Links:

'Employees Say Unsustainable Workloads And Expectations Are Driving Them To Quit', Forbes Magazine

'How to eliminate distractions at work', Business Age

'Reclaim Time to Read' 2022 reading challenge:  https://www.helenbeedham.com/2022-reading-challenge

Helen's business book: The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing

Win a free signed copy of The Future of Time

Register here for The Future of Time at Work public webinar in April

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden

Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner

Alison on Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alison-trauttmansdorff/

Rethink by Amol Rajan

The Listening Shift by Janie van Hool

Harvard Business Review

City HR Association

Transcript:

Helen: Hello this week, I'm talking to Alison Trauttmansdorff. Ali is an international HR director, board member and triathlete. Her career in HR started with the investment bank Goldman Sachs, where she worked for 14 years in both Germany and the UK in various roles. Ali then moved to Rothschild & Co to take up the role of HR director with UK and international responsibilities. She supported the investment banking and private equity divisions, led on diversity and inclusion and wellbeing for the firm and oversaw their learning and development and talent acquisition programmes. Ali sits on the board of the City HR network, the main Council and Remuneration Committee of Aston University of which she is a graduate and on the international advisory board of its business school. She's a member of the Queen's Gallery Group, a community hosted by The Mentoring Foundation at Buckingham Palace, which focuses on improving gender balance and bringing about broader change in their organisations. Ali has two teenage children and she actively competes for Great Britain in age- group triathlon and is also a keen cross country runner and distance swimmer. Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant Ali!

Alison: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Helen: It's wonderful to have you. Having just read out such an impressive bio I'm guessing you are someone who enjoys a challenge in life?

Alison: That is absolutely right. I like to live life to the full, so making sure life is full work-wise and privately as well is something I'm always incredibly focused on. I basically don't sit down. I don't need to sit down!

Helen: You're quite a doer?

Alison: Yes (laughs)

Helen: Rather than a 'being' person. I get that. I get that very much. So what other three words would you use to describe yourself, either how you see yourself or how others say they see you just to give our listeners a sense of, of the person behind the CV.

Alison: Sure. I actually prefer to ask someone else if I'm honest to describe myself and that person's my partner, it's always quite good to ask your partner how they would describe you. And he used three words, focused, resilient, and resourceful. He always says to me, you know, you're more resilient than you sometimes realize you are. And I guess he chose resourceful because I love networking, I love reading, I love experimenting and disrupting. So I can imagine maybe those are the reasons that he chose those three words.

Helen: Does that sound familiar to you? Is that something that you see in yourself?

Alison: Yeah, I think often we think we're less resilient than we are. So that's why I think it's quite good to get other people's perspectives. You know, we help other people in times of trouble, they see us when we're having difficulties as well and watch us how we navigate through those difficulties. So I was actually quite glad to hear that he felt I was as resilient because you try to be resilient. And certainly in the role in HR, resilience has become such an important thing especially over the last couple of years. We're always called on for resilience in the HR function. But I think we had to try to be at least a really steady ship and offer an awful lot of advice to all sorts of people in the organization during the pandemic. So yeah, resourcefulness was definitely high on the list, at least as far as what people were experiencing, and expecting from us.

Helen: That's such an interesting point you make about resilience, not just for you personally, but as a function, given the role of HR within the business, but also I imagine building organizational resilience, not just to cope with pandemics, but with the ups and downs of business life and whatever changes evolve. So I imagine that's a big part of your role as well.

Alison: Absolutely. And I found certainly throughout the pandemic that you were working with quite a lot of people that you haven't typically worked with. So the people that I worked actually most with during the pandemic were people in security, people in facilities management. More so than ever, they needed a lot of camaraderie and advice and help in order to navigate through some of the things that we were being asked to do or asked to solve that we had literally never done before. I think the other thing that came to pass was we were building networks also externally. So I have a group of HR director friends, if you'd like, that became a really important network to me and obviously to them during the pandemic and we've kept it very much in place because whilst we don't discuss competitive issues, there's all sorts of general issues that we can debate together; try and disrupt old fashioned practices together, even create collaborations as well amongst our firms in the name of diversity and inclusion for example. So they were incredibly powerful experiences actually, those new working relationships.

Helen: I guess they help you both personally and professionally, because it's a group of people who understand the world you're in and the role you're in, who can offer an independent view and be a bit of a sounding board. And great that you're able to connect as well on some of the initiatives you do, which is something I see more and more - firms getting together collaboratively in the same industry to try and make broader change happen faster.

Alison: That's right. One of the things that I think we as a group are most proud of in the independent banking network, was that we put together an event for black talent for black students to get to know the industry better, because I think for years we'd always all been battling as individual firms to try and attract more diverse talent to the industry. But sometimes you need to realize that actually you need to club together and make sure that diverse talent understands that the industry is relevant and open-minded and wanting to attract people from their backgrounds. So those kinds of things really reap rewards.

Helen: Yeah it's so much more powerful, isn't it, as a shared message that people are hearing consistently wherever their point of contact is within the industry. Hopefully that starts to shift perceptions.

Alison: Absolutely.

Helen: And so thinking back over your own career and the path you've taken and the different roles you've held, when have you really flourished? Has there been a particular time or times or particular conditions that you found have helped you to do your best work and do stuff you're really proud of?

Alison: Absolutely. I always look back actually really fondly at one of my very first experiences. They're always very forming, those moments when I worked for Goldman Sachs in Frankfurt, because at the time that was in the early nineties investment banking really wasn't well understood in the German market. So whilst Goldman Sachs is an amazing brand, it was not very well known at all, certainly not known to the graduates or talented lateral hires. It was a group of mostly, ex-pats that I worked with from other offices at the time. And long story short, my job was to help them build the office from a people point of view. So I was in a resourcing role, talent acquisition as they call it today. And I was literally running around the world trying to find German speakers to bring to the business. So it was essentially also a marketing job, because I had to really sell, the, the business and, you know, and really weed out the talent and also very early, efforts to be made on the diversity front as well because the diversity in financial services in Germany for, for women is still not where it should be. So you can imagine back in the early nineties, it wasn't in a great place at all. So we were already starting to do very early efforts to attract women into the industry. And there was no one there that could tell me how to do the job. It was very, very entrepreneurial despite being part of a very large established, you know, over a hundred years style organization. But I surrounded myself and was fortunate to work with people who I guess were very resourceful at the time, otherwise they wouldn't have been in that, at that role. We built the office from 90 to 45, and we had to be bold and creative and willing to take a chance on things. So it was a perfect environment I found to learn in, honestly,

Helen: It sounds so exciting and there's something very creative about being in a situation where you're just trying to build something isn't there? Even as you say, within a much bigger corporate organization.

Alison: That's right. And I found in particular during that time, although again, it was a very established organization globally, the fact that we were building a business, made it very unhierarchical. We were laser-focused on output, and that's one of the things I often think about today. We in today's world need to be more focused on output rather than input. So I think I was fortunate to have that instilled in my mind at a very, very young age in my career.

Helen: Yeah, I can understand how that's helped you, you know, get into your HR director roles, because that's the language that hopefully business leaders are thinking about and wanting to know the priorities. And I love your terminology, laser sharp focus on the outputs,I think that's almost exactly an expression I use in my business book 'The The Future of Time' so I'm just wondering if you've had sneak preview! So we'll talk more about that. And is there a particular piece of advice that has helped you, that has stayed in your mind over the years?

Alison: it was, actually from that, period as well. I can remember there was a, a wonderful man. He was a very senior, uh, gentlemen in, in equity research. He was a very senior gentlemen in equity research at the time he was an expat came over to manage the Frankfurt office for, a period of time. He spoke German, he wasn't a, you know, an expat without the language skills, which we often bemoaned at the time. And I can remember going into his office to try and persuade him to, do something. Usually it was to give me money to do a recruitment event, to attract people to the firm. And it was the first time I'd met him. You know, I felt a little bit sheepish, I was probably 24 years old, something like that, popped into his office. He could see I was nervous and he said, look, at this point in time, you're the expert. Forget about hierarchy. I know nothing about what you're about to tell me. So go back outside, gather yourself, understand that you're the expert. Come back in and be the expert because that's who you are in this situation. And that taught me so much and I did do it. I went out, pulled myself together, told him what he needed to do. He asked me tons of questions, because very genuinely, he, knew little of what I was talking to him about. So that really stuck in my mind. And I've shared that with many people; make sure that if you are an expert, be the expert and have the confidence to do that in the room.

Helen: That's an amazing piece of advice and a piece of real time coaching, isn't it? And look how much it has stuck in your memory. The act of having to go out the door, take in what he said, and then have the courage to go back in again, you know?

Alison: And you're right, it's that in the moment feedback and we all think about, well, certainly in HR, I think a lot of us reflect on appraisals and how effective they are, for example, and there's lots of us that debate whether the year end appraisal is, is actually that effective. I've always personally found that those very genuine and authentic moments of feedback and insight from people do me much more good than when I wait to the end of the year to have my standard appraisal. So that certainly speaks to maybe some of the disruption that we need to do as well in the space of performance management, as many people like to call it. I prefer actually to call it performance development. M

anagement has, in that context I think, too much of a negative tone.

Helen: I'd love to dig into that a little bit more because I know for some time there's been a general understanding that in the moment feedback, or as soon as possible after a piece of work's been done, it's more effective than waiting perhaps several weeks or months until the next review point. And yet, even if that happens in terms of day to day, informal feedback, often organizations are still very much married to these fairly static points in the year where they formally review performance. And one of the case studies in the book is a great example of how they've really shifted that and to have much more ongoing performance dialogue through the year so that at the end point of the year, it's not so much about how have you been doing in your role? And evaluating that but much more forward-looking and they call it a progression conversation rather than a performance conversation at that point. Is that the direction you think more firms are likely to be heading in? If you could wave your magic wand, what would you fix around performance management?

Alison: I think you need to look at your firm and how it functions because it might not be just feedback to individuals. It might be feedback to teams. So if project work, deal work, is very much a part of what you do sometimes it's appropriate to look at how the team functions together and then of course, individual people's roles within that team. So in the past, I, for example, had actually some quite innovative French colleagues who did it in that way. They always did a very formal evaluation of how the project had gone and how the team had worked within that. And actually that always came across very positively because really people tucked into the evaluation of how they had performed as a team, and it was always a very open and honest conversation. And I think junior people really valued that. So I think team evaluations could be relevant for, for some organizations.

And, also I think it's got to do with the role of the manager frankly, because I think the role of the manager and management development has had a bit of a renaissance, in many ways or should have a bit of a renaissance because I like to see the manager, not just as manager, but as coach, because we want to empower our people to be in charge of their own development ideally. We're all clever human beings, we should be in charge of our own future and how we're developing. So why not put that in the hands of your employees and as managers act as coaches, to help guide and direct them as they make their decisions and choices around their development. That's what conversations between employees and managers should look like more, whereas the traditional appraisal is you know, these things you did well, and I'm afraid there are a few things that people get quite irritated with you around.

Usually the average employee walks out that room feeling quite down about what they've experienced, but if they're having more productive coaching conversations, throughout the year with the manager, a) you won't come to the end of the year and get these surprises and b) they'll feel much more empowered to be in charge of their own careers.

Helen: Absolutely. So let's move on and talk about time at work. As you know, this first series is accompanying the launch of my business book 'The Future of Time'. And you've worked in probably one of the most fast-paced industries and most time-pressured environments in investment banking and manage global teams on top of that. How do you organize your time at work? Are there little habits that you've developed over the years that help you juggle work and responsibilities and stuff outside of work, but are there also times where sometimes it falls over?

Alison: Yeah, time is, as you rightly say, it's a constant, challenge and I think in many industries, people love to talk, people love meetings, so you can very easily create yourself quite large problems with your diaries and I've seen that for sure. I always encourage teams to be really disciplined about how they ask other people for time. If you want a meeting, have a reason for a meeting, have an agenda for the meeting and also be economic with the amount of time you're asking other people to give, because in my kind of role, for example, my whole day could be meetings if I let it happen. And that takes, I think, a little bit of spontaneity out of the day, because we all talk about the water cooler moments that we've missed during the pandemic.

If you're wall to wall with meetings you don't get those moments, even if you're inside the office, if things have gone out of control. So I do think that agendas, being economic with time is incredibly important, but you need to have that agreement in your team and with other people and be vocal about it otherwise time can literally run away with itself. Sometimes people block times in their diary for certain things, for reading, obviously, for those spontaneous moments. I sometimes put times in my diary that I say, look, this is kind of like my clinic time. If people want to drop in, during that time I'll just be in my office doing things and it's no problem to come in and interrupt me. So I think you do have to be very creative and thoughtful about planning out, at least your next couple of days in advance. And if you are very fortunate to have a PA, or assistant, work very closely with them, to figure out how to make the best use of your time and of others.

Helen: Yes, lots of great tips there for people listening and one of the things that I found particularly interesting about what you've just talked about is how important it is to speak to other people about your time, your choices and your needs from others and have just really open conversations about that. Because when I write and talk about our time culture at work, what I mean by that is the collective time that we all spend and how my time choices might impact on another colleague's time choices. And as a leader, how their own habits, when they're online, when they're available to talk to people, those little habits and choices have a significant impact on other people and also the signals they're picking up about what's the right way to work around here. I just wondered if that resonates for you?

Alison: I think also from a D&I point of view as well, it's incredibly important. And we owe that to each other, you know, people that have caring responsibilities, parents, people who have interests that they want to participate at certain times of the day, it's important.

Again, know your employees, know your colleagues, because if you understand more about people's lives more broadly and people are able to bring themselves to work wholly then you will be more respectful about the challenges that they have, their time in the morning or in the evening, depending on what it is they need to focus. So it's that flexibility piece, sometimes people want to, or need to disappear off to pick someone up or go and see an elderly relative, but they're perfectly happy to have a call later on the evening. That's how they've decided to work and, and spread their day out. So yeah, let's be more open-minded, let's be talking to each other about how time can be used more effectively and flexibly.

Helen: Yes. And I know in some industries and probably investment banking is an example, we work very long hours. In the UK it's true generally, we have quite a long work hours culture. And yet as a nation, our level of productivity is quite low compared to other OECD countries, for example. Do you think we can change that? So the pushback I hear when I say we need to try and find a more sustainable way of working that works better for everybody, that doesn't result in high levels of burnout or stress or mental illhealth, or just physical exhaustion, and that will be better for the individual who's better able to flourish in their career over the longer term and better for the business because they'll see higher levels of productivity and engagement. The pushback I hear is yes, but our clients need stuff immediately. If we don't do it, our competitor will win the client. Or it's a 24 7 industry so we have to be highly responsive. It's very, short-term focused. Is that something we just have to live with? Or do you believe there is a different way that we can shape our organizational cultures and still meet the needs of clients and still win in the market?

Alison: Yeah. Look, there are some challenges for sure, but certainly having worked in the industry for quite a long time I think again, it comes down to management, delegation and project leadership very often. I think unfortunately there are those who are not very structured in the way they think about how to delegate the work amongst the project team. It's really important as a senior person that you're very exact in your delegation to your team captains and what your expectations are of the work that you're expecting to receive back.

Again, I worked once with a very senior guy, an American guy at Goldman Sachs. He always said to me, very often I'll hand out work; I'll say to the director I want two pages, literally two pages, and this is what I want to see. And then the director runs off and says to the associate, goodness, we're going to have to put together a book of 30 pages. And then the associate goes to the analysts and says heavens, we need to put together 60 pages, otherwise we're going to be in real trouble. And then the guy gets his book back and he says heaven's I only want two pages. Why someone giving me a book with 60 pages? But you see the mistake that you make there is that you should have the whole team ... as a senior person you need to be talking to the whole team right from the beginning because the junior people want to understand what your vision, what your focus is for the deal, the outputs that you want to see, the reasons why the clients doing that. So they get a really holistic view.  I don't think we do that enough with our junior people and we just hand down work to them without the full context. And if we did that, people would understand what the expectation was; people would be more respectful of each other's time and we all need to be more demanding, I think, if we're junior people, of our seniors to make sure we never walk away, not fully understanding what is expected of us. So I think if there was more discipline built into that already you could save quite a bit of time, but it really does take some focus and dedication from those project leaders.

And undoubtedly at times it will be possible to push back to clients. Not always, but of course, as a senior person, it is your responsibility to build the relationship with the client and know when you can ask and know when someone is really serious about tight deadlines. So again, back to the manager and the role that they have to play, to help their team be effective and to be fair to them.

Helen: That's really interesting to listen to you about how we always need to probably work a little bit harder at checking the assumptions that everyone's carrying around in their head.

Alison: Correct. Yep absolutely.

Helen: And is there a particular resource that has really helped you in your career or you think would be of particular interest to people listening, whether that's a book or a podcast or talk you've heard?

Alison: A couple of books I'm reading at the moment, one is called 'Rethink', it's by actually a guy who does podcasts on Radio Four and he's collected together all sorts of very small stories. It's a very easy book to read because the pieces are usually two to three pages per opinion, and there's a piece from Prince Charles, for example, in there. So, it's a lot around reflecting on what we've experienced in the past couple of years and how we need to rethink our approach to the environment, to ourselves, to the healthcare system, et cetera. So it's quite thought provoking to hear this really diverse group of people and their very micro views on some really important topics. Another book I found very interesting is by a lady called Janie van Hool, it's 'The Listening Shift' and I think listening is something we need to do much more in organizations to help tailor our approach towards our people, very importantly, and by extension our clients as well. So Janie's book really focuses in on that. I'm a great lover of keeping an eye on Harvard Business Review articles as well. There are always some really useful nuggets in there to help your thinking. And then networks, as you mentioned, I sit on the City HR board; I think, especially if you're in a small to medium-size firm and you don't have a lot of functional colleagues around you, networks like that can be incredibly helpful, to help you brainstorm and think through challenges that you're faced with.

Helen: Thank you for three great suggestions. I've definitely made a note of 'Rethink' and wonderful to hear Janie's book mentioned, because I know Janie as a fellow author published by Practical Inspiration Publishing. She is indeed a fantastic writer and speaker, great to hear you've really enjoyed her 'Listening Shift' as well. How can listeners connect with you after the podcast if they'd like to get in touch professionally?

Alison: Sure I'm on LinkedIn, so Ali Trauttmansdorff on LinkedIn, I'm very happy to connect with people there.

Helen: Fantastic. Ali, thank you so much for joining me today to talk on The Business of Being Brilliant and talk so openly about your career and your reflections and the things that have helped you to flourish and the pieces of advice that have helped you along the way as well. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much.

A

lison: Absolute pleasure, Helen, thank you.