From retail and commercial banking, and balance sheet management, I quickly found a passion for creating value through bringing organisations together, dividing them apart or transforming the way they worked. It took me across the globe in international banking and gave me skills and tools I have carried through my portfolio career. Nearly twenty years ago, I switched to the NHS as an Executive Board Member for a local hospital and delivering their financial turnaround. Some eight or so NHS organisations later, and a time as a Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Health, I now apply treasury and financial thinking to all areas of improvement – whether coaching professionals on quality improvement, delivering productivity gains for patients and taxpayers or making use of data at scale for improvement.
It’s the huge breadth of the skills I’ve acquired as a result of working in treasury, and am confident using, whether that’s in terms of working with numbers or words. Different audiences, and audience members, absorb information and learn in different ways and being able to communicate with numbers, pictures and narrative as treasurers do really helps present data, describe what the data means and lead to the transformation and improvement actions required as a consequence.
Having turned around a number of NHS trusts, across both financial and operational performance, I took on a Board role as Chief Transformation Officer at St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust in Tooting leading on Delivery, Performance and Transformation. I was asked to become a Non-Executive at South London’s Academic Health Science Network – the Health Innovation Network (HIN) South London. The HIN Board identified an opportunity to clarify its strategic goals and the need to respond to changing funding flows from grants, government & public sector commissions and commercial contracts and the chair asked me to lead the committee given my treasury and transformation background.
After creating the Finance & Risk Committee to provide scrutiny around the financial management of the organisation, through using some basic treasury and financial tools, including pricing and forecasting to align operational capacity to demand, a surplus contribution is now being consistently delivered. Bringing a structured approach to defining the committee’s Terms of Reference and how they are delivered, together with tracking longitudinal impact is fundamentally a treasury skill set. However, it also comes back down to the small ability I like to think I have to coach the team to improve their methodologies – and you’d have to ask them whether they think my skills have actually helped.
Not unusually in the NHS, financial forecasting relies on the patterns of activity and how they vary through the seasons of the year. That has a knock on to the pattern of commissions of work to the HIN and so the question arose as to how much “unsold” capacity the organisation should have at different points in time. Seeing the result of the project, which began to reframe this against comparative points in time, gave the full Board confidence that the budget was effective and provided assurance that staff numbers could be maintained.
The power of a well timed argument. Usually when I am most ready to put my points across, the person I want to understand and act on them is least ready to receive them. Take a breath, work out when the person will be ready, what do they need to know beforehand – and even whether somebody else is better placed to make the point on my behalf. Planning communication to stakeholders and measuring the impact of how you communicate, with a view to continuous improvement makes all the difference to value creation.
It comes back to communication skills for me – whether working with individuals across different areas of an organisation, dealing with financial service suppliers, coaching aspiring team members, demonstrating the value that effective treasury management can create or stretching the boundary of aspirations. This includes taking the time to listen to and understand the agenda of the other party and their definitions of success and then being able to describe, and latterly track, how the product supplied meets those needs so value is created for both sides.
To be totally honest, I probably don’t make the most of the member benefits available to me. Top of what I do use though would be reading articles in The Treasurer, identifying root causes that also apply to the situations that I am leading on professionally and reviewing whether the lessons described can similarly add value to my world.
My wife would say the TV remote, my daughter would say my power drill, but I’d have to go for my whiteboards! Not so much a gadget but I have them in the home office, work office and in the garage – essential for telling stories to describe potential improvements, developing ideas instantly without the logging on process clearing the innovative thinking from my brain and tracking actions.
Outcome driven transformer.