Robin & Piyush discussing - Aligning Employees

Well, first of all, you don't do it yourself. You'd be nuts to figure that one person can do all of this stuff. So you obviously try to make sure that you establish a good team of people. Getting alignment is really important, and I think a lot of companies fail in getting alignment. I've often said in our disciplinary banking, it's not rocket science. Strategy is important, but it's not critical. You put 10 smart kids in a room and within a week they'll come up with a fairly similar strategy. The trick in banking is execution, and execution comes from alignment. So how do you get everybody to buy into the story? To get alignment you need two or three things. One, you've got to be able to tell the story well, and tell it simply, in a way that everybody from top to bottom not only understands the story but understands their role in the story. You know what part they're playing. This is like the janitor who was putting the man on the moon. So how do you get to a place where everybody in the system figures they're doing something to be the best bank in the world? Alignment is important, and you've got to walk the talk. You've got to create town halls. But second, you've got to create opportunities for people to learn by doing. I'm a big believer that adult learning comes from learning by doing. So we created this concept of hackathons. We gave tons of people the opportunity to go and work with startups. We created accelerators, not because we wanted to create the next iPhone, but because we wanted to give our people the confidence and ability to get their hands dirty and to learn by doing, and align everybody's thinking to what we wanted to get done. So I think that's an important part. The second key part is you do have to make sure that there is a more formal construct. I'm a big believer in a balanced scorecard, and so we use KPI setting and management principles in a very organized way. In 2014 I redid the scorecard for the company and I carved out a whole section, about 20-25% of our scorecard value, on transforming the company. Those metrics, which changed over time, were embraced by the whole management team and then cascaded down the company, so everybody knew what they needed to do and how they would actually make a difference in this whole transformation agenda. So you've got alignment, you've got a measurement and KPI setting process. And then third, I really invested in a central team. We have a central team which is the transformation team. It covers the key things you want to do. It's not very big. They tend to have people who focus on how do you make the company more innovative. They don't innovate, but they create a culture of innovation. There are 10 or 12 people there who focus on how do you make the company learn to work in an agile way, so they have the agile coaches and horizontal coaches etc. There is a bunch of people who focus on how they leverage data and become a data-driven company. Again, their job is to create a whole culture of data and being data-centric. So investing in the central team and resources to create the programs of change was important. Finally, the last thing: I'm a big believer you need to program for change. Change doesn't happen because you send an email out. Change doesn't happen because you wish it. Change must be programmed. To program it, you have to run conscious, definitive programs which you can then package, communicate, and drive down the system till people get it. So I think we did a lot of things which allowed people to jump on the bandwagon over time. But finally, to the earlier question, it's about giving people the space to make an impact and a difference. You can do all of this, but you have to create an environment where people are willing to take risk and be entrepreneurs, because they think that they can make an impact. That has a double effect: they make a difference to the company, but also it keeps them more engaged in their jobs, so your turnover rates are lower, attrition rates are lower, people want to be there for the longer term.

Yeah, actually, Robin, before I go into that, let me just make one observation. You asked about how do you change people and culture, and I should have mentioned this. I think what was a really important part of changing the internal culture of the bank was this relentless focus on what is right for the customer. It established a very simple and easy rubric for our people to follow: if it makes sense for the customer, you're empowered to do it. And that liberates people to do the right thing. So for me, this whole customer journey mapping, customer obsession really paid off very richly in the culture transformation we got in the mindsets of our people. But when we started off in this journey, thinking we came up with this 4D methodology to discover, define, develop, and deploy. We taught our people how to do this journey mapping. In fact, our board and our senior team, 250 of us, one year we spent two whole days at our retreat offsite teaching everybody from the board down on how to do this: how to do observation, how to do journey mapping, how to work backwards into outcomes. We spent a lot of time learning the art of observation, the discovery part of this process. And I developed a newfound respect for ethnographers and anthropologists because I learned that these people are trained to understand not just the physical aspect of what the customer does, but the deep emotional aspect of what the customer is really all about. So what is the emotive, true job to be done in the mind of the customer? And you can only do that if you observe well. Very early we also figured, which we put into practice, that increasingly much of our customers' interaction with us happens in the digital world, the digital platforms. If you can instrument that, then you can actually get a much better understanding of what the customer journey is like in the digital world. So we call it customer science. We started really perfecting the art of instrumentation and tracking customer movement. So I know at any point in time, because of the big screens, where are customers congregating, what's taking them time, where is the pain point, where do they tend to get stuck, where do they fall off. So we observe them in the real world, we have focus groups, we send people out, but we also observe them in the digital world to understand this whole discovery process really well. Then working backwards, over time we figured it wasn't just good enough to create the customer journey. And we did a lot of that. I challenged the company for the first three or four years, we did about 150 journeys every year to go and clean up the process, clean up the journey. But in the last couple of years, we've taken it a step further, which is to change the organization to manage through journeys. And that's important because it's not a one-time clean up the process, clean up the journey. It is how do we now reconfigure the organization horizontally to manage the journey. The two critical things you need if you want to manage through journeys: one is that you need to be able to create horizontal organizations, and second is you need to be tremendously data-driven because you're bringing various verticals together. So we call it D-DOM: a data-driven operating model and a horizontal organization. These are two critical things you need to put together if you really want to manage through journeys. But that's where we are now: increasingly managing the company through customer journeys, not just running them as projects.

Well, first of all, you don't do it yourself. You've got to be nuts to figure that one person can do all of this stuff. So you obviously try to make sure that you establish a good team of people. Getting alignment is really important, and I think a lot of companies fail in getting alignment. I've often said in our disciplinary banking, it's not rocket science. Strategy is important, but it's not critical. You put 10 smart kids in a room and within a week they'll come up with a fairly similar strategy. The trick in banking is execution, and execution comes from alignment. So how do you get everybody to buy into the story? To get alignment you need two or three things. One, you've got to be able to tell the story well, and tell it simply, in a way that everybody from top to bottom not only understands the story but understands their role in the story. You know what part they're playing. This is like the janitor who was putting the man on the moon. So how do you get to a place where everybody in the system figures they're doing something to be the best bank in the world? Alignment is important, and you've got to walk the talk. You've got to create town halls. But second, you've got to create opportunities for people to learn by doing. I'm a big believer that adult learning comes from learning by doing. So we created this concept of hackathons. We gave tons of people the opportunity to go and work with startups. We created accelerators, not because we wanted to create the next iPhone, but because we wanted to give our people the confidence and ability to get their hands dirty and to learn by doing, and align everybody's thinking to what we wanted to get done. So I think that's an important part. The second key part is you do have to make sure that there is a more formal construct. I'm a big believer in a balanced scorecard, and so we use KPI setting and management principles in a very organized way. In 2014 I redid the scorecard for the company and I carved out a whole section, about 20-25% of our scorecard value, on transforming the company. Those metrics, which changed over time, were embraced by the whole management team and then cascaded down the company, so everybody knew what they needed to do and how they would actually make a difference in this whole transformation agenda. So you've got alignment, you've got a measurement and KPI setting process. And then third, I really invested in a central team. We have a central team which is the transformation team. It covers the key things you want to do. It's not very big. They tend to have people who focus on how do you make the company more innovative. They don't innovate, but they create a culture of innovation. There are 10 or 12 people there who focus on how do you make the company learn to work in an agile way, so they have the agile coaches and horizontal coaches etc. There is a bunch of people who focus on how they leverage data and become a data-driven company. Again, their job is to create a whole culture of data and being data-centric. So investing in the central team and resources to create the programs of change was important. Finally, the last thing: I'm a big believer you need to program for change. Change doesn't happen because you send an email out. Change doesn't happen because you wish it. Change must be programmed. To program it, you have to run conscious, definitive programs which you can then package, communicate, and drive down the system till people get it. So I think we did a lot of things which allowed people to jump on the bandwagon over time. But finally, to the earlier question, it's about giving people the space to make an impact and a difference. You can do all of this, but you have to create an environment where people are willing to take risk and be entrepreneurs, because they think that they can make an impact. That has a double effect: they make a difference to the company, but also it keeps them more engaged in their jobs, so your turnover rates are lower, attrition rates are lower, people want to be there for the longer term.