Links:

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

Brick Lane by Monica Ali

The Gendered Brain: the new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain, by Gina Rippon

My Brilliant Friend, by Monica Ferrante

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

Receive an exclusive advance invitation to join my June programme Time for the things that matter - get on the mailing list here (advance bookings end midnight on Thursday 26th May, general bookings open on Friday 27th May).

Patricia on Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricia-galloway-329234161/

Eat That Frog! Get more of the important things done today, by Brian Tracy

UK ahead of European peers on shift to working from home, FT article (£)

Remote working is making the UK a much more equal place, Guardian article

Working from home around the world, by WFH Research

Transcript:

Helen: This week, I'm talking with Patricia Galloway, a global HR leader with two decades of expertise in starting, scaling and securing business success within the banking technology and engineering industries. Her passion is helping organizations to grow their performance and profit by developing their people. She's also a Non-Executive Director with the Association of Foreign Banks and Vice President on the board of the City Women's network. Patricia holds a BSC Honours in Occupational Psychology and a Master's in Human Resource Management. She's CIPD qualified and a practising C-suite executive coach with a niche for helping people in transition. Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant Patricia!

Patricia: Thank you, Helen. I'm delighted to be here.

Helen: So, listeners have just heard a few brief headlines about your career, and we'll dig into that a little more very shortly, but can you tell us first something about yourself that doesn't appear on your CV that might surprise people?

Patricia: Well, I think the thing that generally tends to surprise people after having spent 20 years in HR and banking is, and you did touch upon it is, that I started my career in industrial HR, in an engineering company and the Midlands so completely different. That was a standalone role and dealing with issues such as union recognition, changing shift patterns, and setting up an employee council. I was fresh from my Master's at the time, so very, very green. It was a baptism of fire for me but I loved the challenge and I learned a tremendous amount.

Helen: That's so interesting. It's such a different world, as you say, from the kind of professional corporate office- based world. And I know from my own past experiences, many years ago in consulting with manufacturing and engineering firms, it's a very different environment. And I'm sure as you say, it was a bit of a baptism by fire because there can be all sorts of people activity that HR needs to wade in and deal with at quite short notice, I imagine.

Patricia: Yes. A lot.

Helen: And was that useful then later on that ' on the floor' experience, so to speak ?

Patricia: Yes. I think the fact that I'd had such a steep learning curve in such a very different industry so early on in my career, I think it gave me the confidence actually that if I can deal with that, I can pretty much deal with anything. And because I was dealing with some quite serious issues, so union recognition with the GMB union at the time, I mean, that was quite a heavy topic with some very, very senior people from the GMB to be dealing with so early on in my career. But I did lots of research, I did a lot of prep and it was fine. And I realized it gave me that solid confidence in myself that actually I can do these difficult things.

Helen: That's such a good reflection to take forwards. And I empathize, I started my career in retail on the graduate management training scheme at Harrods and one of my first rotations, I was doing customer service for the wine and spirits department at Christmas. A lot of wine bottles arrived late or a bit broken and people got very upset and actually one of the best early groundings I could have had career-wise was how to deal with really upset customers day after day after day. It really builds your resilience and your relationship skills. So I totally agree all those early, and really quite scary sometimes, formative experiences really help build that confidence early on.

Patricia: Yes.

Helen: So how did you go from there into other industries and progress up through the HR career ladder?

Patricia: So I've always held standalone roles and as I mentioned my first job was one and it wasn't intentional, I just seemed to have been a good fit for those types of roles. For my second position, I moved from the Midlands to London and changed industry completely. I joined a startup so very different and it was a tech research company.

And I was there from 2000 to 2002 so during the first dot com bubble and for me, I had a blank sheet of paper and it was my role to scale the business and we had rapid growth. We had to create everything from the HR side and it was fabulous, I really, really enjoyed it and I made some lifelong friends during that time as well. But like all bubbles it burst and that had a real impact on our business.

So quite early on, I had to make redundant some of the very teams that I had not that long recruited. But this rapidly expanded my knowledge and my skillset in a really short period of time to go from rapid growth to decline. And I found it got me used to being around the table with the founder and key leaders in the business during some very, very challenging times. So those first two roles gave me a lot of breadth and depth very quickly.

Helen: That's interesting because it sounds almost like when you're in anything but steady state, so when you're growing very fast then it's all a rollercoaster or when there's a bit of a crisis or a downturn, actually, it sounds like those are times where you've then been presented with the opportunity to sit around the table with the business leaders, the people, the executives making the decisions and I'm just listening to that and thinking that's quite different perhaps to steady state when we're all very much more perhaps compartmentalized into our roles. So it's a good way to look at challenging times or exciting times: actually, it might bring you into more face-to-face contact with people at more senior levels.

Patricia: So my role in the tech organization stood me in really good stead for then moving into banking and being able to take a similar approach and be comfortable with quite rapid growth.

Helen: Yeah. And it sounds like because of the experience you had in your first two roles, whilst you're an HR director and specializing in the HR and people matters, you've got a very wide grounding in business management and business growth and the commercial side of things as well, which I'm sure is highly valuable and sought after when people are looking to recruit new senior HR heads.

Patricia: That's one of the things that I've always made a point of right from my very first role was to really, really understand the business that I work within, whether that's been engineering, tech and banking. And it's something I always encourage and work with my team members to do the same. For numerous reasons but some of the main ones is that it really helps you to build credibility very quickly with your peers on the leadership team. If you understand the business. What do they do? How do they add value? How is it funded? Who are our competitors? How are we making the difference? And all of that can also help you spot talent very quickly for the business, because you know exactly what the skill set is and then how those individuals are going to fit.

Helen: That's great advice and so if somebody is thinking, well, I'm in HR, but I want to demonstrate that I've got commercial understanding and expertise, is it simply a case of just proactively asking a lot of those conversations with people in meetings? Or do you need to think about developing that more formally?

Patricia: Well, you can do it both ways and I've done both. So I've taken various courses as well, just personally; when I moved into banking it was a very different language so I did a lot of banking courses just so I could understand a lot of the terminology quickly. But I've always made a point of spending time and asking for that time from the Heads or even number twos or threes in different business units to just sit with me and just talk me through exactly what it is that they do. What's their chain that they follow from value add to the business and to speak to me in very layman's terms first of all, and then I can build up the more technical jargon around that. And just being willing to do that, being open and putting yourself out there to say, 'I don't know. I don't understand. Can you explain that to me?' is a really, really beneficial thing to do. And people are fine, most people are really open and they're happy to explain and talk about what they do. So that's something I would always strongly advise.

Helen: Yeah and I could imagine listening to that, that the senior leader that you're sitting down with who's explaining stuff in simple language, I can imagine that's a helpful encounter for them as well, because every day they're having to explain perhaps complex strategies or markets or whatever, in ways that everybody in the business can understand. So to have the chance to do that and hear how it sounds and see what questions come back, everybody gets something out of that pause and thinking and understanding time, don't they?

Patricia: Yes, yeah, and I think when you're fresh to something you ask questions about, why do we do it like that? Why do we get funding in that manner rather than a different way? And that's always beneficial for everyone to just pause and think, well, why do we do it like that? Oh, it's because of X, Y and Z.

Helen: Yeah, exactly. And what have you found if anything, difficult or stretching as a leader that perhaps has led you to acquire new tools or skills? You've talked a little bit about the terminology and having to go and do some formal studies to really understand the mechanics of the industry. Is there anything else that comes to mind?

Patricia: So as I mentioned, I've covered London, New York and Tokyo, and that's been a real privilege to work across three very different cultures. But when I started to cover Tokyo, that was quite a steep learning curve for me and it was relatively early on in my career. And I was very conscious of learning the nuances of a different culture to try and not make too many slip ups, at least early on. And in Japan, I found it was very much about understanding the hierarchy and respecting that, but also just down to the type of decisions that I should involve senior leadership with. And some of them were things that in the west I just wouldn't involve a senior manager to make those kinds of decisions. He would expect me or somebody more junior on their team to just run with it. But I realized in Tokyo that actually that would have been quite disrespectful if I hadn't involved or at least made them aware that they'd got to sign off on something. For me, I felt quite guilty sometimes; I felt like I was actually giving them more work to do, but it was just part of the culture and how to adapt and just work with them.

Helen: That's really interesting. I've not had the privilege of working in such a different culture, but I would have loved to. So it's interesting to hear you say how you had to rethink certain assumptions and work out what the accepted way of doing things are.  And so you've worked across different cultures, you've had international roles... how do you organize your time at work? Are there certain habits you've developed that help you manage the demands on you in your role, but also manage different times zones and coordinate the time that you make available to people you're working with versus time for yourself to get stuff done. How do you make that all work for you?

Patricia: Gosh, I've tried so many different time management techniques over the years. Probably the one that's always stayed with me was from Brian Tracy's book, Eat That Frog and that was to do the thing you're dreading the most first thing in the morning, and we're all guilty of procrastinating and putting it off and thinking I'll come round to it. So I've really trained myself to do that first thing. And then the rest of the day always seems much easier because you've just dealt with that really difficult thing. Apart from that, I work backwards: when something is due I always build in buffers for delays and dependencies on others. I try and plan a few months ahead and I don't multitask. I've learned over time for me, that doesn't work. I have the view: do one thing and do it well. And so I just focus on whatever that task is and take it as far as I possibly can before then passing it over it to somebody else or moving on to something else.

Helen: Yes. I love that you've read Eat That Frog because I refer to his work in my book The Future of Time, although I haven't read his book in full. So I'm definitely adding that to my reading list for this year, but eating the frog is a great expression and it really works as a habit.

Something I've adopted recently too, since coming across it is just do the big, chunky, unpalatable sometimes, or whatever you know, is going to take real concentration and effort. Get that done first and then you can cut yourself a bit more slack during the rest of the day, or at least bask in your sense of virtue that you've done the hardest thing first, which is the bit I enjoy about it!

And in chatting to other people very recently, I've been hearing both individuals but organizations also, thinking more about that as people are back in offices and as they're managing hybrid teams and thinking about when they're together, when and where people do their work. One of the things that people seem to be more aware of is that need to think more intentionally about when do we need to set aside time that's not disturbed, where I'm not available for meetings and to colleagues because actually I need to really focus on something that's going to move things forward. And people starting to either be more transparent and open about that individually about our own time habits, but also across teams as well. People saying, okay, we're not going to have calls between 8 and 10 in the morning, or after 3 o'clock in the afternoon and trying to manage that. Is that something you're hearing and seeing, or just hearing different approaches?

Patricia: Yes. Yeah. I've always been very outcomes focused rather than looking at where are you going to work or when you're going to do it, to try and pivot my team, to look at what is it we're trying to achieve. And I think that's something that this new world of hybrid is pushing a lot of organizations to do and managers to do with their teams: to really focus on what's the output we need to achieve and then work backwards as to how they are going to do that in terms of time allocation.  But I've always tried to look at what's the end goal. And I think that really focuses our thinking and it keeps the way you spend your time, much more efficient because you're always quite tightly aligned to that objective. Whereas without that, it's very easy to get distracted and to just lose track of time.

Helen: Yeah, that's so true. I think just keep asking the question during the day, during the week, what am I focusing on? Why am I doing this? Is this what I want to be spending my time on? can make such a difference.

Patricia: It does but the other thing that I also found that's been useful, and I do this with my team, is to say no. To really look at what are all the activities that are building up and what can you say no to, and what's adding value, what's helping you with those end goals? And what are 'nice to haves' but are actually just going to chew up time in your day and not add value to the output.

And also to just your career development, there are so many unseen side tasks that you can get sucked into. I often see this with my team, HR is one of the departments that are often asked to get involved in planning social activities, for example. And while that's all very nice, rightly or wrongly it's not going to enhance their career, but it's also not that highly valued when it comes to their perception by other senior managers in the organization. So that's one of the things that I always help them to take a look at to say, it's one thing to be on the social committee, but you don't need to be the one that's running these things.

Helen: Yes, that's really good advice and I know firsthand how HR could be called upon for a whole range of stuff that doesn't feel like it's on your strategic HR agenda!

Patricia: Exactly. Yeah.

Helen: But somebody thinks you're collectively the best people for the job. So you've described a little bit there how you help your team members think about what they're spending their time on. Are there other things that you do in your senior HR role to coach leaders or colleagues about making best use of their time?

Patricia: Yes again, that's for me, a lot of it is focus and determining what it is they're trying to achieve. So when I'm coaching individuals, it's usually about some point of change: either they've just taken on a leadership role, they want to move industries... there's some form of transformation within their life that's happening and they want some advice and guidance on that. And with that, I do just try and bring them to be very clear and to really articulate what it is that they want to achieve. What's the end goal that we're looking for? And then to be quite precise in how to work backwards from that, and then allocate the appropriate time for that, because otherwise it becomes a nice wishlist. So time has to be carved out that they'll actually do the activities that are necessary to get to that end goal.

Helen: Yeah and I guess sometimes part of that conversation is saying. /If life already feels incredibly full, what is, what is going to come off the table to make space for that? And that's something that we often find difficult individually and certainly collectively as an organization. And that's something I worry about in organizations is that we're very used to adding new initiatives and new projects onto the agenda, but we don't always take stuff off the agenda when really we should.

Patricia: And I think that comes back to prioritising again, to deciding there's a huge list of things that we'd all love to work on but actually, this is what we're going to focus on. This is where we're going to put our energy. And you do find that in organisations, it can be a whole variety of different projects running at the same time. So it's trying to work with your leadership team to really carve out what's the priority and how much time and energy and effort is going to be put into that, that we're asking the other departments to support.

Helen: Yes. And how often would you revisit that with a leadership team? Is it something you just do at the start of a new initiative or is it something. you do regularly every couple of months, every six months?

Patricia: I've always done that, sometimes formally but sometimes informally, just to check in with the key leadership team on how their departments are coping; is there sufficient resource whether that's people but also time to appropriately support the project that they're working on. And sometimes there is and sometimes we need to make some changes. But I try and do that where I can relatively early on and quite frequently, so then you can make a shift and you can do a quick change in the planning before it runs for too long and then you start to face issues.

Helen: Yeah, because there's that whole sunk opportunity cost where people in all sorts of famous ways throughout history have not let go of something because of the amount of time and effort and money that's been invested so far.

Patricia: Yes exactly.

Helen: And thinking back over your career and the work you've done and all the resources that have helped you along the way, is there a particular book or podcast or talk that you've really enjoyed, got a lot out of and would want to recommend to others?

Patricia: I've just read a fabulous book and it's called The Future of Time. I'm very serious though! What I love about your book is that it doesn't just set out the problem but it also offers workable solutions. So we are all acutely aware of the problem but it's great to have those solutions and the accelerating pace of change as we've talked about is having a huge impact on our time. But what organizations need the most are practical ways to prioritize the important over the urgent and to remain productive amid mounting time pressure. But as a HR practitioner, I really loved the toolkit at the end of the book and the step-by-step guide for 're-working' time at an organisation-wide level. I think that's something very new. There's a lot on how you can manage time as an individual and how you can manage time with your team. But I love what you've done to just step back and look at how an organization can work together to be so much more productive and to be a much healthier place to work by collectively taking a look at how we spend our time.

Helen: Thank you. Thank you for that lovely overview and endorsement. I really wasn't expecting that! I was waiting to hear which other author you were going to recommend or a piece of work, but that's great. And thank you for helping listeners get a good sense of what's in the book and how it can help you if you're working in HR.  And I'm really glad you enjoyed the practical side of it, because that was something that felt really important to me. I love books that do a brilliant expose of something that's not quite working right but I always feel really frustrated when they leave the 'so what do we do about it?' to the last few pages?  So I was determined not to do that, but I will happily admit writing that third part - because there's three parts, part three is about how do we fix broken time cultures - that was probably the hardest thinking work I've ever done in my life. It's not something that just plopped into place easily! And how can listeners connect with you after the podcast if they'd like to get in touch professionally?

Patricia: Oh, they're very welcome to connect via LinkedIn. If they want to just say a few words about why they'd like to connect and just reference the podcast, then I'm very happy to connect .

Helen: Brilliant, thank you very much. It's been a total pleasure having you on the podcast Patricia, thank you so much for talking about your fascinating career, how you've moved across industries and built up all your commercial and HR expertise and worked with organizations at different stages. It's been really fun talking with you. Thanks so much for being a brilliant guest!

Patricia: Oh, it's been a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me Helen.