All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes. I'm your host, Lydia. And joining us today is Dr. Hamira Riaz of Lloyds Banking Group.
Welcome to the show, Doctor.
Dr Hamira: Thank you so much, Lydia, and I appreciate the invitation.
The Four Chapters of Dr Hamira’s Executive Talent and Assessment Journey
Lydia: Walk us through your journey in Lloyds and what led you to specialize in executive talent and assessment?
Dr Hamira: It’s pure chance actually. So I've had a rather unusual career, probably four chapters. So I trained as a clinical neuropsychologist. I spent my early career in the health service and then the Ministry of Defence, essentially looking at brain disease, so testing clinically to establish diagnosis. Then I moved to strategic consultancy in my mid-30s for YSC, which is now part of Accenture. It’s a consultancy that assesses Senior Executives in multinational companies.
Lydia: How did you find that transition?
Dr Hamira: I found it exciting and interesting, but disconnected at that time. Then by the time I had done both, there was just a much greater tendency for clinicians to move into the corporate environment, and for people in the corporate environment to do clinical training. So, it started to become more of a trend.
I set up my own consultancy so I could do both sides of the work. Then at the grand old age of 50, the fourth chapter began when I moved to Volvo in my first HR role, which had a quite broad remit across talent, leadership, and diversity. Then in March of this year, I moved to Lloyds in a more specialist role as Executive Talent and Assessment Director.
Lydia: So, what are some key areas of focus in this role in Lloyds Banking Group?
Dr Hamira: So I think, post-COVID, one of the things for Senior Executives is just dealing with that Polycrisis planet, that your decision-making actually has to take into account so many macro factors now, and the level of volatility, ambiguity, complexity, uncertainty is now - like never before - which affects both your decision-making ability and your leadership.
I think all of the paradigms that we’ve had in that senior leadership space in the past, the hero leader, who leads from the front, the servant leader, who leads from behind, the agile leader, who leads from the middle, all of those are now probably not as fit for purpose as they used to be pre-COVID.
Things are moving so quickly, leaders are having to adapt at such a pace, that I think that is the key challenge for anybody working in my area.
Navigating VUCA Waters
Lydia: So, what might be the impact of VUCA that we're seeing on strategic planning around executive talent?
Dr Hamira: I think we have to be obviously a lot faster and ahead of the game. We have to make sure that we’re not placing an unreasonable burden on senior executives. So, anything that we do as an intervention, be that in terms of assessment, insights, or development, has to be consumable in the modern world.
We were always time-poor, but we’ve never been this overwhelmed by information before. And that’s because we’ve ended up in a world, a society that’s hyper-connected, and our brains are not designed for the kind of society that we’ve created. So, we’re constantly in a state of overwhelm, and senior executives are no exception.
Lydia: In terms of recruiting or looking out for C-suite leaders, what might be some key characteristics that would define an exceptional leader in an environment like this?
Dr Hamira: I’ll probably choose to answer that in a different way, which is; I’d say there is no one profile that defines success at the senior level. But there are some aspects of the process that allow you to explore the characteristics and qualities of the individual and whether they can actually stretch their leadership to that level.
So, some of these components have been around in the executive assessment processes for a long time and others are probably emerging as more important in recent years. We’ve always done assessments of personality and cognitive ability, and looked at perception and reputation. If it’s an internal candidate, we look at 360, if it’s an external candidate, we look at market reputation.
We’ve always looked at skills, knowledge, and experience to understand how an executive has built upon their experiences, learned from them, and then applied them. So, we’ve looked at that breadth of background. Potential is always an aspect that we have to think about like what latitude is there for growth, vertically and laterally.
Then finally - and this is perhaps an element that’s become more important - executives have always found it difficult, but it’s starting to become more important in younger generations, and that’s your ability to connect and impact quickly and directly with other beings at scale.
That personal brand used to be that politicians and pop stars and celebrities had to be good at that. But actually, now Senior Executives have to be really good at it.
So, that ability to bring your story to life very quickly and connect with other human beings at scale, I think that’s really important now.
Embrace Digital Identity from Adolescence
Lydia: There’s also a vast, or rather broad, segment of leaders that we can see now, in terms of generation. You’ve got a younger group, as you said, coming in and taking on more leadership roles. Might there be any difference between these generations in terms of being able to connect with a broader audience or even build a personal brand or even in terms of leadership capabilities?
Dr Hamira: I think it’s really interesting in terms of the pipeline of building senior leaders. With executives, it’s always been a high-touch service. It’s a small group that carries such accountability for delivering for the business, that it’s always been high-touch. So, you can work with them even if they’re not naturally good at connecting and getting themselves across, because there are sophisticated interventions that you can put into place. And the resources are usually there to be able to support leaders in that space.
Then let’s move to the other side, you’ve got sort of younger generations, early career, who’ve just started out or have an aspiration to get to the very top. And I think they are naturally wired to build their personal brand from their adolescence onwards, and I think about my daughter at 14, she knows exactly what she wants to get across in her digital identity, and how to reach people virtually. So, it’s very natural for the Instagram generation to be able to do that.
I think where the pipeline has an issue with regards to getting yourself across and connecting is in the middle ones who are not naturally wired that way to build their brand, and where the resources and interventions are not in place to give them a personalized set of support if they struggle in that area. So, there are different challenges at different points of the pipeline.
Lydia: In terms of getting that senior leader or executive leader in and developing this individual into the kind of leader that is expected in these times, are there any specific interventions in terms of development?
Dr Hamira: It’s not rocket science. I think there’s always a portfolio approach. There’s room for a flagship intervention for your senior leadership population. At the time when you’re pivoting, you’re changing your approach to strategy, you’re moving into a critical phase of your transformation, for example, just level-setting everybody at once. So, your flagship intervention, when you get them all together, I think there are on-demand interventions, because everyone’s so busy. You have to provide consumable learning, things that they can just get on-demand, consume and feel like they’ve got the answer to the set of issues that they’re facing in real-time.
Then I think in between that, there are probably, and this is where the talent function comes in, you are spotlighting specific cohorts, strategic cohorts of your populations in order to support them during critical phases. So, that is bespoke, it’s modular, it’s time-limited, and it’s because they’re facing a particular challenge that you want to support them through.
Redefining Assessments as Insights
Lydia: In terms of assessments, how has the assessment process evolved over the years for executive talents and maybe what are some trends do that you see shaping in the future?
Dr Hamira: Well, I’ve been around for so long, so I’ve lived through the trends. I think when I first started in strategy consultancy, it was probably, typical that you would outsource your executive assessments to a consultancy house.
You would have a group of consultants that got to know your company, understood your leadership frameworks, and then externally benchmarked your leaders against that. That was very natural.
You would typically spend between three and four hours, including psychometric tests, with a consultant, and they would then write a 15-page profile on you about your strengths and your development themes, and that would hopefully inform development interventions. So, that was typically the approach. I would argue that we have moved beyond that, and all that still happens. But the value, the first time you do that is fantastic. But I would argue that there’s less of a return on investment once you’ve done it once. Once you’ve told your story to a consultant, and they’ve written it down, you learn to play that game.
I think what we’ve moved to, and certainly that’s what we’re doing here, is we’ve got a multi-source, multi-stakeholder, multi-data process. It means lots of different people are involved in looking at an individual in lots of different ways, drawing on lots of different data. All of that gets integrated into a two or three-page maximum profile that is almost unique like a fingerprint. And then once we’ve got that profile, that immediately becomes the basis of the development plan. If it’s an external person coming in, that becomes part of their 90-day transition into the company. So, I think that’s one way in which things have shifted.
The other way that it’s drifted is that we don’t call it assessment anymore. We call it insights. Because that feels very judgmental, it feels like it’s been done to you.
Lydia: Like an examination.
Dr Hamira: Yes, like a parent-child's kind of view. Actually, what we're doing is, as a team of experts in the area, is providing people with insights that they can choose in an adult way to drive the next level of their leadership journey. So, we'd much prefer it to be that kind of partnership than somebody assessed you, came to view about you, and wrote about it. Then that was set in stone as some kind of judgment.
Lydia: I'm also quite curious to see how you have used your skill as a clinical practitioner to analyse these insights. Is there any kind of takeaway from that, or any kind of applied skill or insight that you've had from your clinical background?
Dr Hamira: You’re looking for patterns in both clinical and corporate psychology. One of the things I would say as a psychologist, but it’s probably controversial and counterintuitive, is that there is no way of predicting someone’s future behavior or success.
So, if you think about the number of potential models out there, which promise you that if you use the potential model and assess people using that potential model, you can predict their success in the future, I would argue. Based on my experience, after 35-40 years in psychology, you cannot do that. Human beings are far too complex, and life is far too messy for you to ever be able to predict in that way.
So, I think what you do is you look for patterns, and you look for patterns that you feel come from multiple data sources. Everything’s triangulated and cross-referenced. And then you grow your confidence that actually, the view that you’re forming with the individual is a robust view.
It’s always a gamble. Potential is a gamble. It’s almost like you’re putting money on someone to succeed in the future. It’s a leap of faith, it’s not an absolute judgment, you can always get it wrong.
That’s the one thing that I always felt in a clinical world or in the corporate context, that every person is unique, you have to start with a fresh slate, you have to draw on lots of different data points, you have to make sure that your biases are being accounted for. And then you come to a set of views about a person that best tells their story and speaks to the best version of who they are right now.
Evaluating the Exponential Influence of Technology on the C-Suite with Gen AI
Lydia: Technology is obviously a game changer and you also mentioned that there are different data points that you have to pick up from. So, what might be the impact of these rapid technological changes that we're seeing now, including digitalization right across businesses, all the way that C-suite leaders are assessed?
Dr Hamira: I think that the trend towards digitalization, doing more things online, and in a way, that means that you can have a self-service approach, I think that’s been happening for a long time. And the recent move into Gen AI, and that kind of world, is not going to have an exponential impact at the top of the house.
What do I mean by that? As I said, it’s always a high-touch, personalized service at this level. So, even if you have online psychometrics, you want to speak to somebody trained and accredited in those tools to be able to help you understand what that means for you. I think the technology enablement in the assessment and insight space is going to happen in the volume area, probably not in the exact space.
I also think that if we go fast forward, if we’re really talking about step change, the next point where we will have real transformation in this area will be when we can have proper avatars, that I can project an avatar of myself into a wonderful office with my avatar of my executive. And we can sit there instead of meeting face to face. We actually meet in cyberspace, but in an environment that makes us feel relaxed and comfortable, and is conducive to that psychologically safe conversation.
I think we’re getting there. I think we will get to a stage where we don’t need to meet in person anymore. But then, it still has to be an intimate conversation, that feels psychologically safe.
Lydia: So, when it comes to assessing potential, I understand what you just said about not being set in stone, and it’s one of those things that we have to reassess and look at very clearly before you can draw a clear conclusion out of anything. So, when it comes to succession planning for C-suite levels or executive roles, and you’re looking internally, what might be the benefit or impact of assessing potential?
Dr Hamira: I think we’ve tended to think about potential as being something that you can measure with a set of items and codify. And I guess that’s what I’m suggesting. It’s almost like the Wizard of Oz, because if you draw back the screen, what are you actually doing when you codify potential? It’s another way of looking at someone’s leadership and their background, but you’re just using different words, the words of the model.
What I’m suggesting is that actually, what we ought to do is anchor ourselves in a fundamental psychological truth, which is, everybody has potential if you’re human, you have potential.
So, there are two approaches to this, and they are side by side. One is this idea of a talent marketplace, where you have a shared language across the organization about the language of potential. You give it to everybody, then they self-reflect, they decide for themselves, what’s my superpower? What’s the secret sauce that has fueled my success? You own that language, and you use it as a key, a calling card in a talent marketplace to drive your career. So that’s one element. And that, I think is an open ecosystem, an inclusive approach to potential.
What you’re talking about when you come to get to succession planning is talent process. A process where you decide as an organization, we’re looking for people with potential for what, when, and where. Which roles, in what timeframe, and what and where in this company or another company? That, for me, is a separate set of considerations. One is about just understanding yourself and being able to build your brand around your potential and being able to sell that brand in a talent marketplace and that should be open to everybody.
The other one is being very transparent about what you want in your executives, and that is driven by the succession process. Again, a multi-stakeholder view. It’s not one expert sitting there with some magic wand, who can give you the answer about whether an executive has the potential to get to the C-suite or not. It is a calibrated, verified, multi-data process that feeds into succession. And that allows us to identify potential for vertical growth. But also, most of us spend most of our careers stretching laterally. And this idea of a squiggly career is just going to gain momentum.
People are less interested in climbing a corporate ladder. They want careers that are multi-experience, multi-chapter. And that’s going to require us to be much more creative about lateral potential than we have been before.
Addressing the Robust DE&I Requirements in Talent Assessment
Lydia: Moving on to diversity, it's a big topic and it has been big for a few years now. It's seen exponential growth and made impact in recent years.
How do diversity and inclusion factor into the assessments and development of executive talent at Lloyds Banking Group?
Dr Hamira: That entire conversation has always been around, you don’t want to unfairly disadvantage somebody on the back of the wrong characteristics. So, none of us want to be judged for the way we look, the body that we inhabit, the color of our skin, our height, or anything.
I think that’s always been at the heart of things. But it’s become much more an explicit conversation. We now have to justify the use of every element of our process and it’s quite a robust set of DE&I requirements. Every psychometric we use, whoever we partner with, we have to challenge the norms upon which they’re making their judgments on tests, the technologies they’re using, how accessible they are, all of those things. I would also say that, in the past, where we focused on traditional vectors of DEI, such as gender, age, and ethnicity, we’ve moved on to neurodiversity, which is much more difficult to make sure that we’re being inclusive of everybody, because they can sometimes be latent challenges. They’re hidden until we actually start to work with someone, and then they become apparent. So, neurodiversity is really important.
But I would argue that actually, we also have a lot of lessons to learn from the assessment of personality and IQ. Remember that we have almost 100 years behind us of doing this through traditional pencil and paper tests. And we also know the dark side of the use of those tests that have been developed in the global north with Western audiences, and then translated to an Eastern context, outside in different cultures and different environments.
We’ve got a lot to learn from the dark history of personality and IQ testing, as we move into this new age of being very, very inclusive around giving insights to people and using those to help drive people’s careers.
Lydia: What does that mean, in terms of diversifying the kinds of assessments that we need to have today for diversity?
Dr Hamira: I’m not sure we’re there yet. I think it’s a huge challenge to actually come up with the amount of money. I mean, if we just take a personality tool, the amount of money and time that it takes to get a well-designed tool, so that you are being compared in a way that you feel is a fair comparison, there are enough people like me that I’m being compared to, that is a huge investment for any publication house.
So that’s why I think we need to learn from how these tools have been developed over decades when we move into the new kids on the block. These new providers that come up with algorithms and AI-enabled profiling. I’m deeply suspicious and skeptical of that until I understand the mechanics of their process. What are they using to map and infer skills around? So, I think we’re right in the heart of a new set of challenges. And I’m not sure we’re there yet. I think people are scrambling to keep pace with the conversation around DE&I as it has evolved in the last few years.
Lydia: How would a practitioner be able to measure the success of its executive talent and even assessments programs? Are there any interesting results or success stories that you’d like to share?
Dr Hamira: I think the best outcome, the litmus test of an amazing insights experience, is that your executive feels validated around the things, the qualities that they feel have fueled their success so far. They wouldn’t be an executive unless they knew what their strengths were. So, there’s a degree of the process that’s about validation. So, you’re really great at that, I can see that as someone who’s a complete stranger, and all the data points to the fact that you stand out with those strengths. So, that’s validation and affirmation of strengths, which is a really important part of the process.
The other part of the process is to surprise an executive with those things that they think they are managing and keeping out of sight, but actually, the data has revealed. What do I mean by the dark side of leadership? How are you on a bad day? Who sees it? How does it impact people? How does your team feel about it? What shows up in your psychometrics on a bad day? All of those things. So, you want to surprise them with insights that the executive thinks, I know that about myself, and my family and friends know about it. How did you find out? That’s the second element.
And then the third element is, and this is where insights by themselves are not important, important insights, when they become translated into practical ways forward, are so important. Helping the executive to manage all the things they do not do well, to self-regulate better, to do all the things that don’t come naturally to them. How do they complement and plug those gaps? And how do they do that in a practical, realistic way, on top of a very busy life and a very pressured life? I think there are probably three elements that, together, are the litmus test of a great insights experience.
Breaking Free from Traditional Talent Management
Lydia: What trends do you foresee in the future for HR and Talent Acquisition with technology plays such a key role in this industry now?
Dr Hamira: Well, I’ve been very fortunate the last month to do a lot of traveling to many conferences, where I’ve heard about future trends and where HR is going and how much it’s going to be affected by technology. One of the most interesting ideas that I heard about, which immediately appeals to me, and speaks to the future challenge of engaging, retaining, and developing talent of the future, is this idea that we have to move away from a command and control-based view of talent. So, I grab talent, I bring them in, I hold them, and I keep them forever until I don’t need them anymore, and then I let them go. I would suggest that actually, the trend that most appeals to me is that we have a truly global talent ecosystem, cross-company.
So, what does that mean? It means we’re developing you, we’re finding out your strengths, we’re leveraging them. And we’re finding out about your dark side, we’re helping you manage all of that, and you’ve got a career path with us, but we’re open and transparent with you when the possibilities do not match your potential and your ambition. We have links with other companies and other talent ecosystems, which means that you’re not on your own. We’re developing you for a global marketplace, and we’re not going to hold on to you. But we’re going to let you go and fly somewhere else and live your potential in the hope that by doing that, you’ll come back to us eventually, when you’ve learned those lessons, and you’ve done those things. So that, I think, is a really future-forward way of thinking about talent.
It’s not about us keeping our talent like a tribe, but it’s actually about being very open about developing human beings to their fullest potential.
Lydia: Have there been any feedback from this approach that's come to you and it is an affirmation of this kind of approach?
Dr Hamira: Well, Lydia, this is just a brand new set of ideas. I don’t know any organization that has done this so far. I do know that there are external providers who will take a group of your high-potential talent and parachute them into senior-level task forces in other companies for a price. We know that external providers can provide leadership interventions like that. But actually, for a company to do that, to work in collaboration with other companies, and to proactively enable their employees to work elsewhere, that’s never been done before.
Lydia: Thank you, Dr. Hamira, for your time and these great insights. I absolutely appreciate that, and there are so many new perspectives that have come on board and I particularly like the future-forward method or the approach that you are talking about because, really, we do live in a borderless working environment at this point where people are facing more demands today than they have been even as recently as two years ago.
Share with us your contact details so that someone in the audience who’s listening in might want to pick up a conversation with you.
Dr Hamira: You can search for my name on LinkedIn and connect. I'd be happy to be in touch.
Lydia: Thank you again, Dr. Hamira. And we have been in conversation with Dr. Hamira Riaz of Lloyds Banking Group. Thank you for joining us and remember to subscribe. Stay tuned for more weekly episodes of All-In Recruitment.
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