Helena Morrissey - A Good Time to be a Girl

It was never articulated in these precise terms but I believe one reason why colleagues were prepared to back me as CEO was because of my collaborative style of leadership. We obviously faced a number of challenges immediately following the takeover, and my first task was to rebuild confidence. Where there was a problem, it was my job to come up with a solution. While I certainly didn’t have all the answers and frequently needed the input of colleagues, I had a clear sense of what we were trying to achieve.

I’ve often reflected on that bizarre day. I was only 35 and had no business experience or management training. The firm managed some £20 billion of assets. I had no real idea of how challenging the next few years would be – but also how fulfilling it would be to eventually come out the other side, when we had – together – achieved real progress as a company. I realise now that the decision to say yes rather than what might have seemed a more sensible no to the CEO role, was, in fact, the making of my career. A moment of disruption was my great opportunity.

That experience, particularly in those early years, taught me the importance of focusing on long-term goals, rather than on all the steps we can’t see clearly in the moment but know we need to take to get there. A bridge will often open up when we get stranded, as long as we don’t get distracted or lose sight of that end goal. My six daughters have heard me tell them to ‘leap before you look’ so many times that they now chant it whenever one sister is dithering, but all too often I have seen women (more than men) focus more on what might go wrong than on the prospect of success. We’ll return to this in Chapter 7 – it is vital to recognise and counteract this tendency to hold ourselves back if we’re to be able to capitalise on the opportunities ahead of us right now.

As a novice CEO (and frankly also when experienced) I made many mistakes. Just one day into my new role, I took a call from a tabloid newspaper. I had never had any media training and this was long before companies had ‘corporate communications’ teams. The journalist asked sensible questions about my vision for Newton, which I answered tentatively. She then probed into my family life. Here I felt on firmer footing and happily obliged with some candid information and thoughts on combining family and career. The next morning everyone was very quiet in the office and when I asked if all was OK, a copy of the paper was handed across. There was a rather sensational story on page three entitled ‘Billion Dollar Babe’, describing me as ‘the pinstripes’ pinup’. Richard correctly pointed out that those descriptions were wholly inaccurate (my comment at the end that ‘five [children] is plenty’ has also come back to haunt me), but I felt embarrassed and frivolous for contributing to the piece. After that experience, I didn’t talk to the press for several years and only agreed to do interviews again when I wanted to draw attention to the issue of women in the workplace.

I can see now that in the broader scheme of things that silly newspaper article was not a big deal, but at the time everything felt magnified. The whole experience of my early days as a CEO was a very steep learning curve, with many moments of self-doubt before I emerged on the other side, older, wiser and just possibly better at my job than if I had taken a more conventional route to get there, if only because I had to learn so quickly.

Happily, I did make a few good calls in those early days. One was to shut out the siren voices telling me to reinvent Newton, to develop new strategies that weren’t core to our strengths. I had already learned – in life as well as at work – that we cannot always please everyone and that it’s a mistake even to try. In business, the key is to offer something of value to some people; in life, to know what matters to you, a framework for the myriad decisions each of us needs to take. At that moment at Newton, it was more important than ever to focus on what we did best, to ensure our clients were being well served and that they had confidence in us to continue performing. We were not static, however, the marketplace was changing around us so we consciously evolved our investment services rather than sticking rigidly to what had worked in the past. As author, analyst and former trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it, we were ‘antifragile’, seeking opportunity from change. At the same time, I needed to nurture the culture that had been so central to the business since it was founded. I was merely (and just about) first amongst equals, carrying the ultimate responsibility but in no way superior to my talented colleagues.

Different situations require different leadership styles and while my approach may not be the right one for every scenario or every company, it worked well for Newton at the time. There had been a dislocation, and a collaborative approach enabled our employees, the firm’s key asset, to contribute to the vision of our future.

This all happened a long time ago; now we can see a much more widespread desire for ‘alternative’ forms of political and business leadership. The command-and-control approach that has prevailed for very many years, where a narrow elite tells other people what to do, is rapidly ineffective in a networked world. There is much less deference to those in official leadership roles; leaders need to merit their authority. So the role is less about sitting at the top of a pyramid and giving orders, more about positioning oneself at the centre of influence. I felt this acutely as Newton’s new CEO: one minute I was one of many fund managers, the next I was officially the boss, but not in a position to instruct my colleagues. Instead, my role was to lead by influencing them, having first listened to what was on their minds, then to form a plan that took account of their views (or explain why I was going in a different direction), and bring them with me. This was partly the result of the circumstances of my appointment but it’s also a feature of active investment management firms, since talented investors often see themselves as self-employable. The CEO is more akin to the conductor of an orchestra than a prima donna. This leadership model is becoming the reality for many other industries, and in politics too.

Many people see the shock events of 2016 – most notably Brexit and the election of President Trump – as setbacks for diversity. Of course, at the time no one asked voters to indicate the reasons why they voted the way they did, and all sorts of interpretations can be offered. In my view, while the specific reasons vary, the fact that in both the UK and the US many people voted against the establishment is key. The shocks themselves demonstrate how power is changing in a way that should be good news for democracy and equality. People will no longer be told what to do by leaders who don’t connect with them. The problem is, if this isn’t recognised and addressed, the protests morph into extremism.

I was flying back from a business trip in Denver on the evening of the UK’s EU referendum in June 2016. As we landed, everyone checked their phones for the result and an American lady tapped me on the shoulder; ‘It was Remain, right?’ ‘No actually, Leave won,’ I replied. She looked perplexed and exclaimed, genuinely shocked, ‘But we sent the President!’ She couldn’t see that this might have been a counterproductive move: the Americans ‘sent the President’; the British government dropped Remain leaflets on doorsteps, and people voted the exact opposite. In the US presidential election, it wasn’t enough of a change that Hillary Clinton was the first female nominee; she was also perceived as part of the establishment, as likely to maintain the status quo. Donald Trump’s comments make many of us wince, but during the election campaign, he reached out to those voters who were certainly not living the ‘American dream’, who had not participated in economic or income growth, who felt that no one was listening or cared – and he connected with them.