Episode 44

Simon Barrass on Mastering the Art and Science of Building High-Performing Teams

TIM: Simon Welcome to the Objective Hiring Podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

SIMON: Thanks, Tim, great to be here.

TIM: It's great to have you here, and last time we chatted, it was so evident how passionate you were about team building, team culture, how to get the most out of your team, and how to create a team that's going to be successful, so I'd love to start with just like getting your overall philosophy on how you build teams and how you build successful teams.

SIMON: Absolutely. I think one of the things that has always been important to me is when I want to create a great team, remembering back to teams that I've been part of that felt great and how I'd like the team to be run as an employee is really important. So I think the things that, for me, have always been important also come from team-playing sports. You need a really clear outcome, an objective that you're trying to achieve in a football team; it might be to win the league, something like that. I think you need somebody—you need one person, ultimately, to be calling the shots. And I think the way that manager or coach engages with you as a person is important, and I think having somebody everybody get, like you, get the best out of different people by managing them in different types of ways; some people you have to be the way I think situational leadership styles are really important. So in some cases it can be quite delegative, where somebody can get the best out of somebody; you just really need to point out what you need to achieve and let them get on with it, but there are other people that need a bit more of a direct, directing sort of approach to it. and then you have the coaching and the other elements in between, so I think having that dynamic leadership style I could see The teams I was in that the people around me could you had to get the best out of them, and that meant that you needed somebody who was able to talk to different people in different ways. I think what was also important was that with your colleagues you have a really open and transparent culture of being able to challenge each other but also being able to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each other, and that's where I think a team charter is a really important thing to have in place. So a team charter is something that describes everybody in the team, and everybody in the team buys into it, which sets out some of the key behaviors, whether that's respect, whether that's challenge, and giving everybody the opportunity to call things out, but when a decision is made, we all get behind the decision and move forwards, or even something as simple as making sure that we have fun. because I think once you've got that charter written down in on Down somewhere, it gives people the ability to call each other out when perhaps sometimes they're drifting a little bit away from those behaviors, so I think having that as a central sort of point of the dialogue and sometimes it aligns with the company values, but I don't think there's anything wrong with having your own team charter in place, and then I think also what's really important is giving people the opportunity within the team to be able to grow and develop and move into different roles, and given flexibility, I go back to the sport analogy, but your defenders can sometimes be the best people upfront in the right situation if they're the tall people who can head the ball in. So I think that people having the opportunity to be flexible is really important, and when I look back at those teams that I was in, we measured the success by the end of the year, and we had a quantifiable measure in place, which was did we win the league, and unfortunately I never didn't often win the league. But I think those sorts of methodologies and those areas of things that I've tried to bring into the team I have now, when we've got a team charter in place, we use TA drivers. We understand, are we pleased people? Are we perfect? Are we trying hard? We use that as something that we talk about in terms of our strengths and our weaknesses. We measure what we do, so not only do we have measurable outcomes with our data team, And we look at what impact we have from a revenue perspective, but we also have an employee engagement score, and I'm pleased to say that my team's got a team My current team's got a team engagement score of about 93%, which puts us really high in terms of the rest of the teams in the company. and when we want to understand why the team enjoys working, why people enjoy working in the team, I think it's that opportunity to really push themselves, being able to move around and develop within the team, but also having that sort of culture, which is things we don't, not having politics at play, having the charter that just removes any ambiguity. There are lots of different things, and I think also what I'm a—I guess I call myself a student of building teams because there are loads and loads of brilliant coaches out there, whether it's like Ross Brawn from a Grand Prix perspective or Clive Woodhouse or all the managers. I think there are loads of great books all about people who develop and build winning teams. and as a leader, it's in your best interests, as well as something that's incredibly interesting, to learn what the different ways are that other people have done it and try to bring some of that back into your day-to-day as well.

TIM: That's a great explanation, and yeah, as soon as you were describing the methodology, straight away my head was going to like Sir Alex Ferguson and hair dry trim it for one player and then for maybe Eric Cantona. That's fine; just let him get on with it. It doesn't matter what he's doing. He'll perform best on match day if we just let him be himself, and it sounds like that's your kind of philosophy: treat each person individually rather than having a blanket set of rules or ways of dealing with everyone.

SIMON: Yeah, I think so, and yeah, and I guess if you're a parent, you can't your children; you have to be slightly different with them. If you need to encourage, you know, the right behaviors from them, sometimes you have to adapt your style. I think it's the same with your friends—certain friends. You know, your certain friends you can go out with a beer from; you never have to check in. There are other friends where you do know you want to check in, so I think it's just a representative representation of life, really, that everybody's a little bit different, but I think it does tie in nicely to hiring as well because I guess there's an art and a science to curating and creating the team, and I think When you're in the hiring process, that's really where For me, I start to look at the individual; I look at what motivates them, what drives them, and how they achieved the highlights in their career to date. and I look at trying to work out, like, what are the things I'm going to need to do to get the best out of that person, and is it to give them a challenge and let them go off and discover it on their own, or is it one where they're going to need a little bit of guidance and a little bit of direction? and I think actually for me it's those soft skills that are actually the hardest and trickiest things to find technical skills. I always find there's something that over time you can learn: soft skills are a lot harder to pick up, so I think whilst technical skills are important to recruit for, the softer skills—whether it's the way of engaging with people, influencing, or even problem-solving, which isn't necessarily an inherent technical skill— But the way that somebody can look at a problem and work out logical or different or alternative ways of solving it is a really good skill, and I found, actually, that you go to look for people in the backgrounds; they have often given you also great sources of people that are incredibly inventive and creative. One of my favorite hires that was made recently was somebody who came from a very much call center background. You know, they worked in a big call center with lots and lots of people trying to do loads and loads of calls going on. They didn't necessarily have all of the capability in place to drive the performance. The person went on their own sort of route of discovery of trying to find the right technology, trying to sidestep going through the sort of enterprise IT teams to get things over the line, taught themselves certain skill sets, and created this really interesting and exciting suite of insights and reports that drove a significant change in the business. and that came from somebody who looked at the problem and went, I'm not just going to accept the status quo; I'm going to do something about it, and I think when you're recruiting for a data team, those sorts of thought processes are really important because often the other teams that you work with can be quite stuck into the process that we've always done it this way. and data gives you a really interesting lens sometimes of seeing things holistically, looking across a sort of different line that other people haven't seen, and that ability to challenge and go, Actually, we should be doing something different here, and bringing that to the table and finding and being resourceful in finding the ways to get things done are like the skills that set for me data talent apart from a lot of people can come in and can write a query, can write an Excel spreadsheet, can maybe develop a dashboard, but somebody who can apply those skills in a problem-solving way that can solve a challenge that the business has been having for a long time That's the sort of magic fairy dust I think that I think you can really see that sparkle in people when you do that, and often you get to that, I find, through the culture fit conversation, which is a very candidate-led conversation, and I think sometimes my opening sort of question for that is usually from the place that they've started. So talk me through how you got to applying for this job right now and what's your story. What are you proud of? What's the hardest thing that you think you've done to get here? And just letting those people, letting somebody tell their story. just tells you so many things in terms of the storytelling, tells you what the pride is proud about the way that they approached something and I think once you start to see these things, you can start to work out how do I get I know how I'm going to get the best out of this person, so I think that the team culture and the hiring thing are completely entwined, and, yeah, I think when you've got the opportunity to build a team from scratch You've got the opportunity to see there to bring people in and look at the right combinations. You don't want everybody that necessarily is going to need coaching. You're going to need some people that you want to be able to delegate to as well. So I think that there's a real art to it as well as a science to curating a high-performing team.

TIM: And when you're looking at creating that team, do you start from a set of skills, capabilities, and traits that you're after, and then as people come in, you put together the bits of the jigsaw, or is it a case that you expect this role has to have these things, so if someone doesn't have these things, that it's a no-go, or is there some sort of fluidness? with how you're looking at that set of new people in the team

SIMON: I think where I probably started in the past is being quite formulaic in the roles and the skills and the square pegs fitting into the square holes. I think when you work in a big enterprise, there's a lot of that that's the way things work. I think as I moved into sort of start-up and scale-up businesses, the fluidity was really important because you don't have the scale of the team to have that fully baked out, and I think also I found that you as a data team have to be really agile, so having a team of generalists that can do a little bit of everything but also have a specialism is actually like a real asset to have, where you can rotate your people around and got something that you can throw one person into, but you can get somebody else into it as well to back them up. I think I've become a lot less formulaic about it. Fundamentally, the key sort of way to approach the problem is like, what is the outcome that we're trying to achieve? And it may be that actually you've got a great data infrastructure we don't have; it is not necessarily the right technical skills to extract the insight and the storytellers to create the story and influence stakeholders on that, and so in that respect then you're perhaps looking for a certain type of skill set that you can bring to the table, but it may be that in other scenarios you've actually got fantastic analysts that just don't have the data they need, in which case you need much more; you need people who can technically You know, build out the data platform in the way that allows those analysts to exploit it. I think you've got to start at the outcomes that you're trying to drive and kind of work backwards, and almost like the title of the role in many ways becomes like the really hard thing because you're looking at how do these skills need to interact together looking at the existing team you've got, I would say it's become more of like a dynamic recipe of things that you have to bring to the table. You always have your kind of key focus area, your key disciplines, but I think also nowadays being a jack of all trades is almost as powerful as being a specialist, and I think I like a mixture of people that are specialists and the jack of all trades, if that makes sense as well. So I think it's as I've led more teams I've started to be a lot less rigid about the way that it works and also let the team define things themselves a little bit more as well because I think autonomy is a really important thing. When you look at sports teams, there are some sports teams where they have, if we talk about the NFL, some coaches who make all the shots, who call all the shots from the sidelines, and the team effectively becomes robots that are just doing what they're told to do, but then there are other coaches, so I'm a big Chiefs fan. You look at Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes. Andy Reid and Patrick Mahomes have a real partnership where Andy Reid is on the sideline calling the bigger shots, but he also trusts Patrick Mahomes, who's on the field, to call the shots in the situation that he's in because he's got the best possible perspective and context when he's about to receive the ball in the last 10 seconds of a game. and I think you know when you take that kind of position and that type of context, actually letting the team take a bit of their own ownership of how they want to operate and how they want to set themselves up, I think it helps them to feel they have that accountability and responsibility for defining the team. They also have a little bit more; you almost get a little bit more from them because of that, because it's not just something that they're being told to do; it's something that they're part of deciding on, so I think those are really important things as well when it comes to the team. And we also try to get them involved in the interviewing as well. Culture fit is not just about me, but it's also about how they're going to work with somebody who's super outgoing, who can, you know, are they going to get it? Are they going to be somebody who's never really going to be able to get a word in versus somebody who's maybe a little bit more introverted, a little bit quieter? How are they going to encourage a conversation and get that person to open up so it's interesting to see the dynamics of how those people fit in as well?

TIM: It's interesting listening to you explain this philosophy and approach in quite a lot of nuance and detail, and it's impressive that you have this kind of end goal in mind. You work back from there to see where all the pieces fit. It struck me as you're saying this it must be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, if you're a data leader who's come in outside of data, which has been an increasing trend in the last few years, particularly in larger organizations where they've just spun up lots of individual analytics departments in their bank, and they've had to import senior leadership in because maybe there just isn't enough yet in data because it's too new or something. and so you might get people coming in from a marketing leadership role or finance leadership role suddenly inheriting and leading analytics and data engineering teams without having been an analyst or data scientist or engineer themselves. That must be ridiculously challenging, to put it mildly, for them to really nail those teams because they haven't really done that. They wouldn't have that level of context and experience and knowledge that someone like you would have. Yeah, do you have any thoughts on that trend, and if that's got any merit, or am I missing something?

SIMON: I think a great leader is a great leader, somebody who can lead people, lead hearts, and lead minds in many ways. One thing I've always thought is actually if the truly great leaders are adaptable enough that they can inspire greatness from people, whatever they do, and I think there's an element where actually just leading a high-performing team, irrespective of what you've done, is all just context. and in some cases it's always important to have some background in the field that you're working on because you need to have that authenticity that people buy into and believe what you're saying. But then saying that, if you've got sort of fantastic architecture data technical skills, but as a leader, people can't really buy into you. you're not authentic You don't come across as authentic. You're not an effective communicator. I think you know that can be just as bad, so I think it's got to be the right blend of understanding the domain as well as understanding what it means to lead people, and I would probably say in some cases I would take a great leader over somebody who's got all the domain knowledge but doesn't know how to lead people. Because I think, actually, you know, You can always you can bring people in to fill the gaps and really if you've got your leader who's defining the architecture and the technology to be honest that it moves so quickly nowadays there are that it is almost impossible to Manage and lead a team as well as keep in touch with How the technology and the architecture is changing I think if you're I think it's very difficult To be able to be both a brilliant leader and be right at the cutting edge of technology I think that's where you get into the jack of all trade versus specialism debate of what's the balance so I think somebody and being candid I come from an accounting background my career started as an accountant and I studied accountancy and law I wasn't a bedroom coder, but actually that kind of brought me a lot of real-world experience, certainly in a data team. If you've come from a finance background or from an ops background or even from a sales background, you can talk the language of the people that you're going to be serving as a data team and actually being able to to be authentic with the finance team and say I used to be a management accountant, I know how accruals and prepayments work and how balance sheets work and how we are going to deal with the depreciation on this asset and have those sorts of conversations you carry a lot of credibility, which means that Actually, because I think as a data leader you need to be able to talk the language of all the other leaders around the table, and if you and all the other leaders around the table are not technical people, actually having the technical knowledge isn't necessarily the most important thing. And I think I've said this before: you can have the best technical implementation, but if nobody uses it, then it's not worth it, but you can also have a pretty shoddy technical implementation, but if everybody's using it, at least everybody's using it, so I think, for me, it's important to be able to be—you want people to recognize that you've got the credibility that you know what you're talking about, but understanding the technology alone isn't going to make you an effective leader. So I think it's good that we see more people coming into the data community from outside. I think probably the other thing I would say is having the experience of going through a few different transformations. I've built a few data warehouses and lake houses in my time. you earn the scars You learn the lessons of what goes well and what doesn't go well. I think a lot of the time, actually just having experience of transformation is really important, and you see a lot of people rising quite quickly into data leadership roles now where they've not been through a couple of cycles of starting a warehouse implementation, starting an analytics team, and launching replatforming. These are all the things that over a 20-year career you learn the lessons of what goes well and what doesn't go well, and I think what we, what I think, certainly what you start to see is the people—there's a lot of competition at the top, but actually when you look at what are the sort of skills and experience that businesses need to recruit for. I think my experience of going through transformation multiple times in different-sized companies is so important, and a lot of the time you get people who are just breaking through into that top level, and they have all the passion and all the technical knowledge and expertise to do that. To utilize You know the emerging technology, but when it comes to the difficult stuff of, you know, the business falling off the adoption curve, going through that cycle of data owners and data stewardship, and having to launch that again, that's where the experience of being there and doing that, knowing it's going to happen, and thinking ahead of what you're going to do I think that's important, so I think it's the aspect of leadership and inspiring people. I think that's really important that we don't just have data people there, but when it comes to the technical leadership, I think for me it's less about the technical leadership and more about the experiential side of leadership of when your people in your team are looking at you going Oh god, this is all going wrong. Yeah, this is always going to happen, so don't worry. This is the strategy or the tactic we're going to employ to get around this challenge. I think that's the sort of thing that really lets you cut above other people if that makes sense.

TIM: It does, and in terms of hiring and then building out these data teams and hiring these data people You've got such experience in hiring in different environments and different kinds of roles. For you, what would be like the typical common pitfalls that people go through in building out their data team, like typical hiring errors? Imagine you're advising a first-time data hiring manager and trying to help them accelerate their learning and avoid the most common mistakes. What are the things that spring to mind?

SIMON: I would say I think often it starts with actually understanding the best way to achieve the outcome that they're trying to achieve as a business, and I think, you know, the way that you deliver outcomes from a data strategy perspective tends to be based in four areas: you have business processes, you have the data itself, you have the technology on which the data sits, but then you have people. and I think actually understanding and having a rounded data strategy before you actually execute on hiring people is really important because you end up hiring if you don't have that in place, then you end up hiring the wrong people for the job that you need, so I think the common pitfalls I tend to find are that the overarching strategy, which supports the business strategy, is not fully aligned to the business stakeholders. It's not aligned to the technology, and it's not aligned to the process because if you go into the market and bring people in, you want to make sure that the right people are at the right level of seniority. To do the job, and that is genuinely the number one issue, is that the strategy is not strong enough to reinforce the people that you're bringing in, and if you have a problem with your hiring, I think it generally comes down to the fact that some part of your strategy wasn't fully baked in, so it could be, you know, how are you going to work with the stakeholders if that hasn't really been clearly defined, or you've got some challenges that you need to work through that kind of has a big impact on your resourcing? You're going to have to hire people who, as well as being technically good, are going to have to really try and influence this difficult stakeholder who doesn't really buy into the strategy, so therefore you're then looking for somebody you might be looking for somebody a lot more senior than actually what you need in the rest of that sort of type of role in the team. So I think for me, the number one thing always goes back to having the strategy really well understood by the business with a clear rationale of what you're doing, and I think a lot of the problems that you have as a hiring manager come from the fact that the strategy hasn't been properly landed. I think the other sort of challenge with hiring, I guess, I think It's really difficult for candidates to find the whole application process quite formulaic. You send a CV. For some reason, we've always sent CVs, and it's two pages, maybe one page of black and white prose, and I don't find that the best way to actually understand and see if somebody wants to make themselves stand out. It's very difficult to do that, so I think the process, the interview process as well, where it's purely a process of talking to people and asking them a few standard questions, I like that I've found that asking people to take part in an exercise is just the single most valuable thing that I can do in that I've done in an interview process that has the biggest impact. Because it does take a little bit more time and effort from the candidate in the hiring process, but you have a much more valuable conversation about a meaningful task, which is based on the job they're going to do. You can understand the problem-solving; you can actually see The quality is because that person might not be brilliant, or CVs are really hard things to write. All right, and I can say that as a leader who's been writing and updating my CV for 20 years, it's like I hate reading CVs. I hate writing my own CVs; I just don't find It's that interesting, and it doesn't give you that much opportunity to really show what you're really about, so yeah, going into the hiring process, having a way of being able to just let somebody show you how they can work is just really powerful. The unfortunate thing is you can't do that with lots of people, and if you've got a job where you've got more than a thousand people that have applied for it, you're clearly not going to be able to do it on that, so I think those are some things for me that are really important in the hiring process that have certainly been in the sort of last five years or so.

TIM: What's interesting is that you first went, I think, a couple of levels further up than what I was expecting in the sense that you didn't start diving and talking about CV screening or interview technique or whatever. You said, No, the strategy itself is wrong or could be wrong, and so that's a really interesting takeaway for people to maybe just zoom out a little bit to get that bit right first because then that's going to inform who you're going to hire and why. and without having established that you're almost doomed to go down a path of some kind of failure

SIMON: Yeah, I think that's definitely the case, and in the current market, it's an expensive process to hire people, and getting it wrong is an expensive process, and it's one that you've got to get right, so I guess nowadays it's probably One of the most financially important big costs for a data team is recruitment and people. You've got to get it right, and I think If you're setting off on the wrong foot, it's very hard to transition somebody who does. Who's the one who has a certain set of soft skills and technical skills into something very different if you got it wrong? So I think a bit more time spent up front on planning and agreeing and engaging will pay dividends in the long run.

TIM: It certainly will, and for any leader who hasn't had a regretted hire on their hands, they probably underestimate the pain and misery of that situation, but once you've got a few under your belt of people you've had to let go, that's just like a disaster for everyone, obviously the person themselves. Mainly, what a jarring experience that could be to lose your role, let's say during the probation period. but then unless you're a very confrontational, aggressive kind of person, having those conversations, performance managing someone, and then asking them to leave is also dreadful, so it's just like a lose-lose scenario, and yeah, I feel like anything you can do to mitigate against that and be a bit more careful and more thoughtful in who we're hiring has got to be the best for everyone within reason. Now, that's not to say I'm not advocating now for eight interview rounds or whatever, because it's been shown to not actually improve accuracy anyway. Like, you get past a certain number of rounds, you're not really learning anything else but having thought through in detail about who you're looking to hire and measuring what you can to make the best decision possible. Oh, it's just that it's essential, and I personally found that I would tend to want to skip ahead sometimes in hiring because I'm just bored of it. Like, I've interviewed 15 candidates for some role; I just—I just—I don't want to be interviewing; I want to be doing the job and getting this person in and getting them adding value. But I feel like it's one of those traps you just got to wait till you find the right person.

SIMON: I find it interesting that some data leaders say that they don't have the time to invest in interviewing people because I'm like, You're a leader; you're there to find the balance of the team; that's your job, and when people say they don't have time to interview, for me, it's like, If you can't get—if you can't invest time in the people. The people are the ones who can mobilize all the strategy of the strategy, the enablement of the strategy. Okay, if you're going around doing every bit of analysis and every bit of development, and that's the stuff that's getting in the way of recruiting the people, I think you're approaching the problem in the wrong way. You know, you get the right people in, and they will work on that execution for you. I'm passionate about meeting people and like understanding how people work, I think, and sometimes you meet amazing people, but they're just not the right people for the role, but that doesn't mean that they're not people that actually are going to be valuable to have in your network, and you never know what's around the table. You never know what's around the corner in terms of where you could go with things, and actually that person might be a really useful contact to have. I think people see it as more of a task, whereas I actually think it's a fundamental part of the job, and if you can't, if you don't want to make time for that sort of stuff, then I question whether you're actually a manager rather than a leader because a leader is somebody who understands and curates the team and, you know, looks at it's not just about achieving outcomes; it's about the stuff that enables the team to achieve the outcomes, which for me Is the people stuff, and I think nowadays people it's interesting as well because as you get, I guess, as you get more senior, you find the some of the basics that you thought everybody did as a manager don't always get done. There's a lot of times in the past 15-20 years where I've been not really had objectives set, agreed, or signed off. over the course of a year, and you're looking at going well This is a basic of what we do. I think there's just some really basic fundamentals of things like feedback. You know, giving really good quality feedback when you're a manager is a really important way to build that connection with your team member, and it's both constructively done and it's positive, and it's, you know, done in a way that inspires them, and I think as you grow through the ranks, sometimes you can feel like those basics people don't do them and just don't do them for whatever reason. It's something that I'm just really passionate about. I continue to manage as I try to manage as effectively as I can. Do all the things I do now as I did when I was first learning. How do I become the manager for the first time? How do I know what the things are that I need to do? How do I do it to the best of my ability? I still have that passion now. I think you can't be lazy with these things; you've got to put the time in, and I think one thing that my team will always say is that I will back them to the hilt. I will challenge them in private, but I'll be the number one supporter in public, and I think when the team knows that you're behind them and supporting them all the way and letting them take some of the accolades and you're taking a lot of the pain, or as much of the pain as you can, and I think that's what inspires them to want to put that extra 10 percent in, and I think that's where I think it just goes right from spending the time doing the first stage interviews and being as passionate with everybody as you can be because it's a whole process that you're going through, and that person will remember that conversation that you had. I know sometimes when I get into my first culture fit conversation with somebody, within 10 minutes I'll look, and I'll be speaking to someone, and I'll know the second stage. The progression to the second stage, I do like to tell them there and then I said, I'm going to tell you now you're already at the second stage, because I think it's sometimes important for people to go, Wow, I didn't have to wait until everybody else was, you know, taking it away, because I think sometimes that direct feedback That's how we do stuff in our team, so it's like it's very authentic to us, and I think people just get a sense of the way we run our The date current data team pervades through the recruitment process. It pervades through the team socials; it pervades through tough meetings and incident issues. It's just to say it's, you know, just this. It's the cultural DNA of how we work together, and you If you, at the moment, get lazy and don't get involved in certain parts of the hiring process, then you know you're losing it a little bit, and also, like, hiring is like a good thing. It means you've got investment in the team. You know I've been in situations where you can't get the investment because things are challenging; you've got budgets that you can't go over. So the fact that you're investing—you know, investing the company's money— You've got to be doing it in the best interest of the company as well, so I try not to ever get tired with elements of the hiring process because it's so important.

TIM: You mentioned a few times, or several times, cultural fit, and even as an example, they're like being in an interview with a candidate and realizing early on that they are a good match, at least on those dimensions, and wanting to get into the next stage. What are your thoughts on cultural fit in terms of its measurability or immeasurability? the fact that often it's quite an intuitive vibe the way that people would evaluate it, which then opens it up to all sorts of biases What's your thought on cultural fit?

SIMON: I think it's an interesting one because I think it's a bit of where art and science match. The art of being a leader is being able to identify and cultivate talent. That doesn't mean you're perfect at doing it all the time, but it means you've got a knack for finding something that sometimes other people don't have, and then there's the science of how do you ensure that things are That you can retain and support diversity, equity, and inclusion, you can try to remove as much bias as possible. I think it's definitely an interesting place, and I think a lot of—I think it's hard to completely remove any bias, and I think the reality is that a lot of organizations have inherent bias in them irrespective of what you try to do in your own area, in your own team, or, you know, The reality is that there is bias there, whether it's you know, it's not always the right thing. I think also the industry you work in can be quite telling as well. So I think the charitable sector, the public sector, tends to be a lot more focused on removing bias. I think when you get into more commercial businesses, I've found that whilst bias is talked about, how much of it is actually fully adopted in the hiring process, I think it's quite It's quite, it still feels relatively immature in different places. I guess I haven't really got a specific year. We try to give everybody the right opportunity, but I think the other thing is sometimes you're hiring for not just a culture fit for the team. It's a culture fit for the business, and there are scenarios where you can tell within five minutes of sitting with somebody that if you put that person in front of somebody else, they're not going to be able to; they're going to find it very hard to achieve their outcomes, and I think in those scenarios you do. You have to make some tough decisions as a leader sometimes. and I think actually sometimes bias isn't the worst thing in the world because it's actually helping the candidate as well in some cases where if they're going to struggle in a situation, I think it's a really tough subject, and I think as a data person, bias is something that ideally I'd like to remove, but I think fundamentally there's a lot of bias that's inherent in in the businesses we operate, and as much as we can try and challenge and change the paradigms of those biases and biases, I think we also have to work out how we can best work within it, if that makes sense as well.

TIM: What about the idea of, for example, let's say you're having that cultural fit interview; you're trying to select candidates that are going to match that. What was the phrase used? The team-like phrase?

SIMON: charter

TIM: Team charter—that's the one, so let's say you're trying to match candidates to that team charter. presumably you're doing behavioral interview questions trying to see if this is someone who's going to make it happen or if it's going to be respectful or whatever the particular values are. One way I would have thought to make it a bit more objective would be to have some kind of measurement criteria. So, like, answering this kind of thing on this question would get them a score of five; this answer would get them a score of four. This answer would get them a score of three, so like wrapping some numbers around it so that it's not just getting to the end of an interview and kind of your overall impression is what takes place. What about that kind of measurement standard? Coming up with this kind of scoring rubric and adding numbers to it as a data person, do you feel like that would help reduce a bit of the bias?

SIMON: I've tried that before. I don't necessarily say that I'll try it. It's something I employ right now. I think the thing sometimes with employing numbers and scorings is that it dehumanizes the process and commoditizes the hiring process almost because it becomes almost transactional. You're just trying to get a score, and I think it's funny. I guess as I've become more experienced as a data person and become a leader, I've become less data-driven because actually I don't know how valuable it is. I don't know if it's actually as valuable or meaningful as it could be. I think there are absolutely ways you can score data. I would probably say we don't have the scale of hiring in where I currently work, and to be honest, in a lot of previous places, I think you know maybe if you're recruits, I could see a good outcome for that. If you're maybe recruiting at a call center where there's probably a high turnover of staff, you've got a fairly standardized role, and you've got large amounts of applicants; a scoring system would actually make a lot of sense. And there are obviously ways then you could measure trends over time. I think certainly we're, you know, certainly in the last few years, you, because the roles have been quite specific for specific purposes, I think it's if you've only interviewed three candidates, scoring them, you know what you're, which is the best, I think from that come from the conversations you've had. So I just don't think it works for me. It doesn't work in the roles that I've been recruiting for. Putting a scoring system on it, I think, obviously you make certain notes about it, and you'll go This one's more technical; this person has a stronger influence in skills, but I wouldn't necessarily try to force a score onto that. It's just more of a those are the things that came through as the strongest and what feels like the best mix of stuff, so yeah, I think that's my view on the scoring. I'd probably say

TIM: Yeah, okay, so you're doing some kind of qualitative analysis, and because it's a small volume of candidates, comparing them is actually quite easy. You don't necessarily need to go across the different criteria because there's a small enough set that you can probably put them all on a piece of paper and fairly easily know who the winner is. so to speak

SIMON: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, that's a much more succinct way of summarizing what I just said.

TIM: Simon It's been a great chat today, a great conversation. I've personally learned a lot, and I really appreciate how clear your philosophy is and how people-oriented it is, and so I feel like anyone listening could certainly learn a lot from you about how to create a great team and a great team culture. how to create high-performing teams and so thank you so much for sharing your insights and wisdom today.

SIMON: Thanks, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to talk about something that I'm really passionate about.