Hosted by John Jeffcock, CEO of Winmark and author of The Suite Spot
The Suite Spot interview with Lesley Knox
What background and skills are essential to being an effective Non-Executive Director? How do career experiences and connections impact your ability to contribute at Board level? In this episode of The Suite Spot, we talk with experienced Non-Executive Director Lesley Knox about her wide-ranging career across legal, executive and non-executive roles. We hear about the people and events which influenced Lesley, as well as her passion for learning.
Lesley offers a number of interesting insights for those climbing the leadership ladder, including:
- How non-traditional paths to the boardroom are possible if you are willing to learn how to interpret the numbers
- The importance of understanding different viewpoints – customers, employees and shareholders
- How a passion for lifelong learning and saying yes to new opportunities is key.
LEADERSHIP LESSONS AND CAREER ADVICE FROM
Lesley Knox, Senior Independent Director at 3i
and Genus PLC, and Chair of Legal and General Investment Management
TRANSCRIPT
John Jeffcock (JJ) Welcome to The Suite Spot interview series, where we explore how to reach, lead and deliver on into the C-Suite. Delighted today to be joined by Lesley Knox, who is a senior independent director at 3i and at Genius plc and non-executive Chair of Legal and General Investment Management. Lesley, great to be with you here today and thank you for joining us. So my first question for you is: when you were a child, what did you want to be?
Lesley Knox (LK) That’s easy. I really wanted to be a vet and my father wouldn’t let me. He was a doctor and he thought animals were less important than people. So, I started out my career by having a place of medical school.
JJ And then you went to Cambridge University, is that right? What did you read there then?
LK So I read Law there because my A Levels, as they were in those days, were Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Maths. Law was one of the very few things I could do without going back to school.
JJ When you were leaving university, did you have a plan of where you wanted to go with your career?
LK I had enjoyed law at university. I worked in the holidays at a Family Law firm and realized I really, really, really didn’t want to deal with people going through divorce. So, it made me realize that I wanted to go and work for an international firm that did corporate law. Hence, I got a job at Slaughter and May.
JJ So can you summarize your career into a minute?
LK I qualified as a lawyer in the UK and then qualified as a lawyer in the United States of America, then realized I was really interested in business, not law. I came back to the UK, intending to go to Business School. My elder brother rightly said I was already overqualified, so I went to work for Kleinworts, the investment bank. When I was there, I was in Corporate Finance and then I got offered a job to run a business by one of my clients.
I told Kleinworts I was leaving and they gave me the opportunity to be the Chief Executive of the investment business. So that’s what I did. When Dresdner Bank took over Kleinworts I was offered a job in Frankfurt, but actually even though I speak German I didn’t really want to go do that. So at that point I left to help the Bank of Scotland sort out its investment bank, became a founder of that investment bank, and then moved on to a career as a non executive.
JJ When you reflect back on your career, are there key moments or decisions that you’ve made that you feel have been key to getting you to where you are today?
LK Yes, one of them is something I did and one of them was probably more luck. Going to the United States meant that when I was applying for investment banks (remember, I’m a lawyer by training and the general view is lawyers can’t count) the thing that they were all really interested in was the fact that I brought that US experience. And so that got me into an investment bank in the days when accountants were much more what was being looked for.
The bit of luck was that I was an investment banker in the days when you were a generalist, so I did Abbey National’s demutualisation and Beecham and Smith Klein’s merger. I did food, financial services, pharmacy, everything – nowadays, I think people end up much more siloed much more early.
“If you're given any opportunity - take it. You know, everything you learn comes back to being useful at a later date. And so even if you're slightly wary about whether you've really got the skills or it's a new area or it's a new skill you're being given a chance to learn, the answer is go and do it.”
JJ If I look through our Non-Executive Director network and look at the backgrounds for the majority, there’s a lot of them come from the finance – do you feel that that is a good thing? What’s your view on that?
LK I think there’s an issue for any board which is you really can’t have people who are only there for one skill. The problem for a corporate board is you actually need people who are comfortable looking at the numbers. And I suspect that’s why people tend to come from at least if not financial services, they come from being finance directors, chief executives, running PLCs. You’ve got to be able to run the numbers as well as the business and that means you’ve either got to be in charge of a big business or have learned the numbers.
So if you look, there are lots of people who came through areas like marketing, which again traditionally wouldn’t be seen as being that numerate. But they’ve run big divisions of major companies and so they proved that they can look at the numbers and look at the budget and they prove that they can bring that to another business in another board.
JJ So what you’re saying there is that line experience of running a profit centre is very important in getting into a board role?
LK Yes because you’re actually not going into the same type of business, as that would be a competitor. So you’re going into a business that’s probably a business you’ve never worked in, so you’ve got to bring that analytical capability and that means you can’t be scared of the numbers. You’ve got to be interested both in customers, numbers, people. You’ve got to have all of those pieces.
JJ And in your career did you ever have a guide or mentor or key influencer that encouraged you or helped you on your path and if so, how did they help you?
LK Yes very much so. I have worked for about 15 years for a company called Hillsdown Holdings that was actually a very, very big food business. It was started by two people, one of whom was a lawyer called Sir Harry Solomon. Harry was a huge support and a huge mentor over the years in the sense that he proved that even with the legal background, you could go and become an entrepreneur. You could build a huge business. So he was very much someone who helped me and encouraged me and was probably pretty critical in me becoming the first female director of a plc.
JJ And you’ve changed organizations a few times in your career. Do you think you made the right decisions at the right time? What sort of advice would you give people about changing organizations?
LK Yes, I’ve no regrets. I’m very lucky about that. I’m also someone who really likes to learn. So changing organizations has always been really interesting. But when the Dresner Bank took over Kleinworts, that of course wasn’t my choice. It was what happened in the world.
And I’ve never regretted not moving to Germany and the reason for that is simply that they had very, very few foreigners and they had even fewer women. I’m not sure they even had any senior women. So for me, the thought of trying to change that culture as a single foreign entity, even though I speak German, just felt to me like too big an ask. So I have never regretted that.
JJ And have you ever had a career crisis at some point and how have you dealt with it if you have?
LK I’ve never had a crisis in my own career but I’ve been involved in a number of businesses where the businesses went through huge change or other problems. So I’ve seen a lot of them at quite close quarters and I think one of the things you learned quite quickly is you absolutely have to be able to take a deep breath of the end of each day and just be confident you’ve done the best you can. Sometimes things are outside your control and your role as a non-executive is to support the executives going through a really seriously traumatic period. So I think being able to stay calm is actually quite an important bit of it.
JJ You said you were a permanent learner earlier. How do you develop your skills and knowledge and keep them live and relevant?
LK My theory has always been to try and be in very different boards, where what you are thinking about in one place gives you an insight into another. So for example, when I was on the board of SAB Miller, that is all about the growth of the middle class around the world because you move from what’s known as informal alcohol to buying branded alcohol.
That actually means that what you’re learning about is the economics of countries all around the world, and that’s an enormous help. If you are then working with other businesses that are also trying to expand internationally, what you’re learning in one place just gives you that context. When you hear somebody else talking about a country you either think, yeah, it’s interesting, that sort of is the same sort of response or you’re sitting there going ‘I wonder why it’s different in this sector when someone else is telling me something different in another sector?’
“If you're given any opportunity - take it. You know, everything you learn comes back to being useful at a later date. And so even if you're slightly wary about whether you've really got the skills or it's a new area or it's a new skill you're being given a chance to learn, the answer is go and do it.”
JJ And how important has your network been in your career, your personal network?
LK I think for everybody it’s a professional network, if I could put it like that. Obviously as you know only too well these days, boards are made up of formal processes, but just to give you an example many, many years ago I was a director of Hayes, the recruitment agency, Bob Lawson was the chairman. I was there, I was the CID. I obviously got to know him well. When he became chairman of Genus, which is an animal health and a breeding business, they were looking for a new director and he was the one who said to the head hunters, reach out to Lesley and the head hunters sort of went ‘Why would an earth would she be interested?’ And Bob said, well, I happen to know because she started out life wanting to be a vet. The combination of that and 15 years of working with Hillsdown, who were poultry breeders rather than pork, beef or pig breeders. I happen to know she knows something about it.
So you know that’s where the network I think really does help – someone who knows something about you that’s not necessarily that obvious from the CV.
JJ Do you think there is one key thing about you that enabled you to get into management roles rather than someone else. What was it that may have helped you make that step?
LK Obviously the investment background’s enormously helpful because you are used to looking at companies and all public companies have shareholders so you’re used to the shareholder perspective. That’s a huge help.
I think the other thing in my view is you have to learn to be prepared to ask stupid questions. I’ve sat on endless boards where people have said afterwards to me, I’m so glad you asked that question. People I think are often very scared to ask questions because they’re scared they will look foolish, whereas of course you know very often actually when you ask a question, that’s when you actually get to the nub of something.
JJ Yes, exactly. And with that in mind, do you think your style of how you approach leadership has changed over the pandemic at all?
LK What’s been really interesting is that I am one of the ‘voice of the employee’ directors at Genus and I’ve just ceased to be that at Legal and General. What the pandemic did was enable me much more easily to connect with staff all over the world because actually it’s very easy to get people to join a Teams or a Zoom call for an hour. You know that’s easy for them to do – it’s not easy to get them to come into an office when actually they’ve got a day job and their boss may or may not be enthusiastic about them leaving.
And so for me, one of the interesting bits has been the ability actually to connect with a much wider range of our staff so much, often in different jurisdictions and different countries. So that’s been a plus. I’ve learned a lot, particularly from my younger staff, or people saying things like they find it uncomfortable having phone calls. And you sort of go ‘what?’. And they are used to doing it on FaceTime but they’re not used to the sorts of things that, as an older member of the member of a team, you’re used to doing. So, I think they were much more forthright than they might have been in a meeting.
JJ So do you feel that the pandemic therefore has in a way empowered Remuneration and Nomination Committees?
LK Yes. The thing I’ve noticed is that for example in recruiting more of the independent directors have been able to meet potential candidates, because it’s very easy to fix up a meeting than if you’re actually trying to do that in person, then everybody’s diary is very difficult. So actually I think when we recruited our Chair of Genus, for example, actually all of the non-executives got a chance to meet several of the candidates. Usually that’s just impossible with international non-executives, you just can’t make the timing work.
So there have been some things I think that it’s been helpful for. I mean nothing replaces meeting people face to face, but there’s certainly been aspects that actually I think have been really helpful.
JJ And my final question for you is if you were meeting a 30 year old today and you were reflecting on your career, what advice would you give to someone who wanted to be in your shoes in 20 years’ time?
LK If you’re given any opportunity – take it. You know, everything you learn comes back to be useful at a later date. And so even if you’re slightly wary about whether you’ve really got the skills or it’s a new area or it’s a new skill you’re being given a chance to learn, the answer is go and do it because at some stage it would be really useful to you.
JJ Thank you, Lesley, very much indeed for your time today. We look forward to you continuing to have a very successful career and thank you very much for all your advice. Thank you.
