In August 2024, Dame Alison Rose appeared on In the Arena, a podcast where industry authorities share leadership stories that others can apply in their businesses and lives. As NatWest Group’s first female CEO, Alison has played a key role in managing the company’s 61,000 employees and 19 million customers.
In this interview, “Right team. Right culture. Common mission.,” she shares strategies that will help leaders recruit, manage, grow, and evolve their teams for maximum success. Here are some of the episode highlights.
How Alison Rose Launched Her Banking Career
Alison didn’t follow a conventional journey into banking. She studied history at university purely because she loved the subject. When finishing her degree, she knew she wanted a career that would allow her to live abroad, be competitive, and work in business. Banking was the ideal sector.
“My initial thoughts were I would do it for three or four years, figure out what I liked about it, and get to travel... There was no grand plan of becoming a banker or CEO,” she says.
Championing Women in Leadership and Entrepreneurship
Today, Rose is known for creating opportunities for women in business. The root of this work formed when she entered the banking industry.
A male-dominated sector, she notes that the people in role model positions “were not role models I could recognise… There was a very cookie-cutter view of what success looked like, what a successful leader looked like. None of that fitted me.”
Because of this, as Alison progressed in the banking industry, it became important to her to develop on her own terms but also create an environment where talent was recognised and different models of success. A key component of this was to create relevant role models and “help the women coming behind” her.
A Lack of Women Running Enterprises
Alison reflects on some research she was involved in during her early career. The research showed that 47% of people who wanted to start a business didn’t because they didn’t know where to get help or didn’t have the right support, and fear of failure was a significant barrier in stopping people starting or growing businesses.
This finding inspired Alison and her colleagues to build a network of free accelerators across the UK that could provide the right advice, support and networks for entrepreneurs in order to provide the right support in those early stages of starting and scaling businesses. Once established, and selection was based on the business and the entrepreneur, it became apparent that almost half the entrepreneurs who secured places in these accelerators were women. But when Alison looked at the statistics in the broader economy, nowhere near this many women were running their own ventures.
“There was this massive untapped potential,” Alison says. “The research we did said that there was a £250 billion contribution that could be added to the UK economy, at a time where there was a lack of productivity and a lack of growth, if we could just help those female entrepreneurs get the support and help they needed.”
“It wasn’t that they didn’t have great business ideas. It wasn’t that there weren’t female entrepreneurs. It’s just they weren’t getting the right environment to thrive and getting access to the right support and funding on the same basis as their male counterparts. That, to me, felt both a hardcore business economic reason to put the right support measures in, but also, as a woman, to help recognise that you support women in all aspects as a senior leader.”
From here, Dame Alison Rose adopted a leadership style that looked different to the old-style approaches that were commonplace in business. “For me, it was about putting proactive, practical help in place to help female entrepreneurs,” she says.
Alison Rose on Creating an Environment for Female Entrepreneurs to Thrive
Alison explains that 40% to 80% of new businesses fail in the first two years. Although the failure rate is high, once an entrepreneur sees the impact they’re having, this success and impact tend to grow.
With this in mind, Alison and her colleagues taught mindset strategies in their accelerators. The survival rate of the businesses under their guidance grew from 40% to 80% after two years.
“We also found that by creating the right environment, we would encourage more women to start businesses,” Alison says. “We saw a tenfold increase in the number of women starting and scaling businesses.”
Sharing the exact strategies that they employed in banking “encouraged more people to come into that ecosystem, to create the right environment, and it snowballed,” she explains. “The more you can demonstrate success, the more people will be keen to follow.”
Alison Rose’s Insights Into Being a Relatable Leader
Alison played a pivotal role in the accelerators that provided an entry point into entrepreneurship for many women. But this doesn’t mean her leadership experience has always been easy.
“It’s the things that have gone wrong and been challenging that have been the most interesting and turbo-charging parts of my career,” she says. Talking about these difficulties has proved invaluable to the women she has supported.
“When you get someone who tells you all the wonderful aspects of the story and how the path was perfect and brilliant, and this epitome of amazing success, it’s interesting, but there’s very little that you can take from it. Whereas when things go wrong, the challenges, the hiccups, the transition points in leadership, those are the really interesting things.”
Alison has undergone many challenging transitions, “from being a member of a team to leading my first team, to leading a global team,” and handling these transitions has shaped her as a leader.
“I would talk about leadership or connect entrepreneurs to talk about their leadership. All entrepreneurs and business leaders want relatable role models, and that relatability is really important,” she says.
Talking About Mistakes So Others Can Learn From Them
Alison describes the “cult of CEO” that is prevalent in the corporate world: “the all-knowing, infallible leader.” But “that’s a very old-style leadership model,” Alison explains. She prefers to be a leader who helps others learn through her experiences, both good and bad.
Driving a culture of “experimentation and positive competitiveness,” Alison was “very candid” about mistakes she’s made and challenges she has encountered. At NatWest, she was keen to humanise leadership and make it not only acceptable but positive for people to talk about mistakes and experimentation.
“Everybody makes mistakes whether they talk about them or not,” Alison says. “It’s not the mistake that defines you. It’s how you respond to the mistake and what you do with it.” She would bring her mistakes to life in examples from her career, explain how she resolved these, and then describe how the process shaped her. Its also important in a competitive environment to ensure that you learn and experiment and issues are transparent.
“That type of courageous and honest leadership is really important because mistakes happen,” Alison says. “If you don’t create a culture and environment where people can talk about them, learn from them, and get the experience from other people, then those mistakes stay hidden, and that’s bad culture and bad for the learning experience.”
The Long Shadow of a Leader
Coming from the financial services sector, Alison knows the impact an organisation can have when things go wrong. For example, financial crises have affected countless lives and businesses. But she also knows the impact an organisation can have when it succeeds. The success or failure largely comes down to the efficacy of the CEO.
“I’ve always been conscious of the importance of what role you play and the impact that you have,” Alison says. “Leaders leave a long shadow. You’ve got to be very conscious of what your impact is.”
She explains that CEOs “sit in a seat for a very short period of time.” For her, NatWest Group was 300 years old. “So your job as a leader is to be part of a team, to drive direction, and make sure that you hand the seat over in a better shape,” she says.
“But the shadow that you leave, the impact that it has, has to be long-term and has to have value and be relevant.”
Alison Rose’s Advice on Measuring Success and Staying Resilient
Alison explains that when measuring business success, it’s essential to be clear on the outcomes you want to measure. “It’s very, very easy to get distracted by measuring the wrong things or other people’s perceptions,” she says. In parge organisations in particular there is a lot of activity but it is critical to be clear on the measures of success and the outcomes and momentum you are creating.
“Sometimes things don’t go your way, despite the best efforts, the best people, and the best outcomes.” Because of this, perspective and resilience are crucial to the role of the CEO. Or as Alison puts it, “that ability to zoom back out and go, ‘Is this a win or loss? Is this just a step in the path? Does this really matter?’”
It’s also important to measure the whole team’s success, not your individual success as a CEO. “The thing about being a CEO is, when you win, it’s the team’s success,” Alison says. “When you lose, it’s the CEO’s fault. You have to recognise that your role is to allow other people to be successful and to shine.”
How Alison Rose Creates and Manages Strong Teams
When creating and managing teams, Alison has always focused on seeking team members with skills that she doesn’t have. “A sign of a weak leader is when you push talent down,” she says. “You should never be intimidated by talent. Hire the best people, people who are better than you, because you want collective skills in your team.”
Alison’s approach was to hire the team who would ultimately replace her. “You should be developing and nurturing talent,” she explains. “Your job is to hire people better than you, to hire your successors.”
Creating A Balanced Team of People Who Align But Don’t Agree
It’s also important to recruit people who have different points of view. “You definitely don’t want everybody who looks the same, sounds the same, comes from the same background, and has the same thinking,” Alison says.
“You don’t want people all to agree with each other because if you’re all sitting there, going, ‘Oh, this is the best idea in the world,’ you can almost be certain that you’ve missed something.” Critical is to avoid group think. Instead, Alison has fostered teams that aligned but didn’t necessarily agree.
“Mutual respect and creating a team that can build trust and therefore have ‘good fights’ is really important,” she adds. It’s essential “to allow people to disagree without it becoming personal... You want constructive challenge, but then when you walk out the door, you walk out the door as a team.”
A team like this doesn’t have a blame culture. Instead, “people are comfortable to say, ‘We tried this. It didn’t work for this reason,’ and they don’t suddenly get eviscerated,” Alison explains.
“That was always how I tried to build teams. It was very much creating the environment where people could have that safe debate, that environment where they could safely win and lose. There was no humiliation.”
Evolving Team Needs
Cultivating a team like this is one of the most effective successes a leader can have. But Rose explains that the team shouldn’t be static. When acting as NatWest Group’s CEO, the skills and dynamics she needed to recruit would evolve.
“Some people I’d be bringing in for a very specific task,” Alison says. “I needed to build a particular business in a particular way, and I would need that skill set for a particular period.”
“The world is moving so quickly. Whether it’s technology, whether it’s geopolitics, whether it’s social trends, you have to be mindful of the environment and what you need, and therefore it’s never static.”
Alison was always questioning, “What do we want to achieve? What type of skills do we need? Do I need more stable, traditional people, or do I need innovators and disruptors?”
But “you don’t want a team full of innovators and disruptors,” she adds. “If your whole team is full of disruptors, you’ll never get anything done.” Instead, she would consider, “Who are the peacemakers? Who are the disruptors? Who are the people you’re going to need to fit together?”
Handling Challenges With a Team and Board as a CEO
When managing a team as a CEO, there will always be times when you need to handle challenges. Alison would always tell her team, “Don’t just bring me problems. Bring me ideas on how we solve them.”
“That’s a really important dynamic with managing your executive team,” Alison says. “Otherwise, the CEO becomes the postbox for all the bad news.”
When it then comes to communicating problems and solutions with a company board, she recommends being “transparent around what you’re doing.”
As an example, Alison would update the board at NatWest by starting with, “Here’s the things that have gone well.” Then she’d move onto “the things that aren’t going too well, the things I’m worried about, and what the team is focusing on going forward.”
This approach not only gave the board insights into her concerns but also reassured them that she and her team were on top of any challenges. “It’s not just a laundry list of problems,” Alison says. “It’s things you may be worried about that you are working on, and that builds good confidence with the board.”
About Alison Rose
Featuring on In The Arena, Alison Rose is well-placed to share leadership insights with current and aspiring women leaders everywhere. After breaking new ground as the first female CEO of a major UK bank, in 2023, she was named a Dame for her work in finance. In 2019, Vogue listed her among its top 25 influential women in 2019. And in 2018, she made the Women in FinTech Powerlist.