Inside the Auditorium is back for a second season and shines a spotlight on women in audit. I have been honoured to speak to an exceptional lineup of women in the financial services audit industry.  

My first guest is Sally Clark, a seasoned financial services audit professional. Sally is currently a non-executive director and leadership advisor at Pelham Street, Chair for a number of audit committees and former chief internal auditor at Barclays. Sally shares insights on transitioning to non-executive roles and the challenges faced by women in senior positions. She emphasises the need for diversity and inclusion in boardrooms and offers advice for women navigating their careers.  

This episode explores:  

• Claiming your space: Sally shares practical advice on navigating the corporate landscape, emphasising the importance of positioning oneself strategically in the room to ensure visibility and influence. She sheds light on the power of allies and building strong networks to amplify one's voice in challenging environments. 
• Motivating through purpose: Drawing from her extensive experience, Sally discusses the keys to motivating teams for peak performance. She references Daniel Pink's groundbreaking work on human motivation, and the significance of purpose, autonomy, and mastery in driving excellence within organisations. 
• The evolution of audit: Sally explores the advancements of internal audit and the shift from retrospective analysis to forward-thinking, proactive strategies to mitigate risks. She highlights the emerging focus of auditing culture and behavioural risk to drive meaningful change.  

Don’t miss this episode as Sally brings a wealth of experience and insight, sharing invaluable wisdom that resonates with both seasoned professionals and aspiring auditors alike. 

Note: The views expressed by Sally are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of her employer. 

to Inside the Auditorium. Very excited to have you as a guest today. Perhaps you can explain who you are and a little bit about your career.

Sure, hi Hazel, it's great to be here. So my name's Sally Clark, I am now in what I think a lot of people call the portfolio stage of my career, which I think is a euphemism for I've gotten old. But I did 37 years inside internal audit with a little

where I'd have said I'd have come home and said to my husband, I've had a bad day. So I really, really enjoyed my career. I took a year off, which is for me, you know, was one of the best things to do at the end of my career to sort of decompress. Bought a camper van, went off around Europe with my husband and after nine weeks in a six metre space with him, which was quite lovely, but I decided I needed to go back to work. So I.

Thank you.

started looking for what I wanted to do and I've sort of broadly got my career now in three places. So I'm a non-exec, we can talk about that, on three kind of big-ish boards. So chair the audit committee at Citigroup, Global Markets Limited, which is their broker dealer. I'm on the board at Bupa, private healthcare, and I'm on the board now at Allied Irish Bank UK. I then

I'm on the board of, but I also advise into and support two FinTech startups, which is just really fantastic. One is in the non-financial risk space. So it actually uses all my audit skills because it's all about operational risk and control. And the other one is called Core. Core is a digital platform that's addressing really consumer duty and the whole how do you govern products. And then when I have got any spare time,

and I'm trying to keep it to three days a week. I do my exec coaching, so I'm an exec coach. I work for a company called Pelham Street but also use my own company that I set up, which is quite fun because I now have to understand debits and credits and I'm not an accountant so it's the first time I've had to do that. And I pull all that together and I keep enough time in the day now or in the week to see my kids, see my granddaughter.

get out and about and get out to Italy whenever I can because we've got a house out there.

Beautiful. Well, I mean, we've got so much to talk about. Maybe we can, I don't really want to talk about internal audit per se, in terms of the risks and what's happening in the market. I think it's sort of quite exciting to maybe find out what actually attracted you to internal audit.

Sure. Well, that's a funny thing because I studied English literature at uni and that doesn't really set you up to do anything particularly. And I've done the usual milk rounds of the banks and the retail companies thinking that was probably where I wanted to focus my career. And I ended up landing in a bank at the time it was little known. It was called Williams and Glins. And of course, it kind of the name came back when RBS decided to split itself.

I did about nine months then. If I'm really honest, it was pretty boring. So I saw this little ad in a magazine that used to get the tube stations and it just said graduates wanted for international travel and I thought that's me and literally I turned up for my interview and they said it's internal audit. I think I probably nodded wisely thinking I'm not really sure what that is but I'll give it a go and I got the job.

Because do you know what they asked me, they said at my interview, have you got common sense? I said, yeah, I've got lots of common sense. And they said, and can you be quite sort of practical about things and see problems and see through them to see the patterns in problems? And I said, yeah, I think I can do that. And then I started my career and really kind of never looked back from there. So it kind of chose me maybe.

And how do you think sort of internal ditch changed from when you first started doing it to now?

Oh, it's changed unbelievably. I mean, the same, it's funny, because in a way the purpose of it is still the same, which is to sort of try and help management and boards to make sure that they understand the risks that the companies work, that they're working within are running and there are controls in there to play, you know, to mitigate those risks. And then we come in and make sure that the controls are working. So kind of in principle that hasn't changed, but.

My goodness, it's changed so much. When I started, we didn't have computers, Hazel. We had these long work papers called 13-column work papers. And you had to do everything in pencil. And then your person would review it with all sorts of weird ticks in green and red pen. And so everything was manual. Everything was tested manually. I can remember ordering some reports by mistake. They got printed out. And they arrived. And there was like 20 piles. They were like, this is high as me.

And I realized I'd done the wrong thing. And, you know, so, so I've kind of gone through that whole tech change of suddenly, you know, being able to have a computer, portables that were sort of far from portable, used to have to carry around and only one person could use it on the job. So we'd have to take our turn to nowadays where, you know, I watch, you know, my daughter's just started in audit and she's learning to code in Python and run her own analytical stuff. And I'm convinced that before long.

Yes.

there will be an integration of artificial intelligence into how we do things. I think the other big change, though, that's happened has probably come a little bit more recently. I think Audit very much used to look in the back mirror. So it was looking at what's happened. You looked at things in the past. You looked at samples picked from the past. And so you kind of were giving a backwards view on things. And I think that nowadays,

firms really need audit to be looking in the forward out the window as what's coming at us and what do we need to do about it and are we ready for it. And then also where I'm kind of really excited because I think in a way I wish I'd done psychology at university and not English but all the work that's been going on to look at culture because so often the underlying things that have gone wrong the audit can kind of really get to the nub of.

are cultural in nature. And so whether it's still calling it organisational culture or some of the firms are now really thinking of it as behavioural risk and how do we look at that? And employing psychologists to help us, I think that's really exciting as well. And that's all propelling us forward to where we will be more meaningful to the organisations we work in.

And when you say that companies are now looking at culture, I mean, you know, there's such a lot of buzzwords that are used within internal audit and although being a third line of defence, you know, internal audit, they do want to be at the forefront and obviously have to learn the skills to be able to audit them properly. Culture is such a big word, isn't it, in terms of organisation. Do you think that these companies, banks are getting that right and auditing?

the right type of culture in terms of what they're looking at.

That's a really big question. Whether the firms are getting it right themselves, I'm never quite sure, but the audit functions, I've started to sort of see different people employed in audit functions. And of course it's much easier if you work in a firm that's got a lot of people in audit, because you can afford, if you like, a little bit of a luxury of having a team of people that you might pull in. But I think otherwise people are kind of pulling it in through co-source, you know, bringing in people who've got the skillsets.

But essentially what they're trying to look at is not just, you know, did a payment process work or did this data center, you know, is it appropriately looked after or are we kind of looking at the risks of what we're putting in the cloud, which are very sort of objective stuff, but also what's underlying, what are we incentivizing people to do? And...

do we create incentives that actually cause people to do the wrong things because the way we set them up. So for me, it's about, you know, what's the risk we run when we create incentives for people to just to hit the numbers or make the P&L or and not and don't have a place where people can put their hands up when something's not working. And for me, that's always been the big thing. If you have an environment where people feel safe to put their hands up and say.

either I've got a problem, I've seen a problem, there is a problem, then actually people can look at it. And also if people don't start looking for who to blame immediately, they actually start looking for, well, what do we do to... what's underlying why we've got this issue and how do we fix it? I think what you do is you create the environment within which people can do the right things. And so often what goes wrong is people not doing the right things.

And do you think this will, you know, because there's a lot of people in the, you know, just in all careers, everybody wants to be a manager, you know, when you're younger, if you're a manager and you're managing a team, you think you've made it, and a lot of people actually are not very good managers. And do you think sort of in this way it is also helping to call out the people that are, you know, that may be micromanaging or not managing their staff in the right way?

Gosh, I'd love to think it did. I think it certainly finds the people who have only really spent their career thinking about the things they do, the delivery of a project, the kind of cracking out something, getting a deal done, etc. And it spots, when you do this work right, you spot the people that were promoted because they were great at what they did, but weren't necessarily promoted.

for being good people managers. And it's quite funny, because I see, I mean, that is one thing I just sadly don't think has necessarily changed that much in the 40 years I've been around doing this stuff, because you still see people getting promoted for those reasons, and they don't really care about human life forms. Whereas for me, that was always the biggest driver for how I did what I did at work. And it, it kind of, it's bizarre, because it's in a way, it's your biggest asset, it's gonna be your people.

Yeah.

And yet we promote people that don't really either care about people or don't have great people skills and then ask them to manage people. And then they kind of look at it as a project rather than actually sort of learning how to do it. And it's sad because it is they're all learnable skills, but firms, I think, don't necessarily spend enough time and energy and money focused on how do you make a really great manager. And and then also the next bit up, which is like when you've been a manager and then you have suddenly a leader of.

like manager of managers and you have to lead. And those transition points, which I now spend a lot of my time coaching in, are such difficult transitions. And you realize when you work with people that quite often you're the only person as a coach helping them. There isn't a kind of mechanism within an organization that helps them as well. And it's simple things like, when I look at people's calendars.

and they've been asked to lead others and I kind of go, so where's your leadership time then? And they look at me like I'm a lunatic and they go, no, I've got to read all these papers. And I said, well, you know, do you think about how you might empower your staff to do that bit for you? And then you spend your time coaching them. And it's a whole load of new muscles people have to use. They have to unlearn the muscle of doing it myself and relearn a muscle of how do I infuse and encourage and inspire others to do their best.

and actually sometimes to do their best better than you did it anyway.

Well, you know, you won an award for inspirational leader for internal audit, right? So, and is that, was that your mantra then in winning that award?

Yeah, yes. And I was very interested in sort of what motivates people because I'm a great believer that if you can use carrots and motivate people to do their best, they will come to work and do their best because like no one really, really wants to come to work and do a rubbish job. So I used to look, I did a lot of investigation into it. There's a brilliant book and YouTube video of a book called Drive by a guy called Daniel Pink who says

people are motivated by purpose, by autonomy, i.e. the ability to get from A to B by deciding how you wanna get there rather than being micromanaged. And then the third thing is what they call mastery, which is development and being really good at what you do. And certainly with the generation, I think that are coming through into the profession now, that whole concept of development and people wanting to...

be developed in the roles they're doing is what I'm hearing. It's very much the thing that people want.

Sure. And, you know, with the generation that are coming up and, you know, as you mentioned earlier, your daughter just getting her audit apprenticeship, which I think is brilliant. Do you think having the younger generation just want it here and now and their expectation, yeah, that their expectation that it's more they should have it than wanting to work for it?

Well, obviously I'm biased with my daughter, but when I sort of talk to her and the people that she's working with now, and I kind of meet some of the people at some of the organisations I'm on the board of, because I love to go back and meet the people who are actually sort of really doing the work, I'm not sure they do. I mean, I do think that there's a different attitude about whether I'm in this place for life, versus I'm going to kind of build up a series of...

Yeah.

experiences and I might move here to get an experience and move there. So I don't think people are quite as embedded within a single company as they maybe were when I was growing up, when I was doing the work. But what I'm finding really interesting, and it's a big debate for everyone at the moment, is this whole hybrid working and actually what do these young people want? And I think personally

having sort of chatted to some people there, the kind of people that knew in the role, they wanna be back in the office because they sit at home, they can't actually sit and watch anyone else do it, they can't hear the conversations of how people are tackling things. And so they, one woman's view is that I think we should have lots more back to the office for those young people so that they can experience what an office workplace is like and understand how you learn from other people because with COVID we kind of knocked that out.

It's impossible. I don't think you can sit on a Zoom call like three times a day and then learn how to do auditing. That for me just doesn't work. Because the problem is they're quite happy to come in, but it's quite often the managers who quite enjoyed now the fact they can take their kids to school or they can, you know, they can fill their life in a slightly different way. They're the ones that are more reluctant, I think, to come back than the young ones.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're wiggling it all the time. You know, I want two to three days. No, I only wanted to do two days. Well, you know, come on, we are in a economic crisis and we're delivering that.

Well, it's still the same, you need to be seen, right? And also as well, there's a social aspect of going out on a Thursday and Friday night and just having some fun and understanding who your colleagues are. Also as well, I noticed that... Ah, that's it, can you hear me? That's it, Sally, I'm back, can you hear me? I could.

Yeah, can I hear you?

I am also as well you speak quite a lot about transition coaching. Can you sort of elaborate on that for me as well, please?

Yeah, the coaching, look, I look back at JP Morgan and one of the big things I thank them for, amongst everything else, was that they sponsored me to do a coaching qualification when I worked there. And I had said to them, it was part of my leadership training. I wanted to qualify as a coach. So I did a qualification and that has really, I used that for the rest of my career in how I manage people really.

thinking about all the things I learned about how to do it properly, listening more than telling, asking more than telling as well. And then when I stopped my career at Barclays, it was one of the things I wanted to pick up and I didn't know whether anyone would really be interested in having me coach them. So I just put it on my LinkedIn profile, I think I put, you know, coach.

about six months after, well, because I took my campervan off. So when I came back within a month or so, I had two people who reached out and said, I see you do coaching, you know, what kind of things you do. And so started working with audit people who'd found me and really loved it. Look, it's some it's a it's a real joy to work with people who may not realize how good they are at certain things or just need something unlocked or.

don't quite know where they want to take their next career step, or are about to do that step up we talked about before, you know, into a much more senior role, and therefore suddenly realizing they don't quite know this new stuff they've got to do and how on earth they do it. And so that, I've now, you know, I coach probably about five or six people at a time, and that means a sort of one session a month with them.

and I do all sorts of different people now. So I do still coach heads of audit or people are about to become heads of audit and I really enjoy that because there's some you know practical things I can do in there for things that I've done so it's a little bit of mentoring as well as coaching. But you know recently I've been coaching an amazing woman at an asset management company, I've been coaching amazing woman who's a CEO of a utility company in the UK. So

all different sorts of businesses and industries, and that's been fantastic. And I get a lot of pleasure out of it. And it's just something, you know, it's a different skillset that I can turn to, slightly different from being a non-exec sitting in an audit committee.

Sure. One thing that does concern, not concern me, but I suppose one thing that I think that we need to be sort of quite aware of at the moment is that quite a lot of the banks have been making redundancies in terms of changing their exec level within internal audit. A lot of these people have been in very senior positions. The market's got smaller. Internal

locations, whether that's in different home counties, whatever. And so at the moment in the market, there's a lot of senior talent that is basically out of work. And so unless they go and work maybe for a consultancy to do contracting, I feel that maybe they've now got a transition their career. Are you are you sort of talking to anybody like that? And and you know, what would you advise these people?

Yes, yeah, I am. And it depends for some people kind of like just exactly where they are, whether they're looking at sort of doing something completely different or they're just looking at

you know, maybe transitioning industry, because a lot of them are coming out of their fair financial services. And actually financial services audit for me has always been trying to be at the cutting edge of everything and pushing the dial. So actually, if they transition into different industry, you know, they could take that skill set across. But one of the things and it's something that I I've been exploring and chatting about to a lady called Carolyn Clark, the Carolyn is

on the council at the IIA and she runs her own consultancy. We were talking about why aren't there more heads of internal audit or senior people in internal audit who go into being non-execs on boards? Because actually the whole premise of audit, which I always think of as having this helicopter view of a company joining the dots where people who are deep in a particular part of the firm can't do that. Being able to see.

you know, good being done in certain areas, and then being able to join those people up to people who aren't doing it quite so well, or seeing a problem and going, you know, that could be a problem around the whole company. That oversight that you get when you're in audit is exactly the same as the role that you have when you run a board, which is sitting back, high level views, joining dots. And so the skills and sort of underlying consciousness you've got.

as an auditor, if you've done it really well, are exactly the same things to go onto boards with. But there are quite few people who've made that transition. And I think maybe people who sit in internal audit don't realise how well set up they are for a career as a non-exec. Because the other thing you do as an auditor is ask loads of questions. It's exactly the same at the board. Your job is not to do stuff. It's to ask questions and probe and challenge what management wants to do.

Thank you.

So I do talk to an awful lot of people who are now looking at, well, what could I do? And I try and send them into being into the non-exec world, which is also trying quite hard to create more diversity across what kind of people are going on to board. So it's a great opportunity for women who've been in internal audit to go and get board roles, because I think of all the skill sets they bring with them. And of course, boards are looking for.

diverse candidates now, so that's great.

And in terms of finding these non-exec roles, you know, how did you find those? Was that more of who you knew and they wanted you to be part of that? Did they come to find you or did you go and look for them? Because I would imagine not a lot of people would know how to actually try to go to find those roles.

Yeah, I think that's probably why I get so many phone calls, Hazel. Do you know what? What's really, it's sort of, it's an unfortunate truth. And I don't know what the number is now, but I know when I started looking about four years ago, people said to me about 80% of board roles are filled by people's networks. And that's why when you look round four years ago, before people started making more of a concerted effort about it, people look the same around those board tables.

Yeah.

and then 20% are filled by the sort of like exec recruiters typically. I think that's changing. There's an awful lot of niche recruiters who've created little boards, board roles. And in fact, it was through a niche exec recruiter that I got my first role. And again, I use LinkedIn, I put it out on LinkedIn and I get quite a few things that come at me through LinkedIn now to find me. So that's kind of good because it means there's a broader sort of search going on.

But for anyone who is looking, there are a whole load of board practices within exec recruiters who tend to get a lot of the quite interesting roles. And I probably had three people contact me in the last month about what looks like a really exciting role. I'm full up. So I tend to, what I then do is refer them on to all the people that I know are looking. So it kind of, you can use the network in a good way.

Well, they can always come to me and I can find them for them. So you know, when I, you know, you talk about Black Lives Matter and getting on boards in major companies, can you sort of tell me a little bit more about that?

They can, Hazel. That would be a good one.

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think this is an interesting because people have the diversity on boards for women is really in a much better place than it used to be. And I again, I'm afraid I don't know the latest stats. But you know, when I sort of look at boards, you see an awful lot more now, where women are, you know, 40 50%. And so that kind of, it's not job done, because it's a constant evolution. But it does mean that

now it's time to sort of have a look at, so what are the other diversity characteristics that you might want to focus on and ethnicity is one of them. And you know I'm sort of passionate about this because you know it's been proven that the best decisions that get made get made by people who've had different backgrounds and experience and they bring what they've learned, how they've learned it into a room where a decision gets made.

and you get a better decision because you get better debate. So again, a lot of people declare victory in saying they've got ethnic minorities on their board. But actually, when you look and pull out what used to be called, I don't think people use bae many more as a word to describe people who aren't white. But when they used to hide behind that, you used to find that there were very few Black people who had made it onto boards.

murder of George Floyd, there was an awful lot of work being done and I've done some work with various different people over the years to try and see how to harness, if you like, the real powers and skills of Black people and get them onto boards. There's a difficult conundrum here because we still in a way use the CV as the basis for getting your next job and a CV

really describes all the opportunities you've been given and therefore the experiences you've had. Whereas for an awful lot of black people they've not been given those opportunities in the past, so they don't have a CV full of experience. So now it's about trying to a get companies to look more for potential than necessarily experience, but also creating programs that enable people to build the skill set if you like, so that they can demonstrate the skill set.

And I've got a very dear friend, Heather Melville, who I'm just getting involved with. She started a program called Nebula, which is all about Nebula and the things that join the stars together. And she's doing these programs for black women who are just below C-suite to give them, if nothing else, to give them the confidence to go for that next role. And I've often thought that, you know,

people are very good at what they do. They just don't necessarily have the confidence to go for it for that next role. And that's always been my mantra and my advice to people is, you know, you might look at a role and think, I've only got half the things it's asking for. Well, quite often people fill up those role profiles with things they don't really need, but they kind of feel like more is better rather than less is better. And then people always like count themselves out of going for the role. So the, you know, the program is partly giving

Thank you.

women's skill set, but it's also giving them that kind of sense of, you can do this and you have a right to do it. And I think that it's really important that we carry on that journey. And, you know, there's a whole load more characteristics I could think of in this sort of in the whole diversity space where we're at baby steps, if you like, but we will eventually get to having, you know, boards made up of really diverse thinking and diverse

backgrounds that will enable decisions to be made better.

And just really for the UK though, I mean, when we get in vacancies and we say, right, you know, we get told, right, we want CVs of equally diverse candidates, male, female, so on and so forth. And sometimes there just isn't the women to be able to put these people forward for, you know, and I do think that there isn't as many women in internal audit as there should be. And in senior positions.

Why do you think internal audit is a great area of business for women to build their career?

Um, I, it's actually quite interesting because when I was the head of audit Barclays, by the way, there were, I think there were at least five other women that were heads of audit really at the big banks, you know, and it was great when we got together. It was, it was fantastic because, um, you know, if you looked back at all our career, our careers had moved around each other and we'd interwoven as we've kind of like got to being more senior and, and it was, you know, I think it was really good. I

I think it's a really interesting thing. I don't know why there aren't more women because I actually think that the whole concept of internal audit lend themselves very well to women being able to negotiate, if you like, their way through their careers and navigate their way through their careers. I can remember someone saying to me, there's a lot less testosterone in the room when you come in and deliver your audit report than when one of your male colleagues does. And I...

thought about it afterwards, I thought, you know, it may be true. But certainly, there are ways to, you know, be able to walk into rooms and to be able to land the findings that you've got and if it's an unsatisfactory audit report to do it. And for some reason, it's always worked quite well for me, being female to be able to do that. I don't know why people felt less threatened, because it was the same outcome.

as if a man came in or a woman came in. But I think women can harness that and navigate through their careers using that ability to be able to not necessarily land something with a sort of testosterone fuel, da-da, but instead to say, do you know what, guys, we've got a problem here, and it feels kind of cohesive. So whether there's something inherent, I don't know, but I do think that the...

profession also gives, there's a sort of more of an openness. And so I've always seen women being encouraged to get to the top, way more so than I hear in some of the front office roles or some of the, you know, the sort of more cut and thrust business roles. It is unfortunate that, you know, you couldn't replicate that across into the front office roles, but if you can get senior in audit, I've also seen, you know, amazing women move then.

once they've gotten senior in audit out into the business and all the sort of training and learning and development they've had inside audit stands them in really good stead.

Sure. I also as well, you know, with your career at Barclays, did you find sort of being a female in a senior position at that time, anything sort of that hindered you in terms of being a woman in that role at that time?

Yeah, look, I think it's one of the things I spend a lot of time coaching when I'm coaching senior women about is how to get comfortable in a room that's, you know, where you will be in the minority. Because executive committees haven't made it as well as boards have yet. And it was, you know, I smile because Laura Padavani, who was the head of compliance, who's now at Deutsche Bank, she and I used to say, you know, we're going in and

they'll be talking about the cricket again or the rugby or something like that. I think the, I think it's difficult sometimes to get your voice heard. And it's difficult sometimes to get an environment where you can talk about things that matter to you without it seeming soft, if that makes sense. Um, and certainly

The way I've seen this work best is when you can get three women into any of these groups. For some reason, one woman on their own, I mean, you know, you're almost invisible. Two women. It's quite hard to still kind of crack the balance of where conversations go. But three women, somehow you kind of you feel like you've got a right to, you know, come in and talk about things you want to talk about, not the cricket, not the football, not the rugby.

And I went on a women and boards program, which was quite, which was fascinating for me because we spent a couple of sessions there talking about just about how to get comfortable in the room. And I think I think that's really important. Again, I spend a lot of my time when I'm coaching talking to people about, you know, the physicality of being in the space, how to

position yourself in a room so that you're not likely to sort of just disappear into the background, you know, working out, even sort of like just tips like that about where you sit in the room. If you sit near to your CEO or near to your board chair, you're more likely to get a voice in the room than if you're sitting on the opposite side. It's just really interesting how these little dynamics work. I think there are a whole load of men who are fantastic at helping women.

And I found my allies and if I was quiet or didn't feel like I'd get my voice in, I had people who were looking out for me and it was really good. I can think back with great fondness of a couple of the guys who would always turn and say, well, Sally hasn't said anything, what does she think about this? And so having, again, using your network when you get more senior to build those individual relationships with everybody so that when you are in that room.

you feel a bit more comfortable. You know, there's so many ways of doing it, but it doesn't hide the fact that it can be a pretty daunting place to sit and spend your day.

And we talk about sort of, you know, a lot about women, trying to get women into senior roles. And we talk, you know, a lot about being able to help them with younger children and things like that. But obviously, as time goes on, we go through other difficulties. And how easy do you think that sort of is to navigate?

Yeah, do you know what, it's really fascinating because I guess I must have sort of gone through most of my menopause when I was, you know, the chief intern Lord took bark laze and I'd get in the lift sometimes to go up to a board meeting and suddenly find myself feeling like I'm having a whacking great hot flush and thinking is it because I'm going to the board meeting or is it just another of those blooming menopause flushes that I had. I

much easier thing to talk about and I think firms are really trying quite hard to work ways of, you know, how do they kind of recognise, if you like, what women might go through and help them with, you know, programmes or encourage people to talk about it so that, you know, you can sit and have your, you know, if it's a hot flush, you can sit and have it and you can sort of say,

Because what happens is you get a brain freeze at the same time. If you have hot flushes, your brain freezes, and all of a sudden you kind of forget where you get to. But I think if you can just be open and talk about it and people don't feel uncomfortable, then actually that's really helpful as a way of getting through it. Now, there are gazillions more programmes that are out there now and are starting to help women with that. I, you know...

It's probably not perfect everywhere yet, but I do think it's much more out in the open. And once things are out in the open, you can start to make changes. I had a conversation with a guy not so long ago, and it's really interesting. So he works in a law firm and law firms, again, are notoriously not places that are particularly female friendly.

Thank you.

But he said, you know what, I'm harnessing all the things I'm learning as a father of two daughters who are teenagers to understand what women go through actually every month and to enable people, for example, to say that they're working from home because they're having, you know, it's a day in the month when they just feel like they can't get out of bed because they're having a really bad period. And all of a sudden, he said, we're having a conversation, he said in the room, he said, the guys around me were really uncomfortable to start with. He said, but you know what?

do these conversations enough times and it just becomes part of the language that we use to support half our workforce. I think it's changing and I think that's great. I'm convinced when my daughter's generation get through to being in power in tops of companies, it just will be a much more natural conversation that happens and people don't feel the need to hide away about it or not talk about it.

So who do you think has been your biggest influence then throughout your career?

Oh, goodness me. Do you know what I had? I mentioned at the beginning when I went to work at Barclays, I went back to work for my old boss. And his name was Mike Romer. And he he'd been my boss at Chase. And do you know what, he's probably been one of my biggest supporters and, and a supporter turns into a sponsor if you're if you if you can really get that right.

And it's probably one of the things I sort of say to people as they get more senior, you know, when you when you're sort of very junior, you need mentors around you to help you and you need kind of a bunch of them because you want to learn different things to different people. And then as you get more senior, you need to sponsor because you need someone who's going to talk not to you, but about you in open forums so that they can, you know, they can be your champion. And Mike was always my champion. And, you know, if I hadn't got him there.

I would not have put my hat in the ring for that role at Barclays, because I never intended to be a head of audit. I always used to think that was something other people did. And so I partly had him hauling me up going, don't be stupid, of course you can do it. And then I had my team saying, you know, if you don't do it, look who we might get given. So off you go and apply. And I think, you know, there was an awful lot of things that he and I did together.

Thank you.

simplifying audit, you know, there's a tendency to make everything look so complicated, taking some of the bureaucracy out, you know, there's a number of people who've made it so bureaucratic, you can imagine most people would look at it and think I don't have the slightest interest in working there, you know, I've got to do so many things and dot so many I's and cross so many T's and actually making it fun. Because I think internal audit can be a place where you can come to work every day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can have fun with your colleagues whilst you're doing a very serious job. And so I think I'd probably call Mike out as being that person for me.

And so tell me then what would you, you know, looking back or if you were younger, what would you have, what would you not have done or told your younger self?

I think I would have done a few things differently. One is that thing about not going for a role if you look down the list and you think, well I can't do that perfectly, or I can't do that perfectly, and I can't do it perfectly, and then probably seeing someone else who probably isn't as good as you, kind of go, well I can wing it on that and that's probably not that important really, and then you don't go for it, they do.

you suddenly realize that you were foolish. So I think one of the biggest things would have been to have gone for more opportunities. I never worked abroad. I kind of was very much a UK based in my career, although I traveled a lot with work. I think I'd have loved to have done an overseas stint. I never did that. And I see women that have, particularly women who've gone and done some piece of their career overseas and they kind of come back.

much richer for it, you know, so, you know, they've had so many experiences that are really different and that one of my stepdaughters is about to contemplate three years in Singapore and I think how exciting for her, you know, that she's going to go off and do this. So I think I'd have done that and other than that, do you know what, I think I feel I've been blessed because I've had

Yeah.

great people to work with throughout my career. I've had great opportunities, I've been able to bring up my kids and they are still the most important thing to me. And I've now, in this lovely stage where I can choose what I'm doing and I can, you know, use all the little different bits of my brain that get fulfilled, whether it's, you know, risk and, you know, I'm still excited by risk and control, it sounds pretty sad but...

I can engage that when I'm on the boards, I can engage all the people stuff when I'm working with my fintechs and I can really help people as they move around with the coaching. So, I feel like I've had a blessed life, Hazel.

You have, you have, and it's been, you know, brilliant. Well, look, I'm quite conscious of time because I know you've got to shoot off to yet another meeting. So all I can say is thank you very much for your time today. It's been a pleasure to speak to you.

It's been a pleasure to speak to you too. Thank you very much.