“I fundamentally believe the relationship between a leader and a team member is the most important relationship and, for me, the role of a HR professional is about to train, guide, coach, support and empower leaders and managers to be the best leaders they can, not do it for them.” – Anne Leivers, Head of People and Development at Nottingham Building Society, speaks to us about developing a career in HR Leadership.
As part of our commitment to supporting candidates to develop fulfilling careers, we’ve invited some HR Leaders to share the secrets of their success.
This week, we had a great conversation with Anne Leivers at The Nottingham, who began her career at Marks & Spencer on a personnel graduate training programme. In 2001, Anne joined Boots UK as a HR Manager, a role she held for four years before becoming a HR Business Partner in 2006.
After five years in that role, Anne left Boots to join Rolls Royce Aero Engine Controls as a Senior HR Business Partner. In 2013, Anne spent time at Wincanton on an interim contract as Senior HR Business Partner before joining her current company, Nottingham Building Society as their Head of People and Development in February 2014.
Can you tell us how you got into HR and why?
I was a retail graduate trainee with Marks & Spencer where I had the choice to pick a specialism and I chose personnel, as it was then called. Previously, I’d studied Business Studies which included people-related elements and organisational design modules. I found the organisational psychology elements really interesting and enjoyed learning about how people think and behave and how you get the best out of people. From this I have built my career around my passion for helping people be their best and achieve their goals.
Since then I’ve done a wide variety of roles in HR, including 14 years at Boot UK. I’ve led and built teams, led the people workstreams in major change projects including redesigning organisations and people processes due to large scale business and technology changes. The variety has kept me interested and for me, it’s always been about helping the business improve by making good people decisions.
After Boots, I spent a while at Rolls Royce and although it’s an iconic brand and an amazing company, I missed being close to customers in a service orientated business, which is why I moved to my current role in financial services.
I fundamentally believe the relationship between manager and individual is the most important relationship and I don’t believe HR should get involved in the middle of that unless it’s absolutely necessary. For me, the job is about empowering leaders and managers and building their confidence to be the best they can for their people, not doing it for them. I’ve built a team and a people and development capability which seeks to engage and empower our leaders to build high quality teams to deliver their business goals.
In addition I am privileged and proud to sponsor our CSR strategy here at The Nottingham. Our focus is to help communities thrive, and over the last year in light of all the challenges faced during and following the pandemic, we’ve been doing a lot in the employability space, working with young people and charities who help young people build better futures, especially those most at risk of being NEET (not in Education, Employment, or Training). We’ve developed our flagship Career Academy programme to support young people across our heartland communities and more widely to realise their career goals. Alongside this within our own organisation, we are reinvigorating our apprenticeship programme to provide more roles and opportunities for young people. I think it’s so important for us as a mutual and community-based organisation to focus on these really difficult social issues and it’s so rewarding to be able to help and support this work as well as it being very aligned to the people agenda.
Can you tell me about the key themes and challenges that you’re seeing across the HR sector?
The biggest challenge we have currently is talent, both recruiting and creating the right opportunities for talented people to grow. In financial services there’s some areas where we continue to see a shortage of skilled people, so there’s a challenge around attracting, engaging, motivating and retaining those individuals. One of the ways we’re seeking to address this is a focus on developing our employee value proposition (EVP) into something that engages and enthuses people about what it means to work for a mutual organisation that is purpose led. We want the best people to join us who share our mutual ethos and values and who are focused on ensuring we’re doing the right thing for members.
As a result of the pandemic people are being more thoughtful about where they work and what they do, so I think an organisation built on purpose, like The Nottingham, can be attractive because people want to be part of something that’s meaningful, not a company that’s simply out to maximise profits. Equally, the pandemic has also led to people reflecting on their working lives and we’ve seen more people move on from us than we would have wanted. We know we’re not the alone here and some might say ‘The Great Resignation’ movement has also resulted in talent coming through our doors too.
Just like every other business we’re grappling with the question, what does the future of work look like? Post-pandemic people have different expectations or work. For example, three years ago I’d never done a work Teams call, now they are the majority of my meetings. So how do you create the right balance for people? How do you make your office environment somewhere that people want to come to collaborate and have that sense of connection and belonging as well as offering flexibility to work remotely as well? For us we also have an additional challenge that we have many colleagues who work in our branches and who don’t have the opportunity for remote working as their work is dealing with customers face to face. We are working hard to develop the employee experience for all our teams which is as flexible and engaging as possible. Our third challenge is around how we are an inclusive and diverse organisation where people feel they belong and their unique contribution is valued. We’ve signed up for the Women in Finance Charter, in fact we were one of the founding signatories. We are proud of having a strong female cohort in our senior management group and we want to continue to build on that. We are also working on inclusivity through creating employee representative groups to raise areas to work on and through listening to all colleagues to hear what they want us to focus on. There’s a lot of work to do and we’re doing it because it’s core to our purpose and the right thing to do, we want to live and breathe it.
Having fully aligned people plans, purpose and values is really important – we are a people business after all. We exist to support our members to achieve their financial goals with good quality products, service, and advice.
What career advice would you offer to someone either working towards a career like yours, or someone just getting started in their HR career?
A huge desire for learning is really important in HR. The ability to think, listen, learn and adapt is also really important because HR is a service function and so continually evolving to meet your customers’ needs is essential. HR’s purpose is to support leaders and managers to deliver business goals and deliver the best people experience possible.
For someone starting out in HR, find out where the function sits within the business and understand senior leaders’ view of how important people and the people agenda is to delivering business success. Is there an HRD reporting to the CEO and part of the ExCo or is the most senior HR person reporting into another function. This will tell you a lot about how important people are within the business and how much opportunity there is to influence people management and leadership.
To be successful in HR it’s about having resilience and being prepared to voice a different, sometimes unpopular view so that leaders can make good quality people decisions and do the right thing I remember when I worked at Boots, we used to talk about being an “uncomfortable companion” with our business partners, this has always stuck with me, it’s what I aspire to be. There is value in giving a different perspective and it’s important to feel confident enough to voice your perspectives. You can build confidence by learning about the business, its aims and goals, culture and values and ensuring your perspectives are data driven. Ensure you’ve got good quality people metrics and use them wisely to inform the debate and business decisions.
Being in HR is a great opportunity to get to know a business and be involved. At all levels, be commercially focused, get involved in the business goals, be passionate about what the business is doing and get involved, don’t sit on the side-lines. The people challenge during the pandemic enabled great HR people to come to the fore and demonstrate how they add value to their organisations. As a team, we’ve been hugely relied upon and I’ve seen huge growth in my team because we’ve been faced with continual new situations and challenges. It hasn’t always been easy but I’m so proud of how we have managed the business and cared for our people throughout the most challenging time in all our working lives. There are many positives which have emerged and have changed the world of work forever – it’s an exciting time to be in HR.
Anne has over twenty years of experience in HR leadership roles and has held her current position as Head of People and Development at The Nottingham since 2014.