do it anyway, and learn anyways.
00:26:08 Stephen: I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? And I’ve certainly in my professional career, I’ve always thought, you know, have that, what’s the worst that could happen? You could be fired. So actually here’s a tip. If you don’t think you might be fired at least once a year, maybe not many, much more than once a year, but maybe once a year is the right template, then you’re probably not pushing the boundary quite far enough.
00:26:31 Tesse: I love it. So that says, you don’t do tip, but I’m going to take that as a tip any time. If you’re not pushing the boundary, if you don’t feel you’re going to be fired, then you’re not doing, you know, you’re not actually being challenging of yourself, of others, of society, of the world about being better and being, you know.
00:26:47 Stephen: About being better. Yes. I mean, pushing the boundary on being better, very specifically.
00:26:53 Tesse: Being better. Thank you, Stephen. I’m going to hand over to Paula. Paula, over to you.
00:26:58 Paula: That’s what we are going to close on, pushing the boundaries about being better. Because the theme of this episode was “The Power of Transformation”. So thank you so much Stephen, and I’m about to wrap up here to say to our listening audience, thank you so much again for tuning in. We ask that you head over to “Google Podcast”, “Apple Podcasts”, or “Spotify” or anywhere else that you listen to podcasts and subscribe. And if you liked what you just heard, who wouldn’t? Please write us a raving review. If you’d like to be a guest on “TesseTalk”, we ask that you reach out to us on our website, which is “www.tesseakpeki.com/tessetalks” to apply. And thank you again so much, Stephen, for being a guest on this episode, “The Power of Transformation”.
00:27:51 Stephen: Thank you.
00:27:52 Tesse: Thank you, Stephen. Always a joy meeting you. Always a joy.