To develop a business you must also develop its employees, says Heather Cooper, chief people officer of financial services giant Hargreaves Lansdown. As an executive coach she is bringing new thinking to this vital role. Interview by Liz Hall
Heather Cooper is possibly the first female executive coach in the UK to be made a director in a FTSE 100 company.
In November 2015, Cooper was appointed to the new role of chief people officer at Bristol-based financial services company Hargreaves Lansdown (HL). She was made a director last February (2017), joining the ranks of the 29% or so women making up hires to UK boards in 2016 (according to biennial research by headhunting firm Egon Zehnder: www.egonzehnder.com/GBDA).
According to Cooper, her appointment at HL, which is one of the largest companies in the UK, administering more than £61.7 billion of client assets on behalf of 836,000 investors (30 June 2016),“shows how much the business values the importance of my role and of people to the success of the business”. It also demonstrates HL’s commitment to building diversity, she says.
Her background in consultancy, high-performing teams and executive coaching does make her stand out in this role, she says.
“A traditional chief people officer would come through HR operations. I think my background gives a different flavour to the way I engage with the business, with a bent towards the importance of the development of people in addition to having strong HR processes. The development of our business is intrinsically linked with the development of our people; you can’t have one without the other.”
And given this background, it’s unsurprising that she’s prioritised putting people at the heart of its leadership and business strategies, which she says is now “hard-wired into the strategy of the business”.
“The importance of people is now hard-wired into all our conversations at executive level. We have senior level buy-in – for this process we had to have complete commitment and support from colleagues [employees]. The new CEO is talking about people and values, and this year our 10 directors have each led focus groups [on this] with their teams for the first time.”
Nor is it surprising that she’s set about implementing a multi-pronged coaching strategy. This includes a new manager-as-coach pilot programme, and more generally “we are embedding an inclusive, coaching approach to all our development programmes and citing this style as the preferred style of leading others.”
Cooper has instigated a raft of initiatives including new career development and team development programmes, themed weeks including Healthy Living Week, Healthy Minds Week and Personal Development Week and an internal careers fair.
Before joining the company three years ago, Cooper led London-based talent development consultancy Gordon Cooper Associates, which she set up with her husband, working across Europe as an executive/leadership development coach, HR and talent consultant between 2000 and January 2015.
While at Gordon Cooper, she worked with a team of experienced coaches and consultants to deliver a range of senior partner development initiatives and HR talent consulting assignments. These included a six-month consultancy stint from January 2015 for Hargreaves on a high-potential competency model.
“During the course of this period, HL was starting to see the importance of people to the strategy of the business,” she says. So when she joined, “I set out a simple people strategy to attract the right people, making sure we have skilled, motivated and engaged people, the right culture embedded, putting client needs at the heart of all that we do, and doing these cost-effectively.
“Step one was going back to basics, making sure we had the fundamental HR process in place. I recruited a capable team, which is still growing.”
There are currently 30 in the team based in Bristol, UK and Warsaw, Poland, delivering “full service people expertise” across HR business partners and HR analysis, HR admin, talent acquisition, learning and development – including talent management and colleague communication.
“Step two was to add real value, stepping up to work more as a partner to the business. The main tool here was independent benchmarking through Korn Ferry so we could get an outside view on employee engagement, benchmarked against other
high-performing organisations and those in our industry.”
The first Korn Ferry-delivered colleague engagement survey was carried out in October 2015, and is now done annually.
“We followed up with focus groups facilitated by colleagues across the board listening carefully to what they had to say. Then at the beginning of 2016, we put in place an action plan, making “significant changes”.
“We’ve significantly improved our pensions scheme, our range of employee benefits, health care options, our approach to wellbeing, our approach to pay and bonus. We’ve changed our approach to performance management, introducing career planning as part
of the appraisal process.
“We’ve also improved the quality and quantity of communication across the business – becoming a listening organisation that ‘cares’ about its colleagues. And we’ve launched a culture project to articulate and embed our mission and values.”
The company’s values are: Care – put the client first; Service – go the extra mile; Integrity – do the right thing; Simplicity – make it easy, and Innovative – do it better.
The next colleague engagement results were expected to be available last month [December] and according to Cooper, HL was “expecting to see significant improvements in employee engagement and feedback on management style”.
In the future, HL will be moving to bi-annual colleague surveys along with a wide range of other surveys “to keep our finger on the pulse of the views of our colleagues. We want to really listen to their views and take on board their feedback to create an even greater place to work.”
Coaching strategy
HL partnered with coaches Jenny Bird and Sarah Gornall to help it develop and deliver on its coaching strategy and build a coaching culture.
Cooper says, “They have been invaluable in our journey to becoming a coaching organisation by providing one-to-one coaching to our senior leaders, designing and delivering our manager-as-coach programme pilot, and advising on the implementation of our coaching strategy.”
The first 15 participants are currently going through the manager-as-coach pilot, which has been designed to align to ICF competencies. All HL’s directors will also be attending this programme in 2018, and it will continue to offer more places on the programme.
Coaching has also been interwoven into other initiatives. Personal Development Week, which has taken place over the past two years, has included motivational speakers, workshops on impact and influence, and career development drop-in sessions. It’s also featured coaching demonstrations. Colleagues were introduced to the GROW model, giving “participants the opportunity to hone their coaching skills on each other”.
Other L&D initiatives
Two years ago, Cooper launched an ongoing executive development programme “to build inclusive leadership and high-performing teams”, which is “going very well” and which includes group-based learning, MBTI and 360-degree feedback.
Last year [2017] saw the opening of the HL Learning Academy, which hosts a suite of career and team development programmes, delivered by Pearn Kandola and Results Catalysts.
More than a fifth of the workforce has attended the Academy already.
“It’s been very successful: we’re receiving outstanding feedback.
“We now provide development programmes for all our colleagues at each step of their career, but these programmes are over-subscribed and we are working as quickly as possible to provide more slots. We’re doing a lot of catching up, but my intention is that all 1,000 colleagues will have the opportunity to go on a programme.”
One of the career development programmes, Vista, is for senior leaders and 24 have participated to date. Other programmes include Pathways for Middle Managers.
HL has launched a careers website, ‘Invest in your future’, “to promote the business, its values and its opportunities. This way, we will attract different sources of talent, particularly millennials”.
The website is proving to be a success: “In the past six months visits to the site have more than doubled. We are planning more innovation with a slick digital onboarding process that connects new recruits with a mentor and a network – even before they join.”
An internal Careers Fair was held in May 2017 for the first time “where colleagues can see all the different careers in the business and how they can prepare for them”.
Cooper has helped to bring about the opening of HL Tech in Warsaw “to increase the talent pool of skilled IT colleagues into the business”.
“I was working with the IT director to build the case and kick off this exciting initiative for the business. In a short space of time we have recruited 50 IT colleagues. Already the team in Warsaw have won an award – HL Tech has been named Top UK Investor of the Year [in Poland], praising the culture, development opportunities and partnership between the team in Bristol and the team in Warsaw.”
Cooper has also been focusing on building social communities, pulling together an annual social calendar, with “something for everyone”, and which is not just a social “nice to have”, but focusing on healthy living and CSR.
Healthy Living Week offers colleagues a wide range of activities, such as fitness classes, health MOTs, singing classes and mindfulness classes, while Healthy Minds Week is an awareness week that includes workshops on mindfulness, personal resilience, mental health and nutrition.
Background
Cooper started her career with Marks & Spencer in commercial management then learning and development, later working in an L&D consultancy, before setting up Gordon Cooper. She has held a number of senior appointments at Deloitte in both HR leadership and HR consultancy.
In the early days of Gordon Cooper “it was more L&D, but I noticed I liked working one-on-one so I started developing through the Academy of Executive Coaching and Ashridge.”
What has shaped her?
“Coaching, the work by Peter Hawkins, and I found Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead [S Sandberg] to be a very powerful book – as a woman, as a mindset, being in a listening place and staying open.
“I often spend Fridays in London listening to new ideas and people, and the last six months I’ve been… reading lots about Poland and its history.
“I read a lot around different topics, for example, technology through to the latest thinking in leadership and business news.”
She’s a big fan of the Internet, of the Snapchat app in particular, which she finds a great way to keep in touch with teenagers, including her own children, and to post snaps of her cooking with chocolate.
“My focus at the moment is being a helpful adult as they make their journey into adulthood; there’s a requirement to be more developmental. It’s like leadership.”
What is it like going from coaching to this role? “Going from being a coach to being a director in a FTSE 100 regulated environment requires a lot of support. I have a fantastic team around me, not just the team of HR colleagues, but elsewhere in the business. It’s testament to the culture at HL.”
And what about being a female board director in a FTSE 100?
“When my kids were younger, I didn’t pursue my career in the same way; I made a choice. And now I can’t get away from it. This role is a lot of responsibility so the amount of hours you give to it is a lot too. But I take a holistic view, looking at how the whole month has been. At times I’ve been enormously busy, there have been times when I’m meant to have taken a holiday and I haven’t. At other times, it’s been a bit more flexible.
“It’s hard, but it continues to be a priority for me to spend time with my kids, to be a wife, a mum, a sister and a daughter. All of those roles continue to be upfront to me, and I’ve built them into my life. So if I need to go to a school thing, I will. I’m flexible around how I work it. I have a home office and a place to work in Bristol, and I also have a place to work in London and I have my laptop, so I have flexibility of where I work. The way I see it is, I’m working to the objectives and I’m a strong advocate of flexible working.
My CEO plays equally his role as a dad, and prioritises that.
“Self-belief is important, and to dream big. And I had really great coaches who have provided me with great support to be able to achieve what I’ve achieved. I’m keen to encourage others to dream big. Because this was my dream – this is what I wanted to achieve.”