Inspiration – Live, Lead, Leave

Transcript

[00:00:00] Paula: Welcome to “TesseLeads” with your host Tesse Akpeki, and co-host me Paula Okonneh. “TesseLeads” is a safe, sensitive, and supportive place and space to share, hear and tell your stories and experiences. We get super curious about the dilemmas shaping people’s futures and the journeys that they’re on and that’s what “TesseLeads” is about. Today the name of our guest is Stephen Sidebottom, and our theme is on inspiration. I’ll tell you a little bit about Stephen, he is the “GEAPP”, Chief People and Operating Officer. He’s had over 30 years of international experience of building organizations primarily in global financial services and in both the private and public sectors. I’ll tell you a little bit more. He led the people aspects of Nomura’s  acquisition and subsequent integration of Lehman’s European business in 2008, before becoming the global head of business HR at Standard Chartered Bank, where he was a member of Global Executive and Risk Committee. He’s also the chair of the Institute of Risk Management. He’s the warden of the Company of HR Professionals, and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Welcome to “TesseLeads” Stephen.

[00:01:36] Stephen: Thank you very much.

[00:01:37] Tesse: Stephen thank you for coming on “TesseLeads”. And you know, one of the things that stood out for me as I read your bio, was that you have lived and worked in the United Kingdom, in Asia at several times. I’m curious about learning from you what your range of experience evolved from being in different parts of the world.

[00:01:57] Stephen: I mean, it’s a great question. I mean, I was always very keen on travel, living and working in different places and experiencing them. And as a child, I spent lots of time in the Caribbean and in the US, as a teenager, I should say. So that felt a very natural part of the world to be in. When I finished university and I decided to go to university in the UK. I joined Standard Chartered Bank for the first time and I joined their international staff group with the idea that you would be posted all over the world. And that just like seemed the most amazing adventure to me, that you could have that kind of experience and then you’d go one place and you didn’t even get to pick it. Even in a funny way, even better thing was that they decided for you, so you might be absolutely anywhere. And in fact, they posted me to Bahrain in the Middle East, so that was why. So my first experience of living and working overseas, I’d spent time overseas, but that was my first proper, I am now here for a number of years. That was wonderful. I mean, it was an amazing experience to spend time in an Arab culture, and in particularly in Bahrain in those days where there was a, the sort of separation. And Bahrain doesn’t have the wealth in equality. It doesn’t have the high level of wealth of other parts of the Middle East. So Bahrain is a part of the workforce. You work with them there. There’s a developed merchant class in that society, which had been, it’s a 3000 year old society, had built its wealth as a regional center from trade and pearls. So it had a real history and resonance to it. So that was just an extraordinary way of connecting with that part of the world. I’d spent time before going to university, volunteering in the Sudan, so I’d spent, that was my first experience of living in Africa, which was a real foundational experience for me. I mean, people have things that happen to them, things that they do that just the chart who they become and both of those were critical experiences for me in my journey. And then since then I’ve spent time, I’ve always sort of sought to work for organizations with international context for them. Working for Naura and spending time in Japan and learning about Japanese culture was such fun and so interesting to challenge some of the stereotypes. I mean, all of the stereotypes are true, but a level about Japan, and Japanese people. And also they are incredibly funny. And really, really interesting, and really mischievous, but you’d never know that from the stereotype until you start to work.

So, and then I more recently spent eight years with Standard Charter again, but based in Singapore and in a global role, which meant I got to spend time a lot of time in our key markets across Africa and the Middle East, and India, and Southeast Asia, and Asia as well. So it was a huge privilege to have the opportunity to work for a truly global organization that acts and think in a truly global way, and to learn so much about how to bring a diversity together to achieve common commercial outcomes. So it’s just a wonderful place to work.

[00:05:21] Tesse: Well, I love that. Paula, what’s coming into your mind? What kind of questions are emerging for you as you hear Stephen speak?

[00:05:28] Paula: I can hear really that he’s global. And so in your bio, you are described as the Chief People and Operating Officer of “GEAPP” tell us a bit about “GEAPP”. What does that stand for? Can our listeners learn about “GEAPP”?

[00:05:41] Stephen: So “GEAPP” is the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, and it was launched at cop 26 in Glasgow as a big philanthropy backed by the “Rockefeller Foundation”, the UKFoundation, and the “Bezos Earth Fund” as a fund, which is acting at the nexus of climate change and energy. The focus being that around energy access for people in developing economies, an expectation that people in those economies should have the same access to energy as a driver of economic development and wealth, as those in development markets already enjoy. But If that is done without taking a deliberate and clear green approach to it, the impact in terms of carbon would mean any chance of achieving one and a half degrees is simply impossible. So it’s part of a thinking in just and equitable way about access to energy in a low carbon future. And so GEAPP works uses its status as a philanthropy to work with governments and global organizations to drive energy access, to reduce carbon emissions by transitions to green technology and to create new green jobs. So it’s a huge privilege to be involved in that work on one of the most important and pressing issues of our time.

[00:07:10] Tesse: So Stephen, that being in the place where things are happening, in this pivotal place of change is so important. So I’m really wondering about your pathway, your career till now, in terms of what your story was about the road you took.

I’m thinking in particular about Robert  Frost’s poem called “The Road Not Taken“, where roads less traveled. What kind of threads running through your story about, from where you came from to here?

[00:07:41] Stephen: Yeah, that’s fun, isn’t it? I mean, I guess the question of what choices did you make? What does that mean and why, and how well did you make them? I mean, I believe in chance that’s not the same as believing in fate, I don’t think I believe that things are preordained and predestined, I think at all. But I do think chance plays a significant role in everything. One just has to roll with that. I think people who are successful are successful because of chance, and people who’ve failed because of chance, not because of any inherent merit necessary. I mean, there may be life choices that they made. There may be things that happen that you could say chart that direction, but all of us start with the same worth, with the same opportunity to grow and achieve things, whatever those are, and they will be very different. So how people end up, how happy they are, how unhappy they are, how successful they’re, how well paid they are. However, whatever your different measure is, is so driven by chance and fortune, and of course the most significant elements of that are the fortunes of birth, the fortunes of your family, the launchpad that they provide for you. So when you thinks about this question of the Road Not Taken, you also have to recognize the starting point not given, and the starting point is so differentiating. So everything then is a question of the steps you take and what you make of it. I’ve never been someone who has some regrets about things. I don’t believe in that. I mean,I quite like nostalgia, I quite like thinking back about things. So I mean, I can be as emotive as anyone on those kinds of things. But I mean, there’s nothing that I think if only at that stage I’d done this, it would’ve been, I think from any point in your journey,  And I wanted always to step away from a, an idea that there is a single convention of that kind of thing. So I was aalways exploring what’s next and new.

I went to university in Oxford, which was really fun. I mean, my family had been there, so it was no tradition of going there but it was an extraordinary experience to see that world and to work out that you could fit into it and succeed in it, but also sort of rebel against it too. I then left university and joined a bank, I joined Standard Chartered. I mean, there was no thinking about that. I mean, that’s what people were doing, they were either becoming consultants or bankers. It was the time. It was the late eighties, that’s what you did. So did I choose that road? Not really. I chose Standard Charter because it was international and that really appealed and that was completely compelling. But then I realized I had no idea what I was doing in work. I mean, I’d been educated, so I knew about the stuff I knew about, but I had no idea how to be good at work. I also realized I didn’t want to be a banker. I mean, I did spend most of my career in financial services, so I liked bankers and I liked banks, but I thought the work was not the work I wanted to do. And then I went and did an MBA at London Business School, which was about educating myself in what work meant. And it was important to me to be able to understand when people were talking about strategy, what did they actually mean? And when they were talking about operational delivery or they were talking about marketing things that I had no idea about. That was great because it turns out, once you’ve learned about those things you could then start to deploy them and you become a much more rounded person at work. And then after that I moved into thinking about people and change and performance, ever since then, been the theme through my career. Working as a consultant in the Middle East and then coming back to the UK and working in HR consulting and learning the mechanics of HR around how do you build jobs and how do you build skills within people? I mean, that’s what I learned when I worked for Pay consultants, and then I went into line HR and banking. Now, that was actually the single most difficult transition that I’ve done in my career.

Because I turned up, you know, I thought I was pretty good and I was hard because of my consulting skills. And they all thought, oh, this would be great. You can help us rethink these. And I went and worked for investment bank for “Visa w Barclays”, and I turned up thinking, oh yeah, I’m, I know all this stuff. It’s going to be great. And I could do that, but I trouble is I couldn’t do any of the other stuff. I couldn’t do any of the other things that you need to do to be successful in HR. I had zero idea about, you know, how do you manage maternity leave? What do you do about this? What do you do about that? So that first six months was the, an extraordinary learning curve for me. Fortunately, I had two outstanding colleagues who taught me everything I know about HR and who are still both great friends, and I’m a fast learner. So I sort of mentioned, but that six to nine months was really tough. And then since then I’ve stayed in that space, that space of thinking about people, both in line HR in different contexts and in the other work that I’ve done. And now I have people as part of my responsibility at GEAPP. But my work certainly in recent years has been much more around strategic leadership, around an organizational change, around purpose and about culture values and things like that , deployed through all sorts of different aspects, but because it’s work, you’d get to do stuff. And that’s one of the things that I’ve always loved about HR as a profession, is that it’s the context in which you work, means that you are able to think multilevel at the same time. So you often engage with a person, a leader, about an issue. So they’ll be talking to you about a person issue that they want something on, that’s great, and you can talk about that. And then you sort of lift it a little bit and you start to talk about, you get them to think analytically about the issue that they’re dealing with and put it into a context and say, well, you do think about or you think, well, if you do this, then of course this happens, then this happens. And you draw a series of connected, a linear, analytical view of how this stuff connects and help them think through their strategy and their thinking about an issue. And then you do a little bit of conceptual stuff and you go, but what about this? How does this different frame into this same issue go? So that’s what I’ve always enjoyed about HR, you can go in for a conversation with a leader, which they think is going to be about a specific thing, sometimes quite trivial, and you [00:14:51] Tesse: I’ve seen you at work and you know your crafts, and I’ve noticed curiosity, your persuasion, to ask questions, how you reframe stuff and lean into other people rest and perspectives and that can be extremely powerful. Paula, do you have thoughts on this?

[00:15:07] Paula: Actually, I’m curious about something since this is “TesseLeads” and it’s, you know, we tend to talk about personal stories. I noticed that Stephen, when you talked about Japan, your face lit up and you said, there you go, there you’re smiling. What is it about Japan that’s really you really enjoy?

[00:15:28] Stephen: Oh, well, I mean, to be fair, Paula, my face would also light up if I talked about Kenya. Or if I talked about Egypt or if I talked about, Washington. It would light up in thinking about any, all of these places. But Japan was, I mean, the thing that was most fun about Japan for me was that it was completely unknown. At the point where I started to learn about it, I didn’t really have any sense of it. I probably thought it was a place I would never visit and certainly not a place I would spend time in. And the idea that I might get to know Tokyo really quite well was not something that was I’d ever thought about. And yet it is glorious. I mean, what’s great about Japan apart from the food? Amazing, apart from the architecture, extraordinary, apart from the people, just utterly beguiling. So, and an ancient culture connected into so many things, and then the modernism of it, the way subtly Japanese culture, visual references have changed so much about what we see around us the whole time. It’s a wonderful, wonderful place. It’s also a place I would thoroughly recommend to go as a tourist. It’s very safe, very easy to get round, stunningly beautiful, very welcoming.

[00:16:39] Paula: So Tesse Japan is on our bucket list.

[00:16:42] Tesse: Put together.

[00:16:43] Stephen: You should do it. You should do it.

[00:16:44] Tesse: Yeah. Yeah. That struck me about a Japanese craft, which is when they used to mend broken pottery and the pot becomes so beautiful because nothing is thrown away. Broken made whole golden kind of thread. It’s so powerful metaphor

[00:17:01] Stephen: I love that too. I think I find it very moving. I think of objects like that certainly speak to me enormously, in the same way that in English culture, you find pottery, of 18th century pottery that’s been mended with metal rivets and I find those compelling. The story of someone owning it, loving it, treasuring it, breaking it, mending it, continuing to treasure it. And here it retains that sort of sublimation of the point of breakage into a point of new beauty, new substance reinvention into something clearly flawed, but even more compelling and beautiful than the original was an extraordinary metaphor.

[00:17:45] Tesse: Called kintsugi. I think it is. And when I heard about it, it lifted me that nothing is ever wasted. There can be beauty and there can be transformation in pain. And I embraced it.

[00:17:56] Stephen: Yeah, I mean, it’s back to the point that I was trying to make less beautiful beginning, which is the thing that matters is the step that you take from the point that you are at. And if you pick it up and you mend it, then you achieve something new.

[00:18:10] Tesse: That’s cool dust, absolutely Stephen. Cool Dust, Paula?

[00:18:14] Paula: I’m still amusing over what he said. The steps that you take when you are in, you know, in a position that just doesn’t seem right to get you to the place where many times that step is never wasted. The people you meet along the way who you influence, and sometimes you never get to know who they are until you know years later or somebody else comes back and tells you. But those steps are important. Thank you so much for saying that.

[00:18:40] Tesse: Yeah, I think, Stephen, what you said that struck me was when you said you don’t spend time in regret, you know. I know my fault,  is I spend a lot of time regretting what if, what if. And yeah, it’s kind of looking to the past or looking to what happened at the launchpad for something next or something new and not spending energy too much on looking back really, Paula.

[00:19:02] Paula: Yes. I mean, and that makes me think about, you know, the agile environment we find ourselves in. And you know, I sense from speaking with Stephen that there’s a lot of inspiration and transformation that he talks about that, you know, impact lives. As we are in this, you know, fast moving environment and what we are talking about your personal life, how do you kind of bridge those, your personal life with your professional life in this fast move in society that we find ourselves in these days?

[00:19:32] Stephen: We are in a very fast moving world and we  are compelled to busyness and I think about that quite a lot. I mean, I have a capacity to work quite fast so I can process data and I can do things pretty fast which is a blessing. I’m also blessed by what I would consider a level of innate laziness. So if I was not only made to work fast, but was driven to work fast, so that would be even worse. So I think it’s around slowing down to speed up actually is the answer. To recognize where value is created and to take the time to think and to shape. I mean the work of leadership is speaking and holding space and being deliberate about how you do those. It was interesting when I first started working as a banker at Standard Charter, one of the lessons that I learned then and of this is about many decades ago, so it may be those things are not true now as they were then. But particularly when there were issues with customers and you know, and sort of what was going to happen with accounts and stuff, there was this thing that we were taught informally, let’s just wait and see. Let’s see what happens tomorrow. Let’s just wait. Will they repay us? Will they, I mean now of course, algorithms will get in the way of all of that, but there was a whole thing about, well, if you wait, it may not be the same. I’ve actually quite enjoyed that as a frame of reference, which is not everything requires us to act. Not everything requires us to act urgently. Sometimes waiting is okay, and that is analogous to this point around slowing down to speed up, taking the time to think. Be then deliberate about what you say and do how you listen, and then don’t drive the action, as a leader hold the space for others to act.

[00:21:18] Tesse: That’s really beautiful. Hold the space for others to act. Waiting is okay. Are there any last words of inspiration for people who are listening in to this? Steve, before we wrap up. Because I’m making notes because tonight I’m kind of like waiting is okay.

[00:21:34] Stephen: Waiting is okay. Taking the time is like slowing down to speed up is the right answer. And this should be fun. I mean this life should be a life of fun and joy. So if we are moving too fast to take pleasure in the things that are around us, the people we work with, then we’re doing it wrong. Busyness is no virtue. Virtue is outcomes. Virtue is relationships. Virtue is exactly Paula, as you said, the thing that you never know, you never knew you did, the conversation you don’t recall. Those are the things that are worthwhile. Those are the legacy leads.

[00:22:04] Tesse: Beautiful. The legacies that we have, the legacy we live, the legacy we leave. These are all beautiful things. Paula, I’m going to hand over to you now while I mull over what Stephen has been saying. It’s very, very rich.

[00:22:19] Paula: I’m mulling over it too. Legacy we live. Legacy we leave. And that brings us up into why we do “TesseLeads” because to our listeners, your precious stories do matter, and we ask that you continue to share them with us. Many are supported, encouraged, and nurtured when they know that they’re not alone, and that’s why we do “TesseLeads”. So if you would like to be a guest on our show, we ask that you head over to our website, which is “www.tesseleads.com” to apply. And if you will have enjoyed what you just heard, which I’m sure you did, we ask that you leave us a raving review wherever you listen to us, whether it’s on. “Google Podcast”, “Apple Podcasts”, “Spotify”, or wherever else you listen to your podcast. Thank you Stephen, for being a guest and for sharing such great tips, like slowing down to speed up. There’s one you just said Tesse.

[00:23:17] Tesse: The legacy we live, we lead, and we leave.

[00:23:20] Paula: Oh, all the Ls.

[00:23:22] Tesse: I’m telling you.

[00:23:23] Paula: Thank you, Stephen. It’s been a pleasure.

[00:23:25] Stephen: Thank you.

[00:23:26] Stephen: Thank you.