Hosted by John Jeffcock, CEO of Winmark and author of The Suite Spot
The Suite Spot interview with Danielle Harmer
What skills do you need to be a Chief People Officer? How do career experiences and connections impact your ability to contribute as an Executive Team leader and adviser to the CEO?
In this episode of The Suite Spot, we talk with Aviva’s Chief People Officer, Danielle Harmer, about her career path and the key influences on her progress from line management to staff management.
Danielle offers some tips for those seeking to pursue a leadership career in Human Resources, including:
- Why wanting to work with people is not a reason to go into a HR role – it’s about data, business strategy and taking some tough decisions
- The importance of knowing what it’s like to be a customer of the service you are offering
- How to understand what the business does by getting grass roots experience and partnering with the CEO to develop the business strategy.
LEADERSHIP LESSONS AND CAREER ADVICE FROM
Danielle Harmer, CPO, Aviva
TRANSCRIPT
John Jeffcock (JJ) Welcome to The Suite Spot interview series, where we explore how to reach lead and deliver a C-Suite role today. I’m delighted to be joined here today by Danielle Harmer, Chief People Officer of Aviva. Danny, thank you for joining us today.
Danielle Harmer (DH) Thank you so much for having me.
JJ So can I start by asking, what did you want to be when you were a child?
DH Well, obviously a princess for a little while and probably a ballet dancer as well. I did ballet until I was 17 – I wasn’t really built for it, but I did love it. But the thing I most wanted to be was a maths teacher. I really, really wanted to be a maths teacher when I was younger, I suspect because I had a maths teacher I thought was great and I quite enjoyed the subject. I can see no other reason for my passion at the time as a child to go “I’d just love to be a math teacher!” but that faded with time.
JJ So when did you decide that HR was your thing?
DH It was much more recently actually. I was working at Halifax Bank of Scotland and at the time, I was an area manager working in the retail network looking after areas or branches and somebody said to me “What do you think you want to do with your career?” Actually, it was a new regional director who’d come in. And I said, “Do you know, I think I’d be OK at this HR thing” because the way I ran my area is all about how? How is it that people impact on the performance of the area – the customer experience, how we plan our resourcing, how we allocate targets in relation to people’s skills and capabilities and also to the market area.
For example, at the beginning of every quarter we’d sit down and do our targeting and go, right Hounslow is really good at personal lending, Richmond is really good at investment. So, we should put our best investment advisor in Richmond and our best personal loan advisor in Hounslow and we should allocate the targets accordingly. And who’s our next assistant manager going to be, who’s our next branch manager going to be, and how do we man the store so that on Saturdays we’re providing excellent service to customers. All the sort of interventions that sit as part of HR were the things that I think made my areas successful.
We had a new regional director come in and said “What do you want to do?” and I said, “I just think the way I run my area, if you scaled that it would make the business more successful and God love him probably about ten to nine months later, heavily pregnant with my second child, he came to see me at home and said “We’re changing the footprint of some of the regions. The London region is too big, we’re splitting it in two, which means we need another head of HR. How about it?” “Yes please” I said (I did point out with my large stomach, full of baby). I went “I’m about to have a child”, and you know this is the sort of stuff that nearly 19 years ago was quite unusual, he said “Don’t worry, we’ll cover it.”
“There have definitely been instances where I have gone ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ but you need to be prepared to bet on yourself and understand that you do have skills and value to add. And that's easier if you've moved jobs and you know you're going to be fine.”
JJ If you had to summarise your whole career in one minute, what would you say?
DH That’s the worst question. I mean, it’s a brilliant question but it’s the worst question ever to answer – what have I done in the past 30 years? I have had the opportunity to see not only great leadership but what I’ve understood is that the secret of success for every business I’ve been in is through its people and the biggest impact on that is leadership.
In HR we have the privilege to support on the agenda, but we don’t own it. We’re kind of there as custodians of culture and performance and leadership and values, but I think I there are so many inputs into leadership. For example, I think becoming a parent made me a better leader. I was probably very ‘pointy-elbowed’ and ambitious before I had children, and suddenly for me becoming a parent when you realize you can’t control everything, it’s not about you anymore, you go OK, well this is an interesting change in my life.
JJ How would you describe your current role briefly?
DH The purpose of what we do at the Aviva people function is to help Aviva be better through its people and I think the key thing is, what is the organizational strategy? What is it that the business needs to achieve for its customers, shareholders, employees, the various stakeholders? And how does the people function enable that? And then get ahead of it and actually be part of the agent for change to help the business be all that it can be.
Ultimately, of course I’m going to say this because of the job I do, but genuinely, what do businesses have? It’s all about people, same with you right? You can replicate technology and you can have physical networks and products but it’s your people that have the biggest impact on what your customers experience – the value that’s created from the inputs that you choose as a business. And so it’s just such a brilliant job to do.
JJ And have there been key moments or decisions that you’ve made in your career that have been key to getting you to where you are today?
DH I think going into HR, leaving Halifax Bank of Scotland – by then it was Lloyds Banking Group because HBOS had been acquired by Lloyds Banking Group at that point during the financial crisis. Choosing to leave was a really important step for me. I’d been there maybe 17 years and it had been a fantastic place to work because it’s a big organization. The career opportunities were operations roles, store leader, branch leadership roles, local director, area manager, regional director, HR, fantastic grounding.
I loved it there, I knew the people, I was comfortable, but I only knew one way of doing things. It was more than one culture, but the Halifax Bank of Scotland/Lloyds sort of smorgasbord of what existed in the business.
And when I left it felt like a pretty terrifying thing to do to just go work for another organisation. I had worked somewhere else before I worked for HBOS but it was just transformational for me to go, OK, hang on a sec, I thought that what I did was good because of the place I was. Actually, I can separate my skills and qualities from what’s great about the organization and see what I have that’s transferable and how I can apply that learning in a different environment. I think you get a clearer sense of you and the value you bring when you take what you have to another business. I’m not saying if people are incredibly happy in their organisations by all means stay, but I think it can bring a narrowness to your experience and the value you bring to an organization if you don’t move. And here’s the thing, if they are a decent business, they’ll say to you if it doesn’t work out, come back. So give it a go, give it a while.
JJ You started off in line management and you moved to what they call staff role. Do you think that that earlier line experience has been important to what you do today?
DH I think it’s important in two ways I think. Firstly, I had been a customer of HR so I understood what I wanted. Please don’t tell me about shiny new things that you’re doing that you think are brilliant – tell me how you’re going to help me as a business leader with being better or growing or dealing with this issue I’ve got that I’m finding really tricky to resolve.
So, being a customer of the service you provide is really important. I say to my team all the time, be a customer of us. Go on and try applying for a job with us. Continue to challenge yourself and look at what you do through a different lens.
I think the second one is it probably helps with your credibility. You speak the broader language of business and leadership. And when you are supporting people and coaching them and challenging them to be able to say, ‘Oh yeah, you know, when I was a regional director, here’s some of the things I tried.’ That I think helps give you a sort of credibility and a grounding that’s really useful in the role.
JJ And on that journey have you had a guide or mentor/influencer that had a particularly significant impact on you?
DH You know, I’m asked this question and every time I go no, I think I’m very lucky to have relationships with lots of people and they all bring something. And I hope it’s two-way, I hope I support them as well.
But I do tend to have a few mentoring, coaching, informal relationships with people which I kind of dial up and down. I quite like the kind of ‘I really need to noodle this over with somebody who’s going to challenge me on it. I’ll phone Vicky’ or ‘Wow, this is an interesting question on inclusion, Mel is brilliant at this and I’m going to give her a call’. That’s pretty much how I’ve managed mentoring and relationships over my career and it’s just how it works for me.
“When you have lots of passionate people, all caring about what's going on, saying ‘what does the data tell us, what do we really need to do?’ is important. And it's definitely something that I have carried with me - data keeping you on track is really important for business leaders whatever you're doing.”
JJ And have you ever had a career crisis moment or was it clear sailing all the way?
DH Yeah, definitely not clear sailing all the way. I mean making the decision to leave Lloyds, which was absolutely the right thing to do, but those decisions are hard. If you love a business and the people in it, they are hard. So deciding to do that was tricky.
I then moved to Barclays where I was working in their corporate functions doing HR. It was a time of enormous change for Barclays and in the c.18 months I was there, I think I had probably 4 bosses with the change going on in the organization. And Barclays is a great organisation, fantastic brand and it attracts really good talent but I was ready to leave when I decided to leave Barclays and then went to Metro Bank, which I literally fell in love with. I mean a little piece of my heart is still Metro Bank red because it’s just a fantastic organization. I didn’t start it but coming in early and building something, that is challenging and creating customers is a brilliant experience, especially with not huge amounts of funds to do it. And it encourages you to be really creative.
So, there have definitely been a couple of instances where I have gone, “Am I doing the right thing?” but you need to be prepared to bet on yourself and understand that you do have skills and value that you add. And that’s easier if you’ve moved jobs and you know you’re going to be fine.
JJ And so, how do you develop those skills and knowledge through your career?
DH I have a sort of kit bag of skills and experiences and I was talking to someone in my team the other day about this. I think the way I gather stuff is through stories and experiences. And I also share that learning through stories and experiences. And the way I kind of apply my knowledge is I go well… there’s been a previous experience where I’ve tried this and you know what happened? What did I do? Because, thankfully, with 30 plus years of experience if you can keep it all and go “Well, that didn’t go well. I’m really not going to do that again.” And “That went well. Let’s think about why it went well.” I think that’s really important.
One of the interesting things when I was running business development/sales teams that I always found fascinating was that when you speak to sales leaders most of them can tell you when things aren’t going well. Most of them can tell you in great detail why they’re not going well. And then when things are going well, they don’t really know. They’re just going well, this is great. I’m just going to enjoy the ride. The really good business development leaders, and I had the experience to work with many of them in my team, what really impressed me about them was that they could tell me why things were going well and then they could replicate it. And that’s a really important point.
JJ In terms of your network, how important has that been to you?
DH Really important. It’s the sounding boards, you know, somebody’s got you. We just need to remember that leadership jobs can be quite lonely and actually you need to have cheerleaders around you. Now, I don’t just mean people who go “Well Danny, that’s brilliant, I think that’s absolutely genius.” They need to be straightforward, someone who’s rooting for you, someone who’s got you, someone who comes to you with positive intent even when they’re telling you something you don’t want to hear. And actually the flip side of that is that it’s a really important part of the CHRO/CPO job, as part of the leadership team and in terms of the partnering relationship you have with the CEO.
JJ And when you got into your first executive committee team, or your first c-suite team, what do you think it was about you that got you that step?
DH So, my first executive committee or the leadership team of an independent organization or a listed company was Metro Bank. We weren’t listed when I first joined, but we listed during my time with them. The CEO there, Craig Donaldson knew of me from HBOS and some of his team had worked with me at HBOS – our paths had kind of crossed.
I think it was my probably the breadth of experience, the fact that I knew retail banking really well that I had a passion for the customer and a passion for how the calling experience feeds through to the customer experience, and enough breadth of experience to be able to build stuff and find pragmatic solutions. He took a chance on me which was brilliant. And during my time there I think what Craig would say is good brain, able to find solutions, willing to be in a minority of 1, which is not always fun, but can be important.
And I think this is true of everyone at Metro Bank, in the executive committee. When we sat around the table it was hard to tell what somebody’s job was, what their specialism was, because there was a very strong sense of being a leadership team. But when push came to shove, and this was definitely an ethos we had as a team, if there was really strong challenge and disagreement, ultimately if it was a people thing, I was the expert so then it was my shout on it.
I think the other thing about being on the executive team at Metro Bank was that everybody there was so passionate about what we were building that the need to be really grounded in the data was so important in that business because when you have lots of passionate people, all caring about what’s going on, having that “what does the data tell us, what do we really need to do?” is important. And it’s definitely something that I have carried with me and certainly at Aviva we’ve got a brilliant people data analytics team now and that kind of data keeping you on track is really important for business leaders whatever you’re doing.
JJ And if you reflect back on your whole career, is there anything you would have done differently?
DH There are lots of things I should have probably done differently, but I’m a great believer in learning from it, because either way, whether it’s brilliant or not so brilliant, there’s learning to be taken from it and don’t beat yourself up a bit about it. Life’s a wee bit too short for regrets about should have, would have, as long as you’ve learned from it. That’s the most important thing.
Could I have left Lloyds sooner? Yeah. Could I have gone somewhere else instead of Barclays? Yeah. In fact, when I joined Barclays, I was talking to Metro Bank about going there and went “Oh that’s a bit scary. It’s a bit too early. I’m not really sure that’s the right thing for me to do” but going to Barclays was brilliant for me. It gave me a different experience and a grounding in the corporate function aspect of HR, which I wouldn’t have got anywhere else and is very useful in my current role. You know, the other thing that Barclays is great for, a grounding in from an HR perspective is especially when you doing corporate functions is reward. Reward is a really important aspect of doing Group CHRO role. You really do need to understand, especially in financial services, remuneration and how it works. So I try not to have regrets, just try and learn along the way.
JJ And has the pandemic impacted your leadership style at all?
DH Yes, I think both the pandemic and also coming back to an organization the scale of Aviva. Lloyds, when I left must have been 125,000 people? It was huge. Barclays was huge, but the corporate functions were a fairly defined set of people. When I joined Metro Bank it was this tiny 300 people, and 4000 when I left.
So, coming into an organization the size of Aviva which, when I joined, I think we had 28,000 people. It’s much easier to get to know our business and its people by just getting out on the road and meeting people and understanding what your customers experience and what the learnings like and what it’s like to be hired into a contact centre in Aviva and all that sort of stuff.
When I joined Aviva in February 2020, a month before lockdown, I said to the team who support me there “Right we’re visiting every UK site within the next three months and I want to visit every site globally within the next six months.” I almost blame myself for the lockdown and I think my first week at Aviva, we went to a site in Eastleigh, spent some time listening and thinking oh this is interesting, understanding how people joined, why they were still here. You know, things that people bring up like the air conditioning here isn’t great. OK, fine. And then we stopped inter-site travel at that point because COVID was becoming an issue. Within three weeks of that the UK was in lockdown and I had to work out a really different way of engaging with people because my usual approach of get out meet people getting together and understand, ask, let me ask you some questions, let me meet you, connect with you was just not possible.
And I think in this kind of video format, especially when we were first using it, it takes an awful lot of energy and you almost have to kind of dial it up and work out how to get people to engage with you? On a screen when they don’t know you, it’s much harder to build rapport. And so I put in a lot more different types of touch points rather than just write informal stuff, live streams and virtual visits to sites – with great help from the internal comms team who were really good at all this sort of stuff. But I think just realizing that your personal warmth and relationship building is brilliant, but that’s not the only way to do it. You need to be able to flex your style was probably a lesson for many leaders.
There are some horrible consequences from the pandemic and from COVID, but actually the introverts of the world are probably much happier in this forum, you put them on a Teams session and if we were in an auditorium where if you’ve got a question, stick your hand up, we’ll bring you a mic. They’re going “Oh. I’d rather not”, but that is not happening in a Teams session. You can either raise your hand and ask a question, or you can put it in the chat. Suddenly we’re getting different people engaged in the conversation and asking questions which I think is brilliant.
JJ If you met a 20 year old this evening and they asked for your advice on how do I become a FTSE100 Chief People Officer, what advice would you give them?
DH Go and understand how businesses work. Understand what it is that businesses do. Do some other jobs, do some operational leadership jobs, be a customer of HR and then be sure that you’re fascinated by the breadth of the landscape. You know when people say to me “I want to be in HR because I like people” I go “Oh no, no, no, no. If you like, people go into sales, go into relationship management, you will be really happy.”
I think the people who are successful in HR are curious about data, about the impact people can have. Of course they’re passionate about the culture of the organization they work in, but they’re also prepared to do the difficult things. And I think sometimes people where their first approach into what we do as a role is “I want to do it because I love people” should know it’s not a big part of the job, but being able being able to make difficult decisions and hold the line on things that aren’t necessarily popular or which can be very emotive is an absolutely key part of the role. Otherwise you’re just going to be exhausted and you’re not going to be able to partner the CEO in the way they need.
JJ That’s brilliant and thank you very much indeed, Danny, for your time and a fascinating interview. And we wish you the best luck in the future.
DH Thank you very much.
