BHAVESH VAGHELA: Hello and welcome to Ops Game Changers, the podcast that sheds light on the critical role operations have in driving business impact, customer experience, and cost. My name is Bhavesh. I’m Chief Marketing Officer here at ActiveOps, and I’ll be your host for today’s podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about transformational change and what it takes to do that, and what sort of leadership you need in order to drive that change. To discuss that with me today, I’m delighted to have Paul Jamieson, who’s the GM of Operational Excellence and Customer Experience here at Bendigo Bank in Australia. So, welcome to the podcast, Paul.
PAUL JAMIESON: Good to be here.
BHAVESH: Before, we jump into the topic of transformational change and how you lead that, maybe just kind of talk to us through how you ended up being the GM of operational excellence. What’s your journey been like?
PAUL: Like most people, I fell into it. Various interesting career paths. My background is in agriculture and farming. So, I grew up on farms, working early and long hours, with a high work ethic in retrospect. And did a number of roles, worked as a chemist for a little while in a large laboratory. Worked behind bars and then the call center industry took off way back in the late 80s and found myself in there and then pretty quickly progressed to managing and leading and getting into analysis. Taught myself Access, Microsoft Access at the time and Excel. And if you knew Access and Excel, you were oof, you’re one of the hundred who could do it, right? So, yeah, eventually found myself into the early days of workforce management, workforce planning. Back in the days when it was all Excel and building your own databases. Yes.
And then progressed from there with the various different platforms and tools and built up the leadership capability and then went pretty much around the world. I’ve been in the US, most of Europe, parts of Africa, South Africa was in there for nearly a year, India as well. And then for the last nearly ten years, over here in Australia.
BHAVESH: And how long have you been at Bendigo now?
PAUL: Three and a half years, coming up on four years.
BHAVESH: So, at last year’s Capacity conference at our Awards, you won the Executive of the Year for the APAC region.
PAUL: Yeah. Still uncomfortable with that, you can tell.
BHAVESH: I can tell. Was that a bit of a surprise to you?
PAUL: Yeah, I struggle with self-recognition or recognition full stop. So, it was yeah, a nice surprise. And great for the bank as well, if I’m honest. That we’re not having traditionally been known for to play in that space. So, from productivity efficiency standpoint, think it was great. It’s a line in the sand and a fist on the table, I think, for the bank. So, I’m really pleased from that front.
BHAVESH: And I guess, you know, when you are a leader and you’re going through change, you don’t really think about, you know, what you’ve achieved until these things happen, right, in terms of the awards and so forth. Because, you know, over here at Bendigo Bank you’ve been driving some key transformational initiatives. So, what sort of things have you been doing over the last two, three years here at the bank?
PAUL: Well, when I first came to the bank, one of the things that really attracted me was the ability to be able to influence and drive change. And to…I called it playing my greatest hits. You know, I’ve been in the game thirty years doing this, in various different forms. And I could see that there was big opportunity to come to Bendigo and work with the leadership team here and really start to drive up productivity, establish benchmarking, do some standardization and really just mature the leadership capability and, you know, operations more generally. And there was a thirst from the bank to do that.
They recognized that was an opportunity for them, and they were very keen from the board all the way down to support me and the growing of this team and really get into that. So, it’s rare that you get the chance at a bank this mature and this stable, with that level of, dare I say it, maturity and productivity, to come in and be able to play with all the full toy set. Like the full piece. So…
BHAVESH: And why do you think that was important for Bendigo? What were they trying to achieve?
PAUL: Being the fourth or fifth biggest bank in Australia and there’s a bit of distance between the top four and us. We are a very particular community- and customer-focused bank. Won’t go into details here, but you can go online and you can just see our NPS score is what was that plus 27, 28. Yeah. Majors are minus four, minus five, give or take. So, very community people focused. Used to call it the one arm boxer, very strong in there. And slightly weaker on the other arm, which was productivity, efficiency and standardization. Yeah. So, there was recognition to do that, not just for cost effectiveness, but to really mature us and make and get us fit for the future as part of wider strategy.
BHAVESH: You know, that’s you know, pretty common for a lot of organizations going through that transformational change. But it’s not easy to change people’s mindsets as you evolve. So, what sort of leader are you?
PAUL: You hit the nail on the head. You said, ‘changing mindsets’. And it’s something I always talk to my team about. And as much as we think or we inhabit roles that are specialist workforce, capacity planning, process excellence, process architecture, sustain coach, I do remind them that’s just the vehicle they drive. What they do is mindset changers. They are here to promote change in the business through offering different ways, different approaches, different techniques, different tools. Yeah. And show people what the art of the possible is.
Taking them to the mind gym is another way that I would use but stretch people to that final repetition where they feel hard and they start to get stronger and start to get used to it. And that’s difficult and it’s hard. So, for me, the biggest thing is to try and get people around me and within my teams and to collaborate and work with, not just throwing tools out there, but to actively challenge and change the mindset, show the art of the possible. Yeah. And until you can do that, you can have the best tools, capability, whatever in the world, it tends not to stick or last very long.
BHAVESH: And is that one of your key pillars of, you know, when you’re thinking about changing either the mindset or the business? Is that one of the first things that you’re thinking about? How do you go about doing that?
PAUL: Hundred percent. When I first came here and really, with every place I’ve been I’ve always checked to make sure that I’ve got the backing and the support of those around me. In this case the board, the exec and others really support this and have that upfront conversation and say: Look, this is going to be difficult. There are going to be things that we’re going to uncover that you’re not going to like in terms of your own leadership, not your personal leadership capability, or but that might be the case, but the people under you. You know some of your kids might have spots. As I used to say. And that’s always difficult conversation to have. The people that you think are great are maybe not quite great.
BHAVESH: As good as you think. Yeah.
PAUL: Pretty much. And you got to be prepared for that and to make sure everybody’s on the journey. So, the first thing for me is to make sure that I’ve got the support and be really clear that there are going to be some grumbles and there are going to be people that are going to opt out. As you go through a range of work, whatever that may be, there are going to be as you start to change the culture to more performance, data, standardized way. People that are not used to that and have built their career success, if you’re team leader or an operational lead, on gut or on ‘I just know’. Yeah. And suddenly that’s not there. They’re using data, they’re using ActiveOps, they’re using standardizations, they’re using, you know, rigor scores, for example. And all those things start to challenge them. And people start to realize, well, maybe I’m not as good as I thought, and the hand goes up, this isn’t for me. Yeah.
So, it’s important to have the people around you to do that and then to have the team around you who can lean in and have that fireproof resilience. Because there will be a reaction. Of course. Any change in culture has an initial rub to it.
BHAVESH: So, when you kind of look back at your career, you know, twenty plus years doing this in various organizations around the world, was there a moment where you tried something or you learned from somebody else? You thought, okay, now I get it. This is the sort of thing, particularly around people change that makes a big difference.
PAUL: There are so many programs and projects, and I’ve learned always to say this to my own team and others around. I think I’ve learned more from my failures than from my successes. And some of that’s inherent in me and like how I think and act and what led me to that? So, those things tend to stick. You tend not to think about your successes as much because they just happen. The ones where you failed or didn’t quite land as you expected or got and ‘I wasn’t expecting that’ surprise tend to imprint.
And so, you can think of three or four. When I used to work in the BBC, we had a number of contact centers there that we were closing way back in the day. And combining certain things around communication, how we managed that message, how we came up with the analysis to set on that strategy. There are a lot of things there I wouldn’t do and haven’t done again.
BHAVESH: I guess that’s because you’ve got the hindsight of strong career behind you when you walk into something like Bendigo, you bring all that with you, right, in terms of the change.
PAUL: Well, yeah, I think, look, at a certain age, and you’re only what, twenty-five so that you won’t… wouldn’t have gone through it. I was having this conversation yesterday with someone. At a certain age, I think half of my job is building agency for this bank to go forward, setting up the capability, agitating for more and constantly really pushing to make sure that we are getting up to that upper quartile and moving on.
My other half, and it seems to grow week on week, is to bring up the people around me. To mentor and coach them and to give them thoughts. I often bring people into the room, have open brown bag sessions with people, other leaders to come in and have post-exec sessions. If I’m having post-exec sessions: why I presented that way, why I said that, why they said that. Do you understand how that happened? To really play back some of those learnings. And if you know, as I was I saying, I spoke to somebody yesterday, it’s like having when you have kids, you always want to have that generation have the easier life than the life that you had and always goes through. Yes. And for me, if I can distill the things that I’ve learned in the last twenty, thirty years and impart that to someone, they can get a shortcut to some of that. So, I think 50% of my job, which is nice part of it, is to actually build up the people around me and to have this bank have leadership maturity develop by taking advantage of my experience than probably I’m getting from it.
BHAVESH: Have you got any kind of tips and tricks or to do that? I mean, you’ve talked a little bit about, you know, sharing your experience when you’re doing presentations.
PAUL: One of the things I’ve—yeah, I’m a fifty-something year old bloke. It took me till x amount of years to realize it was okay to talk about your feelings and to be open about stuff. So, now I’m very open with my leadership team, with people around me. I would talk about lots of things that have affected me and give them context to that so they can get inside and see how I arrived at that decision, why I was asking those questions, and, in some cases, why the board are interested in that and bring people inside as much as I can to the conversation. You can go to courses and yes you can let…but actually if you’re sitting in the room having the discussion and then doing the post discussion review, you can get so much from that. That I think is so key.
BHAVESH: You said something a little bit earlier on about you know, learning from your failures, right? I mean, people will talk about learning from my failures, but many organizations and financial services are pretty risk averse in those kind of things. So, are you the sort of leader that encourages your teams to just think out of the box, you know, I’m trying to use as many clichés as I can come up with now. But really to drive that and take the risk.
PAUL: I think I use the word agitating. My boss may use different words than that for me, but provoke, challenge. I certainly think in second and third order impact strategy right down to tactical. Longer term, I mean, I’m certainly much more on the strategic side front as opposed to the more tactical, but I can go between the two. But to constantly challenge, I will frequently be offering different view. And often I don’t agree with that view that I’m talking on. But by virtue of saying you know if we’re in senior leadership meeting, even at the exec, I will say, ‘Different view, counter view,’ to provoke the discussion to make sure what we settle on is robust. Yeah.
And sometimes you need to have that yin and yang in the room. And I will frequently say, I’m not sure I even agree with what I’m going to say, but I’m going to say it just that and then we’ll have discussion on it. Sometimes we’ll land on that, often we won’t. But it adds dimension to the conversation. So, I’m definitely more of an agitator but and try and provoke that in the team. You cannot go forward without challenging the current norms, without challenging the current culture, without challenging the accepted norms. Some of those accepted norms might be fine. Yeah. But the bulk of them aren’t. They need to be challenged. And it’s like getting the rust off the gears. You need to be uncomfortable.
BHAVESH: So, do you therefore, when you’re thinking about building your leadership team, are you consciously thinking about the different characteristics and styles you’re going to need?
PAUL: Well the one thing I don’t need is another five as me, right? I think yeah, don’t think any company could take it, let alone me. So, I look for the things that complement me. I’m as you probably get the sense, highly unstructured, quite energetic. Although don’t feel it, but I’m constantly told I’m quite energetic, very kind of entrepreneurial thinking, bit avant-garde in that way. So, it’s nice when I have more structured, more disciplined people and I’m sure my team listening to this will recognize who they are in there. And I’ll pepper that with different types with some challengers, some new thinkers, people with different levels of experience, people with very structured subject matter expertise, and some people who I can just spot are great leaders and just need to find the tooling to develop to bring those two things together. So, I’ll constantly look at the five or six in the team and see how do those skills complement one another.
BHAVESH: I mean, one of the other things that you know, certainly in the role that you’re in, one of the big challenges is translating strategic priorities for the organization and ensuring that you and your teams are fully aligned to that and understand the outputs they’re generating are driving towards those transformational programs. And a lot of you know that you know, senior leadership kind of fails at that level. They’re not able to bring the team along and articulate them towards those business goals. How do you go about doing that? How do you, you know, translate here’s where we’re going, guys, but here’s what we’ve got to do today.
PAUL: One of the biggest things I like to think I do. We have a monthly town hall. Sometimes we have open brown bag sessions. We just had one on Friday actually. We’ll invite guests sometimes from the exec, sometimes it’s we’ve got our half-year reviews, we’ll bring people who are presenting those results to the market. Analysts will come in. And they will start to bring aspects of the bank, the environment, the economic environment back into my team and we will have normally about an hour and a half discussion on that and also as a key part of it, how that connects back to the team so that they can see their efforts in this case, ActiveOps productivity is doing to the cost base and why that’s so important.
And Sam Miller, for example, she heads up our Market Engagement. It’s always a pain to point to me and my team. There’s a page that she goes out to the analysts and in some cases our key investors and talks about what we are doing and some of the programs that we physically are doing and that’s talking itself out to the bank. And think that really resonates with the team and they can actually connect their day-to-day work.
BHAVESH: And what it means.
PAUL: Yeah. And on what that means more strategically, you can see how those results play into the three-year plan. And I will frequently, you know, I’ll talk like that and say this is why X, Y, and has knock-on impact. So, it’s good to get the heads up from the call it getting out the garden shed and start to see the sunlight a little. Particularly in the roles that we’re in. We’re very technical subject matter expertise and we can get tied into the minutiae of it. So, it’s good to pause, stop, come up and see, well, we can see how far we’ve walked up the mountain and we’ve actually come a fair distance.
BHAVESH: And have you seen that change during your tenure here?
PAUL: Yeah. A lot. I think understanding how the bank runs, how it makes money, understanding what risk is, understand the economic environment that we’re playing in, why cost management and it isn’t just about getting a number, an efficiency number, why all that plays into XY and Z. Yeah. We had the CFO come in and do a complete talk for an hour on effectively net interest margin, how the bank makes money, what current rates and it was a really good session. So, people had lots of pennies dropping. Yeah. That’s what that means. So, that’s why that’s important. Yeah.
BHAVESH: That makes a big difference I think, you know, because that motivates your staff, and they understand why they’re putting their extra hour in or why they’ve been asked to drive the outcomes in that period of time. And I would imagine therefore things like attrition probably goes down as a result of some of the leadership.
PAUL: In my team, or this function that is very low. Partly for that reason. And you know, we hired very well. We do fairly—I don’t know if the word intense, but fairly rigorous testing, even psychometric testing for roles that you wouldn’t normally do that. So, I think we’ve been slightly fortunate in the types of people that we’ve brought on. But connecting them to the overall story and giving them the financial acumen. That they can look at the half-year results and then attach their work to that. Because it’s a slightly different language that they wouldn’t normally have picked up on.
BHAVESH: It does. And you said something earlier on, which was, you know, changing mindset from gut feel, right? In terms of yeah, the way I’ve always done things before. And that kind of leads to the question around data, right? Because these days data is now available, hopefully in real time, and it’s things that you can base your decisions on. How do you get the teams to start to trust the data or starting to think about how they use the data? And then of course you’ve got AI coming, right? Or potentially already here, depending which way you describe it. And how are you going to get those teams to adopt that as a way of supporting what they do? So, you know, there’s a lot of transition coming, isn’t there, in terms of technology. What’s that kind of data to gut thing? What are the things that you normally do to try and break that thinking?
PAUL: Well, I think the first thing in all you’ve described there is change mindset, right? Is how do we bring people on the change journey? How do we make sure that they’re trusted, supported, and are able to feel comfortable as they go through change, whether that change is adopting a different way to manage their team through data-based decisions and rather than just no gut feeling, or whether that’s stepping in a bit more to letting the hands off the wheel and letting some AI in there and addressing some of that. A lot of that is management of fear and building a trusted, honest environment and relationship with the front-end of the bank and to be visible and present. And I think, you know, going back to the leadership component of being honest, being visible, being present, and being articulate as probably key. The old days of being stuck in an office that you never see and firing out emails saying, ‘Here’s the strategy paper—bang. You really have to get in and get in amongst it. Spend time with the branches, spend time on the front-end of the bank as much as I can. Work very closely with the GMs of the front-end of the business. Yeah.
So, I think it’s important to understand them and build a trusted view from that. If they understand where you’re coming from, they’re more likely to buy in and give you that extra piece. The other thing I will often say is: You need to—you don’t know if particularly starting in a new role. I need to have a loan of your trust for the next six months. You’re going to go through some stuff you’re not going to like. You’re going to you don’t know me from Adam. You don’t know this approach from Billy Bob. But I need you to trust me. And I’ll repay that trust threefold. You don’t know that yet, but I need you to trust that it will happen. And if normally you get people to buy into that and then it always happens bit quicker than that when they start to see the results.
BHAVESH: That’s an interesting conversation to have somebody that they’ve just met. You know, you’ve just walked in and you’re new to the organization and it’s very direct.
PAUL: It’s an honest one, right? It is.
BHAVESH: Honest one.
PAUL: It’s a no-BS one I think. And I think that’s part of it. I said, ‘We are going to go through some change, you’re going to be impacted, it’s going to feel difficult, but I need you to trust me, you’re going to come through the other end of this. Is what it’s going to look like. We’ll have the support mechanisms in place to help you. But you are going to be fitter, stronger, better, faster than you are. And then you can beat this door down if that isn’t the case at the end of the period.’ And almost to a person that’s what happens.
We talked about Boost. We did a leadership program. It’s a sixteen-week leadership program where we put all our frontline leaders through and we taught them effectively one operational capability leadership. Setting up dashboards, how to use quartile management, focus on your bottom quartile, celebrating success, using data to interpret and analyze. Whole each week had different theme. And we had one coach for every two team leaders and one coach for every two operational leads in there. So, it was quite intense. They would sit with them, they would come out, they would have they would even be part of the one-to-ones and give them feedback, like day in the class, four days side by side with shadowing, and then they go into the next theme. That was very intense and for the first four or five weeks there was that loan period, yes, where they were like putting all this effort in and not seeing the results. Normally by week six or seven…
BHAVESH: They see it.
PAUL: It starts to land, the rhythm starts to happen, the capabilities start to kick in, and they start to get that 1% benefit. They start to get that positivity back from their workforce or that person they could never manage is now being more effectively managed and is getting a fair level of response. And the techniques that they were learning were starting to pay dividends. The NPS, if you like, or the survey that we did at the end of that for every team leader, ninety-eight percent of people gave it if you like promoter, or ubiquitous ‘loved it,’ score coming through the end of it. A few didn’t. And like I said, those are the ones that realized halfway through…
BHAVESH: Not for them.
PAUL: It wasn’t for them. And I think that’s fair and right to have that honest conversation with them at that point.
BHAVESH: But I think there’s an interesting point there. You’ve invested, people talk about investing in people all the time, right? But you’ve put a program in there to really help your teams drive their leadership capability and drive that. So, you’re asking them to trust you for a period of time. But then also you’re asking the board and your senior leadership to trust you that it is going to work, right? Because you’re taking your teams out of the front line of doing work, to get better at potentially doing work. And how was that conversation?
PAUL: So, I brought in PwC for a fair while to do a lot of benchmark and assessments, shadow and coaching views and some like two hundred page pack of maturity assessment of the entire Bendigo Bank operation. It was completely agnostic and it was compared to global standards across a whole range of criteria. And going through that as well as my own experience was enough to say the opportunity that we have here is, and here’s how we can fix it and here’s how we can address it. So, using the data, which in itself is sign of what we’re trying to do, to convince not to convince, but really just to show people the art of the possible, show the board and the exec what the opportunities were and how we would do it was enough.
BHAVESH: Somebody like yourself in your position and from leadership perspective, you know, you have to be able to clearly energize your team and lead your team. But also you’ve got to be able to manage upwards, right? And make sure that the senior board and everything else is behind you and driving that. So, that’s skill that you learn over time, right? You know, it’s not something that just immediately happens.
PAUL: I remember my boss, COO here, pulled me aside after, the first couple of months I’ve been in. I don’t know if he remembers saying this to me. He’ll be watching this and say: ‘I’ve never said that.’ He did say that. He was impressed, he’s never seen anybody and he’d been in the bank twenty odd years, he’d never seen anybody in the bank connect at the senior exec and across levels as quickly and as deeply as I did. Now that wasn’t purposeful. Well, it was obviously to an extent. I wasn’t thinking I’m going to go in hard and connect as wide as I can, spend time with the various different leadership teams, understand, communicate who I am, what they are. That, to me, that’s just what I do. But that was I suppose that’s inherent in me, but that was one of the things that was really key was to get everybody, as many as we could, around what it was what we were doing, what it was, what it wasn’t. Talk about the productivity opportunities and the stories that we’re seeing and what and a lot of them would go: I knew that was it. This is really exciting. There were a few that were not. And to talk about why productivity and customer that those two they weren’t against.
It wasn’t an OR conversation, it was an AND one. You improve your productivity, you get better customer outcomes, you get sleeker, quicker customer journeys. Your customer experience goes through the roof. It isn’t competitive of one another. And in parts of the bank, and actually I should say parts of any industry I’ve been in, it is seen as, we’re increasing productivity, the customer’s going to suffer. And it’s not if you do it right. And anybody can make things quicker, right? But the trick is to be more effective, but get the customer outcomes there. Get the quality through. Make sure that you’re not having rework.
BHAVESH: And I think you see lot of that in the world today. I mean, we’ve been talking about, you know, automation for years, right? It’s not something new, but there’s a real push with automation, you know, with Gen AI these days and what it’s going to do. So, you kind of see that people automate the wrong stuff, right? And make things they think are making things quicker, but actually they’re not driving the business outcomes. That’s what you’ve just described there.
PAUL: Funnily enough, I heard it this morning. When I was getting up, one of my colleagues sent me a podcast on AI work slop. The growing tendency of people to chuck stuff in AI and you get this you know when you read AI now and you say that’s AI, that post or the you know, that paper, it’s got those AI-isms in it. And it’s just like. It’s saying a lot but nothing. And it’s how we use AI to still keep the human element in there, you know, digital when it matters. Sorry, digital where we can, human when it matters. And I think we need to apply that human element on top, but use AI where we can and where we should be to accelerate that kind of so then we can concentrate on the human elements.
This bank really talks a lot around that. And I think it really it is really going to be a good case for this in that we are so community-based. You’ve been around. You’ll see the banners on community centers and local cricket clubs. You turn a corner and, you know, the most remote place in Australia and you’ll normally see Bendigo Bank coverage there somewhere. Our presence and our connection to the community is very, strong. Super strong. It’s probably our super strength, or one of our super strengths. Innovation is quickly becoming that as well. And how you maintain and retain that in a world that’s AI is the challenge. Yeah. I think for us, given the scale, we can invest more in that human element. We can continue to have a human voice, whereas some of the larger banks or the larger industries will go farther and faster on AI, probably to the detriment sometimes of customers, although they would never say that, I think. And I think that, you know, from a shareholder point of view, the cost starts to kick in then they have to do AI more. We don’t, because of our scale, we can probably have a little bit more of that human element. More than we would or more than would be seen elsewhere. So, yes, there’s no doubt that AI is going to become a larger part of our toolset and already is. We have a partnership with Google at the moment. But the human element and how we apply that part is going to become even more for us, I think, over the next year or two.
BHAVESH: And you know, even you know, if you had a crystal ball, what do you think the Bank of the Future’s going to look like in the next five to ten years? What do you reckon?
PAUL: AI, you know, is such a nonlinear, exponential force. It’s so hard. You know, if you know, two years ago we weren’t talking about AI. And now you literally can’t have a conversation anywhere without the word AI automation popping up. Yes. So, it’s ubiquitously everywhere. How we manage AI there’s definitely processing, definitely things you know, that’s definitely going to become more AI-centered. I mean, you look at those capabilities and you start to look at those exciting opportunities. But then that starts to think about then what are the roles that we can then create from that and broaden our thinking roles, the strategic roles, the ability to get the stuff done that we’re not doing. Yeah. We’ve got so many gaps and things that we’d like to cover off, but if we’re able to fill them with humans why or be able to fill them with AI well then humans can then do much more customer interaction, outreach programs, community-based programs. I think that’s where this bank will be in five years. And are you excited?
BHAVESH: Excited by the potential of what’s going to come in next year.
PAUL: I am.
BHAVESH: I mean, you’ve been working in operational excellence for years, right? So, it’s constant change. It’s nothing that’s, it’s not static, right? But you think about, you know, we talked about fifty plus year old men, me and you sitting here. We’ve seen a whole bunch of technology change in our lifetime. But this one seems kind of, you know, very fast and, you know, has the potential to completely change for the way we think about it. And Some people can be fearful of that, or some people can be excited and jump into that and think how do you feel about it? Do you feel like rolling your sleeves up I’m going to get into this?
PAUL: Look, definitely yeah, I’ve got the mindset where that’s super exciting and it’s agitation and it’s point of difference that’s happening all around the world at the moment. So, it is an exciting time to be in. And it is different. It’s not—because I remember the time when emails kind of sound really old. When the emails were, ‘We’ll book you at this,’ and it’s like, this is different than that. I think this, you know, if you listen to podcasts and some much more articulate views on it than I’ve got the view is that this is going to—this is like the industrial revolution. Yeah. It’s going to be that transformative over a shorter space of time. So, we can’t quite envision what that exactly. Yeah. Other than knowing, it’s going to change. It’ll probably change society. But we’re talking about the banks and operational excellence. When you start to think about your family and the roles and the jobs, that’s going to be fully transformative. So, with the time that we, you know, are on the nineteenth hole and on retirement gig. I think the world will be situated. Yeah. No but the thing is, and do say this to my team, this is the generation, this is the time when you’ve got your fingerprints on it. Yes. You.
BHAVESH: You can shape.
PAUL: I always say that to you’ve got—this is one of those rare opportunities you will have, particularly coming into this bank. You’ll be able to put those four or five bullet points on your CV that will remain there for twenty years. Here’s what you did, here’s how you transformed. These are the great things that you’ve done that. You’re never going to get the chance to do at this moment because of this moment in time and ideally at this bank because of the position that it’s in.
BHAVESH: But it goes back to what you said at the start of the conversation that we’re change agents, right? That’s what we are in operations fundamentally. It’s being able to change. So, that’s you know, you’re building a skill set of leadership that helps drive that for this particular bank as you move forward as well. So, the new technology.
PAUL: Customer centricity in there as well. And I think that’s a key thing that’s going to allow but something we don’t talk about with AI enough is that yes, we think about it as processing and automation and stuff, but it’s going to give us a level of customer insight, and allow our people to make decisions based on customer insight and forecast and predict customer insight, so that so the customers will feel they have again I’m imagining this and can feel the product guy shouting at me, but imagine tailored products that digital and AI is able to position specific to you.
BHAVESH: For you, exactly.
PAUL: At a time when you want them or need them because we can predict that. And the relationship then that you have with your bank is a lot more personal. Yes. Lot more tailored rather than you having to walk in and ask and kind of that looks good. I think I’ll have one of them. We can say, hello, you’ve got this perfectly a tailored suite of products that are right for you at that point in your life. And that’s where I think AI will really, come into it. And that’s how people will use those skills. It’s going to offer a whole new toolset to our front-end bankers, to our service consultants, to a whole range of roles to really engage with the customers.
BHAVESH: It’s definitely exciting times. And I think, you know, when we look back at your tenure at Bendigo so far and the transformational change that you’ve been supporting and driving, if you were in a room full of other GMs in here or COOs, what advice would you give? Based on the last three years of your journey, what advice would you give them?
PAUL: Stock up the alcohol. Put the alarm clock away.
Constantly challenge. Challenge yourself. Challenge your thinking. Challenge everything that you see within reason. Look externally as much as you can. What’s everybody else doing? Make sure you’re running the race that you’re in and you know who the people you’re running against are. It’s one thing to be twenty seconds quicker than you were. On your last lap, not good if everybody else is at 40, 50 seconds quicker. You’re still going to come last. So, you need to say what’s everybody else doing? Where are they going? What do the standards look like? How do you compete? And constantly push on that. What do you need to do to push in?
Tie your customer metrics, your customer views right back to your processes, right back to your operational KPIs.
Put the customer at the heart of what you do. So, do the metrics, the data, your decision making that you make everything on, do those tie back to customer?
And then for us, specifically for us, where does risk come into that? Where’s your risk culture? Where’s your risk appetite? Do you understand the risk failures in there? How are you using the data? In some cases, it could be process architecture, it could be the operational excellence capabilities, how are we using those data points to assess risk in your business, risk in your processes, customer risk, finance risk. So, really understand risk as much as you can. It’s an overlooked part of operational excellence.
BHAVESH: I think so. And you know, the opposite question to that is what would you do differently?
PAUL: Over the last three years. Well, I think I’d like to have planned some of the delivery more tightly. The planning was quite good. Self congratulating myself here. I would like to have planned the delivery a little tighter. I would certainly have indexed more on process excellence. So, we’ve got an architecture team and but we’ve built up great capability of black belts and green belts in there. I would like to have done that a little sooner and connected that more to our operational excellence capability. You can you could sometimes only fight one war. So, we went for the productivity, maturity, leadership capability uplift and we kind of left the process excellence, built the team, but we didn’t really turn that up until the last year and a half or so. And now that’s up.
I would have invested more early on what we call sustained coaches. And those were the people to come in to help the leaders maintain their levels. They’re the challengers. They sit with them and say, here’s your bottom quartile, here’s how they can improve your rigor scores. This is an opportunity in your team. Have you thought about doing this a little differently? Here’s some of the observations, even down to psychological safety, we’ll observe meetings and say, the psychological safety, the way you discussed that wasn’t quite right, so they have a big cultural impact. So, teaching people and maintaining that confidence back in the business, I would have liked to have invested a bit more of that early on rather than just rely on the Boost and then some of that to keep it going. So, yeah, would have probably got those trains if they left the station bit more aligned than they were. But overall, think we did good job of making sure we avoided the sugar hit of just productivity and then we walk away and it falls back. We maintained and improved. We got some great results. I mean, we’ve had something like thirty-five percent productivity uplift overall, and then another ten percent on top of that over the next year or so. You could have got that hit contained.
BHAVESH: And you keep it maintained and could be.
PAUL: And improved. Yeah. So, it’s hard to be overly harsh. I would like to have brought that little earlier. Yeah. I do think the process excellence stuff now and the architecture, particularly as we’re moving into AI. Understanding your processes, having them documented, having them detailed, understanding where the opportunities are and getting the efficiencies in your process management up front is probably key. Yeah. I’d like to have done that earlier.
BHAVESH: And you know, looking back, mean, what are you most proud of?
PAUL: That’s an easy one. I’m most proud of my team. So, the leaders that work with me, my team, and my broader team, we’ve brought some great talent and capability in. I’ve seen some people really mature and develop and really contribute well. And some of their thinking is excellent. I saw some great stuff even on Friday where one of my direct reports had one of their team come in and present something they were doing with AI. Which was just way beyond me, but it was so impressive that they’re innovative and challenging their own thinking and said, here’s how we can use these tools, here’s what we’re thinking of doing, or here’s what we’ve rolled out. So, seeing that coming through—yeah, that’s great to see. I like seeing that maturity come through. I’m really proud to work with some of the folk I work with even though I’m an old dog, I can still learn a few new tricks and can look left and right and there are some things that I pick up. Never tell them that, but there are a few things in there like, that’s yeah, it’s really interesting. I’ll just note that and clock that in. There’s some real experience and innovation and capability that I’m really quite proud to work with across the leadership team. Yeah.
BHAVESH: So, I’ve got a final question for you. We asked your team what your superpower is. Okay, so that describing you as a leader and they’re saying what your superpower is, what do you think they’d say?
PAUL: I’m going to talk to this because it’s one of the things I’m starting to get more comfortable with. So, this is probably the right time to talk about this. In the last few months, when would that be—just before, Christmas, just before, Christmas, was diagnosed as autistic. Which was a surprise for me, but not a surprise for anybody who knows me. Or probably anybody watching this. I’ve also got ADHD, so it’s ADHD. Now that in itself, as I’ve been learning and working with some people on this, it gives me the ability to be able to think really fast, think really deeply and be able to articulate data and understand a data set really quickly.
To be able to articulate fairly well, I think, is a key strength. And as I say to my team, make the complicated simple. I’m fairly good at doing that and communicating. I think I communicate Through analogies pretty much all the time, which in itself is an analogy. So, that, I think, is probably my super strength. I’ve been able to bring all that together with experience I’ve now got. If—again that isn’t too self-serving to say, puts it on steroids. I’ve got this level of experience through different cultures, different environments, different countries, different industries, having that and being able to articulate that and then bring those to bear in this environment, in this age, with a newer team, think is probably it’s probably one of my few superpowers.
BHAVESH: That’s awesome.
PAUL: I guess it was said superpowers, I’ve got more than one.
BHAVESH: Yeah. I think that’s great, point is to close the podcast. Again, congratulations on winning Executive of the Year. This conversation has just you know very much very obvious the skills that you bring and the journey that you’ve been on. And I think what you’ve shared today, there’s a lot of our viewers, our listeners would take a lot from your experience and things that you’ve done. So, we appreciate you sharing that with us. And thank you once again for joining us on the Ops Game Changers podcast.
PAUL: Thanks, Bhavesh. Great to be here. Thank you.
