Building purpose into a business from the ground up is hard. No surprises there. But reinforcing a long-standing intention can be almost as tricky. 

This was the task Lloyds Banking Group undertook when they decided to double down on their ambition of ‘Helping Britain Prosper’. 

In this episode, host Becky Willan speaks with Lloyd Banking Group’s Sustainable Business Director Fiona Cannon about the challenge of embedding purpose in one of Britain’s largest banks. This episode will help ensure your purpose-driven mission is delivered with substance and is factored into every business decision. 

Do you want to learn how to build a purpose-driven business from the company that’s helped some of the world's most influential organisations become more purposeful? Download the Insiders’ Guide to Purpose HERE.

They themselves were turned away from getting somewhere to live when they first came over exactly because of that.

That sense of injustice was very strong for me, from quite an early age, actually. And I think that's where everything started for me, was wanting to change the world.

As Fiona got older, it was clear that the first thing she wanted to tackle was gender equality. Partly because she studied English Literature at University…

and became infuriated by the number of male authors that I had to read!

….but also because she felt the weight of gendered expectations on her shoulders.

It was a kind of reaction against what I think was expected of me not just in my family, but more broadly in society about what you would do as a woman. And that's what I kind of really wanted to change

Fiona’s first job out of university was at the Work Foundation, which at the time was known as the Industrial Society. It worked with businesses to effect change. Fiona was part of the women’s development department.

I made a conscious decision to want to go into business because I think business can be a real force for good. If you can change things in business, then that can have a massive impact in changing society.

Fiona then moved into financial services, where her and her peers were able to make some bg changes.

The banks originally were the organisations that were doing the most about gender equality, actually, at the very beginning. And so there was some real highs, because we were part of changing a lot of things that people take for granted a little bit. I set up something called employees for childcare, which was to kind of lobby, really around developing childcare strategy in the UK.

But there were also low moments.

I used to have people literally shouting at me in a room about why was I talking about gender equality. You know there were times when it feels like you're constantly having the same conversation.

Fiona built up her resilience – with a helpful reminder from an early mentor.

It's not about you. It's about what you represent and what the things are that you're trying to do that people are railing against. And so the ability to take yourself out of that, and not take it personally, I think is the biggest, kind of most important piece of advice that I got very early on; it made a massive difference for me.

Fiona has always been driven by seeing the tangible impact her work has had.

Introducing maternity pay for the first time when we didn't have it, that made a massive difference to people's lives.

For others working in the purpose space, Fiona reminds us:

People aren't always going to be on the same side as you. And your job is to find the way through and around that.

We had done quite a lot around purpose. In the past, we had a very, uh, strong purpose statement, which was helping Britain prosper and that kind of manifested itself through a helping Britain prosper plan, which was really focused on the areas where we felt we could make the. Greatest difference around social economic and environmental, um, challenges that the UK was facing.

I think we were at the point where we really needed to move it from being a purpose statement, to being really purpose driven. We had a new CEO, so Charlie nun joined us last August. He's got a really bold purpose driven agenda and he believes very much that purpose will be central to our success. And so that kind of provided us with a.

C opportunity to really reset and to look at what we needed to move ourselves on. I think we probably wouldn't have made the progress that we've made. Had we not done the things that we'd done before, because the organization was used to talking about purpose, but it was really around how do we make sure that we provide more clarity around what helping Britain prosper means?

Um, because everybody had their own different definition and be more specific about how that actually came to life. In everyday decisions across the whole organiz.

All the things that we looked at in terms of changing that statement weren't as distinctive, inspiring, and as active as helping Britain prosper. It it's very concise. It's well understood across the business in terms of a statement. And so I think. Having considered it, the sense was that really the work needed to be on what did that actually mean?

And that the statement gave us enough flexibility and scope to make it mean whatever we wanted it to mean, actually. And so that was where the work was really focused.

what we set out to do was to really craft this purpose driven mission that would support the statement and to really put some meat on the bones, if you like about what it actually meant so that people could start to see how they might use that. And I think the work has been really interesting. It's been really interesting for me, uh, personally as well, but I think we did obviously get our mission statement and we've now got our principles around that, which does provide the clarity around what do the words on the page actually mean?

So in a sense, It was the process that we went through. That was really important. When I looked at other organizations who had been leading on purpose, the big differentiator, it seemed to me were those organizations that had really engaged leadership and also colleagues more generally in kind of building the purpose led mission.

And so that was the piece that I was really keen that. Made sure happened. It was very much a kind of co-creation. So we had interviews with the leadership to start with, which was really to kind of help shape out and articulate what the big ideas would be that we could start to look at that would really describe the role of Lloyds in the world and how we would live our purpose.

We worked then with our chief exec Charlie and the executive team to really work our way through these ideas. And I think what was really interesting about that work was, I mean, if you talk to any of our leaders, particularly our group executive committee members, they really understand why they chose every single word that was on that, on that statement, uh, because we debated it and, and that was the beauty of the process, I think, was the constant iteration, which meant that by the end we had something that was very much owned by the leadership.

And by colleagues and wasn't something that was just kind of developed centrally by a kind of small group of people and then thrown over the water. Everybody else to put into practice.

The four principles are that we will be more inclusive, more sustainable, more pioneering, and more secure. What they do is provide a framework against which people can test the decisions that they're making. Now that that's a piece of work that, that we've just kicked off now, which is how do you really make sure that those principles become real?

As we think about decisions that we're making, testing them even right now against those criteria is a way to just to start the organization to start to begin to think about this. But we do obviously clearly need to do a lot more work on it, but I think what it does is. Explain what we mean by helping Britain prosper and therefore provide the kind of guardrails if you like for the business to make the decisions.

One of the things that we are looking to be able to do is to, uh, make decisions differently that doesn't necessarily always mean that you will make different decisions. But I think what this framework will ultimately provide is the ability to have a conversation around the decisions that we are making to have kind of tested.

What we're doing against our purpose and to make sure that we've considered all of those principle points and, and actually just have an open debate, an honest debate around, okay. Having taken that all into account, where do we end up?

It's such a complex and multi-year journey, this piece of work, and it does, it is a business transformation. So it will completely impact on our culture the way we work. It's gotta, we've gotta think differently. We're gonna be working differently. We're gonna be making decisions differently. And so, you know, it's really important to make sure that the leadership, what has created the framework, first of all, is committed to it because it, we need that ongoing commitment to change because it will be hard at points it's been.

Actually a really enjoyable process so far the work that we've done, but there's gonna come a point where it's actually harder and that's the kind of real putting it into practice. And so you need a leadership that is committed, um, because they've been part of defining what this looks like to be able to see that through and to want to make that happen and just to create the energy and the enthusiasm.

Around it. And that's been one of the things that I've just found so interesting about this as well, is that, you know, our leaders are so excited about where we've got to and enthusiastic around what we're trying to do, that we just wanna kind of continue that through. I think, where you don't have that.

Commitment. The danger is that purpose becomes somebody else's job. And, you know, it happened a little bit with the helping Britain prosper plan, which is, you know, we had our kind of seven key areas that we were focusing on, but it was really seemed to be to the side. And someone else was kind of felt like someone else was managing it.

Purpose cannot be owned by anybody kind of centrally. It has to be owned by the business.

What the board provided was real challenge to us and challenge in the, in the sense of wanting. Be bolder to go faster to really kind of think outside of the box. And that's actually quite a gift from a, a board to say, think big, think bold to start with in order to be able to kind of really unlock what, where we might end up.

And so. That kind of understanding and permission if you like to really go, um, further in our thinking was really important. And then of course, you know, the, just the insight from that group of individuals as well, they were involved as involved as everybody really in terms of giving their inputs around the words that we thought we would use and the ideas behind it.

And so that feels like a real collective. Ownership, and we are not having to explain something or persuade the board. They're actually part of the process and have been pushing us and challenge us to go as far as we can. So that's been really fundamental part. I think, of the success so far.

So I think we got the balance, right? We involved colleagues very early on in the process. We did start with the leadership in terms of just the kind of framing. We took four ideas of what the. Purpose driven mission statement could look like to everybody. What the bottom up bit brought, I think was the, you know, what it feels like on the ground on a day to day basis and, and how anything that gets decided can feel like on the front line in particular.

And so it was a real test. Of some of the ideas that the leadership were were thinking about as well as to really just test, would that work in real life, does it connect with all colleagues, but it was important to do the two together and neither one actually kind of, we didn't do more leadership than we did on colleagues.

So I think kind of that them both being partners, if you like everybody being in partnership to kind of develop, this was really, I.

We had never done anything like this on this scale in the organization before, and, and at the beginning, I think there was some nervousness about really involving people in the process in. The way that we did. And so we started small with a small group of senior leaders, and then we moved it out and it actually, it was by starting small and then building up that I think people became confident.

In the process. If I think about the first time we spoke to colleagues, which was fairly early on, we did a, a small group of graduates and apprentices in the organization to kind of give a different younger kind of perspective on it. When we looked at that and the outputs from that, what you could see was they were not that far away from where that small group of Le original leadership was.

And so I think that provided confidence with people, uh, with our leadership and with others that actually asking colleagues and, and kind of, and asking more people to be involved was not gonna end. I think the worry was that we would end up with. Trillion different ideas, but would be impossible to kind of work your way through and that you would create an expectation amongst people that the idea that they'd come up with was the one that we were gonna go with.

But I think we took. All the early inputs, as well as some of the outside, in context and trends and everything else to develop those four initial ideas that we then tested out on people. And so that provided a framework. Everybody of course, had things that spoke to them more than, than other things. But I think what became very clear very, very quickly was that there were some real emerging trends that were the same.

So everybody felt the same about sustainability. Everybody felt the same around inclusion. I, I feel really strongly that you cannot do this effectively, unless you do do this engagement piece. And in fact, actually we, in the end, not only spoke to colleagues and leaders, but we also spoke to customers as well.

And that's something that for us was. Big step. And I don't think we'd have been able to, if we'd have proposed that at the beginning of the process, I think that would've caused some worries, but it was actually just going through it and really seeing that we were all pretty much on the same page that gave everybody the confidence to then go out, to actually talk to customers.

And, and again, the customer feedback, interestingly was really very much in the same kind of space so that, you know, kind of made you feel like actually you were doing the right thing.

We all own purpose, but you do need, I think, some light touch central facilitation and oversight of the whole piece because there are so it's so complex, as you've said, and there are so many different pieces. To this work that you just need to be able to kind of coordinate. Know that it's happening, that it's going in the right direction.

And in particular, I think making sure that the connections across the group are made effectively. One of the things I think that Charlie in particular's been really keen to, to focus on is, is to break down some of the silos that can often, um, come into play in big organizations. And so I think you do need centrally just this oversight that in ensures that those silos.

Happen that that, that everybody's working to the, towards the same, uh, direction. We're not duplicating activity. Everybody's got a kind of very clear about what their areas, particularly at this stage, when you're running kind of work stream of activity. So what are we doing around communications? What are we doing around, um, culture?

What are we doing around, um, engagement? You know, that, that we are all interconnected. For me, you know, in my roles around sustainability and inclusion, diversity, you are the expert and the advisor. And in this role, you are not, you are neither , you know, because you are not the expert in terms of what will end up being the right mission statement for the organization.

And so you have to use D. Kind of skills around facilitation, but you don't, you're not trying to persuade or influence in a particular way. You have to just let it, let it run.

So we're basically doing the same kind of process as we did on, on the development of the mission statement and, and using the same tools really to now start to look at. How do we start to make purpose driven business decisions? What does that mean? And what are the tools and support that the organization and everybody in it needs in order to be able to do that.

And, and you've often talked Becky around this purpose driven decision, making, being a, a muscle that, that people need to test and to develop really the thing that. Want to try and avoid is that you have a tick box exercise. You know what I mean? Where I, you know, you can see, I could immediately see where you might have, you know, board decision papers for board going, having a little box.

This has, you know, has purpose has purpose been considered, and have you looked at the four principles and you just go tick, tick, tick, and we need to really avoid that. So this just becomes much more in the DNA of the organization. You know, our leaders and our colleagues know how to make purpose driven.

Business decisions. They know what is the right thing to do. Sometimes I think the environment is not supportive enough for them because it, we've not been clear enough that that's what we, um, want people to do and are supportive when people do that. And so some of it, I think, is around creating the right environment because interestingly we've had a code of, of responsibility for, um, for a long time.

within that document. We have criteria around how to make business decisions, thinking about purpose, but actually that hasn't translated into it actually happening on the ground because that they are just words on a page really. And we haven't done the work to really embed. And so this is gonna be important part alongside a whole range of.

Activity, you know, more broadly, obviously we've been, you know, there's an architecture around this work as well, which is, um, you know, the, uh, the mission statement, the principles and the values as well. And so those two things go hand in hand. So how do you create, um, the right culture and land the values alongside the principles?

So, and all of that work has been developed in the same ways we've approached the, the purpose driven mission statement, develop. Through this co-creation work. So that's where we are right now. And by the end of the year, I'm hoping that we will be really starting to use really making purpose driven business decisions on a, on a regular basis from there on him.

Thank you for having me, Becky.