Jo Taylor (MD of Let’s Talk Talent) talks to Shelley Hayward, Head of Learning and Talent at Cumberland Building Society about Coaching and Leadership.
Transcript of the Coaching & Leadership with Shelley Hayward episode
Jo Taylor
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 12 of the Let’s Talk Talent podcast. I’m joined today by Shelley Hayward, Head of Learning and Talent at Cumberland Building Society. Hi, Shelley. How are you doing?
Shelley Hayward
Hi, Jo. Really glad to be here. Yeah, I’m great. You?
Jo Taylor
Yeah, I’m really, really good. It’s a bit of a cold one today, but I’m excited to be chatting to you about all things coaching and leadership.
Shelley Hayward
Fantastic. You think it’s cold down there? Up in Carlisle it’s a lot colder!
Jo Taylor
Oh, bless you, bless you. So I wanted to start off this podcast by asking you a really open question. Because it’s been something that’s been playing on my mind. In the pandemic, there’s been a purposeful shift in organisations in taking a different type of leader, and trying to develop a different type of leader. So we’re not going to necessarily talk about leadership, per se. But what I wanted to know was: you’ve been doing a lot of work around coaching, what role does coaching play in leadership, and having that purposeful approach?
Shelley Hayward
It’s a really, really good question. I think all leaders will identify. It’s taken an extra bit of something during the pandemic, as leaders. We’ve had to be more empathetic, we’ve had to juggle things that we’d never thought that we’d have to juggle before. And with that, I think what the pandemic has brought about is this sense of being in your own echo chamber, as we’re all sitting in our own little WebEx or Zoom worlds or Teams worlds. And having that chance to reflect, having that chance to really think about you and broadening your views as leaders, as we sit in these silos, has been really, really important. And that, for me is where coaching really comes into power. Having that opportunity to sit back, think about yourself, and reflect upon who you are and what you need to be during this period of time is really critical. And I think good leaders have forgotten about ourselves during the pandemic: the key reason why we engaged in looking at coaching more deeply to support our leaders during this time.
Jo Taylor
So tell me how you’re using coaching at the Cumberland?
Shelley Hayward
Here at the Cumberland we’re going through huge transformation, as well as juggling a pandemic. So for our leaders, we wanted to give them some space, we didn’t want to engage them in long modular programmes, traditional in nature. We wanted to give them personal space. Coaching completely fitted the bill for that – it’s a safe environment, focusing on the things that are going to make their boat faster, but reconnecting them back into the business, and what’s going to make the difference for the business at the same time.
Jo Taylor
So one of the things that as a head of learning and talent in my career I’ve always found really difficult is, when a CEO comes and says, “well, coaching is great, Jo, but how are you going to measure the success?” Have you thought about how you’re going to measure the success? Because it’s a nice-to-have, isn’t it? Rather than something that anyone listening to this might say, “oh well, I’ve got the money to do it, or I’ve got the time to do it, or my leaders would rather do a modular programme”, how have you built the business case, in effect, for this approach?
Shelley Hayward
It’s a really great question, and one that we have thought a lot about, but then also not given too much detailed thought to. You can get so caught up in evaluation and data, when actually you just know it’s the right thing to do. Coaching is a big investment, but it makes a big difference. For us, our key measures will be both at a personal level, as well as at a business level. So we will be looking to work with those individuals to understand the difference that it’s made, both soft and hard, to their confidence levels, and to what they’ve been able to bring back into the work environment and to implement. At a business level, we’ll be able to see that through more conversations happening across the “heads of”, people emerging out of their silos – through business performance, it’ll be part of a number of measures that we’ll look at to understand the difference, but we’re not hooking it solely on coaching. We just know that it’s the right thing to do. And it’s really interesting, your point about selling it into CEOs, they’re the population of people that typically have a coach, they know the benefits of coaching, it’s just sometimes more hard to see or to accept the benefits that coaching can have at the next level down, and beyond. We’re piloting coaching at our “head of” level, which is the level just below our exec team. But our hope is that we will look to bring external coaching in to parts of our management development programmes in that middle management layer in general. We all know the benefits; sometimes you’ve got to take the risk, and I’ve asked our senior leadership team to take the risk, to allow me to pilot something, and to then show the evidence rather than coming up with that business case from the outset. We’re doing it the other way around, and I’m really fortunate to have a senior leadership team that are trusting me and already see the benefits of coaching themselves.
Shelley Hayward
So as a head of learning and talent, when you think about the challenges that you’ve got ahead, what are the things that are keeping you awake at night,
Shelley Hayward
The challenges that are keeping me awake at night are probably centred around talent management and career development, but not in the traditional sense of moving people up within our organisation. It’s how we create the breadth across our organisation and the acceptance in – within financial services, it can be quite traditional, you go from one level to the other, like in many organisations. What we’re wanting to do is to help people see the breadth of experience that they can get from across the organisation, and the career development that comes with that, rather than those gear changes and going up and getting what – the ‘what’ – if that makes sense, the job title, or the salary or those harder things. We’re wanting people to start to develop the breadth within their roles. That keeps me awake, because that’s easier said than done. Because those things really matter. We need to balance the two for our colleagues. But ultimately, the further up the ladder – and we’re a hierarchical organisation, we’re highly regulated, we need that hierarchy in place in order to give our regulator peace of mind – it means that there’s less roles in any hierarchical organisation, but we don’t want to lose that talent. Talent management’s really key up here in Cumbria. We lose about 70% of our young talent leaves the county to go elsewhere. We’ve got a great environment to live in, house prices a lot cheaper, we’ve got great roles, we need to keep them here. So we need to find new, exciting ways in order to engage talent at all levels within the organisation. I think another thing keeping me awake is this shift into a much more compassionate place. Far more authentic leadership. Being a leader is really hard, and so that shift from a more control-and-command, even in great organisations like ourselves through a pandemic, it’s easy to slip back. And we need to remind ourselves how to remain compassionate, and help all leaders across the organisation whether that’s at team leader level or at exec level, of what that takes and what that means to be really purposeful and live in line with the company values.
Jo Taylor
So Shelley, what really strikes me – and I did a webinar recently about HR superheroes – and I was trying to say to people, now is the time to be at the forefront and we’re at the table, and turn on your superpowers, whatever they may be. And one of them was actually coaching. One of the things that we said in the paper that we wrote was about coaching and being brave and being bold. But it’s very easy, isn’t it to forget about ourselves? How can coaching support us as HR professionals do you think?
Shelley Hayward
As HR professionals, we always forget about ourselves. We’re always the last to enrol in that training programme or that CPD. And a lot of the points that I’ve talked about require us to have brave conversations back into the organisation with senior leaders. That’s hard. And if you haven’t got that someone that you can confide in – that someone that can challenge you, stretch you, give you some strategies, some advice, just to listen to your approach – it could go wrong. So having that reflection space is important. For me, when we embarked on the coaching pilot, I also embarked on it not only from the perspective of wanting to understand what my peers were going through and to be able to talk confidently to the senior leadership team about the impact of the coaching pilot, but also to support me. Ultimately, at the end of this process, I want the business to back coaching throughout the organisation. To do that, I need to make sure that I’m on my A game, that I’ve thought it through, and that I’m in the right space to be able to do that. And we have just as bigger an inner critic as anyone else out there. So making sure that we’re part and parcel of that process is really important.
Jo Taylor
So one thing that’s really been noodling in my brain recently, you know, as a consultant, we have coaching and we deliver coaching, is that, I suppose, when I was a director of learning, was the propensity to buy in that external support versus actually grow your own. What’s the right balance? Or is there a right balance?
Shelley Hayward
Well, firstly, I think this is why we work with you Jo, because I don’t think there is that push for it all being external. You get that for me to do my job, there needs to be a balance, there’s not an endless pot of money and coaching is expensive, then it’s a real investment. I think there is a balance to strike. But I think that there are things you need to weigh up and weigh up carefully. From my experience, developing a coaching skill-set across the organisation is really key. So some of those skills that I mentioned before around listening and questioning and challenge and empowering people, they’re really key: creating the space. And I think learning and development, or people teams, have got a really big responsibility with creating the space for peer-to-peer coaching or action learning sets that have that coaching focus and that coaching style to them are really key. But I think the power of external coaching comes from not knowing the person. From having that absolute security, and that sense of safety around “this person cannot judge my world”. All the questions that they are asking of me is not because of them knowing what’s happening over in that team over there or what I did yesterday and how that conversation went. It’s completely impartial. So they’re there for you. And even in great cultures, there’s always that niggle of doubt that “is somebody telling me that, or is somebody saying that to me, because of x, y and z?”. So the power of external coaching comes from having that impartial voice there. So I think with that in mind, it’s about giving your leaders – giving your people – those skills to, when the time is right, have those coaching conversations and just know… isn’t it better? Even if we don’t call them coaching conversations, isn’t it great when someone just listens or asks a question to help you think a little bit deeper about a situation? If we had more of that happening across the world, how beautiful would it be? So developing those skills, creating the opportunity for peer-to-peer coaching across the organisation, getting people to understand that that’s the way that you do things, is probably the best place to get to internally and utilising those external coaches to move the needle on key populations of people and allow it to trickle through.
Jo Taylor
I think you make a really good point, because when I did a webinar recently about coaching, and I looked at it in three dimensions, coaching’s the utopia, right? It’s the one that we all aim for. But it’s really hard, and certain people are great at it, and some people are not. And you’ve got mentoring in the middle, haven’t you, which everyone’s very good at in terms of advice and guidance. And then you’ve got managing on the other side. And I think sometimes we expect our leaders to be great coaches, but actually they’re just good at managing, and operationally, and they’re good at mentoring, but it’s very difficult to be good at all three elements. Do you agree?
Shelley Hayward
I absolutely agree. And I think we put too much pressure on ourselves with staying in the place of coaching when really what our people are wanting from us is advice, is support, is direction. Having the skills in your back pocket means that you will start from a place of listening and questioning and probing first before then moving into that advice area. I know as myself as a leader sometimes I put a lot of pressure on myself to coach when that’s not what required. It’s more that mentoring piece, but it’s having the skills and knowing that continuum and knowing how to flow between the two. And if you’ve created that coaching programme, or that coaching culture within your organisation, you’ll know the people in your business to lean upon that need that little bit more support. And the best coaches, typically, from my experience within a business in an internal coaching environment, aren’t those that are in your direct line. Are the people that sit in a function far away from yours that haven’t got that insight or aren’t close enough to know the questions that could lead you in a certain way. So yes, I do agree, Jo.
Jo Taylor
I think you make a really great point that in a way, we’ve used coaching a lot in career coaching, it gives people an opportunity to explore the possibilities. So is the ambition with this pilot to not only look at the “heads of” level but actually to democratise it because there’s something that traditionally coaching has always been for, as you said, the exec level or the senior management team? Actually, there’s a real opportunity isn’t there to give everyone an opportunity to have that freedom and have that conversation? What’s the ambition, do you think? What’s your big, audacious goal?
Shelley Hayward
Ah, I love that: democratisation of coaching. It’s too late, if we give coaching to people at “head of” or exec level, it’s too late. We need to start thinking creatively as to how we can support a coaching culture throughout the organisation. Our intention is to look at ways of integrating coaching – one-to-one coaching – at many levels of the organisation. That doesn’t need to be costly. It’s not always about using external coaches, but it is about how you invest and educate your current workforce in being great coaches. Being able to listen – deeply listen – being able to ask probing questions, how to empower people, all of those great skills that we talk about needing in compassionate leaders are the exact same that you would be developing in order to create a coaching culture. So whether it’s peer-to-peer coaching that happens across the organisation, coaching circles, or even just the style that people use in their conversations, it’s absolutely critical that we start to democratise those coaching skills, so that it becomes part and parcel of the fabric of the organisation.
Jo Taylor
So if someone’s listening to this podcast, and they go, that’s all great, Shelley, but where do I start? What are your top tips for people starting on this coaching democratisation journey that we are eulogising today about?
Shelley Hayward
I don’t profess to be the expert with this, Jo. But all I know is that you have to start somewhere. Starting is better than doing diddly squat. For me, it started with conversation, it started with us engaging people from across the organisation, no matter what your level is. We’ve invited people to what we’ve called “power hours”, opportunities to come together to learn, to talk. That’s engaged people in learning, and thinking, rather than doing, in a different way. We’ve not run development programmes throughout the pandemic, nor do we intend to really start big development programmes back up. So we started by engaging people in a different way of learning, and then hooked in the coaching pilots to support that. So we’ve got this top-down and this bottom-up approach to coaching. I think it’s important as well to talk to your senior team, to be brave and ask the question, “why just you?” If we know it’s got value for you, then why wouldn’t it have value somewhere else in the organisation? So there’s something for me around starting somewhere, starting anywhere, engaging people in a different style of learning, creating the space for that coaching pilot, but also having some honest conversations with your senior leaders. Gone are the days of traditional tick-box training. As learning professionals, we now need to start having challenging conversations with our senior team to help them move the needle culturally and help them understand the impact that learning can have and the impact that coaching can have. Yeah, my advice is just start.
Jo Taylor
Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time. I know that I’ve learned a lot and I’m enthused by your energy and I wish you huge success at the Cumberland and we look forward to coming on the journey with you and talking to you again when you have more information about what changed as a result of this pilot. Thank you so much.
Shelley Hayward
Thank you, Jo.
Jo Taylor
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