Ah well... she laughs. And for the first time in our interview she is speechless. She hesitates, but the 180 smile remains unbroken. Then having assembled her list she begins, Very passionate about the customer, very determined, very focused, very output-driven... Ah, well, I think we could all do with some of that.
Scoular is such an elegant, restless, irresistible force of positivism that it would be tough to find fault. Scottish by birth and accent, and firm by nature I think this interview has been a wee bit light on our people policies so far, Andrew she has a broad smile that she uses as often for emphasis as warmth and a knack for making her point forcefully but never aggressively. Her charm, one suspects, masks an ambitious drive.
She no doubt needs all of that at Barclays, a 300 year-old institution with an 11 billion operating income, over 70,000 employees and a senior executive list that is very, very male. So who is the most senior woman in Barclays? Well, she says, theres Lynne Peacock, who came with the Woolwich takeover, but unfortunately shes leaving, so um, well, at head office, I guess, me...
Brought in two years ago by the banks new Irish-Canadian CEO Matt Barrett, Scoular was given a brief to overhaul the Barclays HR set-up, bringing disparate entities into one smaller, streamlined department, and develop some people policies that will fit the banks new business strategy. In particular Barrett, an ex-HR man himself, wants her to help open up senior Barclays positions to more women, to introduce more ethnic diversity in order to better reflect the banks customer base. A tough task, you would guess, at such a crusty institution.
So Scoular is leading the charge, in more ways than one. Now 47, shes no stranger to big company politics, having spent 20 years at British Airways, where she had worked her way up through a host of senior HR and line management jobs, before reaching customer service operations director. She has also, between BA and Barclays, done a four-year stint on secondment to the Governments New Deal employment task force in Whitehall, giving her experience of a very different form of politics too.
Perhaps the surprise is that, despite extensive involvement with small and medium-size companies through the New Deal, she chose to go back to one of Britains biggest firms. Why? It was just a great opportunity, she says. Matt was putting together the business strategy and I had the opportunity to align the people strategy. Often CEOs dont see the need to have the people strategy aligned.
The charismatic Barrett, former chief of the Bank of Montreal and a banker who is far better at employee relations than most, was clearly a draw. Its about involving the employees at the front end of the business, says Scoular. I like that visible style of leadership. It was prevalent in BA and it is the style I follow myself Ive just finished God knows how many roadshows for my HR people...
Those that are left... One of Scoulars initial tasks at Barclays seems to have been to winnow out an overwieldy HR payroll. We started the year 2000 with nearly 2,000 HR staff spread across the diverse corners of the banking group and we have now consolidated that into one central function which should be down to 1,000 by the end of the year. Three years ago the ratio was one HR person to every 63 Barclays employees. She wants to push it towards one to 175. Very challenging, she concedes. So far, she adds, shes achieved 46% reduction in headcount, 34% reduction in our costs. And she smiles widely.
We are sitting at a conference table on the fifth floor of the Barclays Lombard Street HQ in the City of London. Scoular, medium height, compact, wearing a severe black trouser suit, is so immaculately dressed and coiffed her hair cut in a bob with highlights that she had seemed almost to glide into the room rather than walk. (Her PA, who had left me there waiting, had told me I would have no difficulty in recognising her as she is always so elegantly dressed). She is also relentlessly upbeat without a sliver of cynicism in her make-up. Everything gets a positive swing.
She is never less than pragmatic, however. She was, she reveals, sounded out about the Barclays HR job way before she took it, during the banks interregnum when it was between chief executives and being led by chairman Sir Peter Middleton. She turned the headhunter away the first time, not willing to join an organisation when the succession issues were still up in the air.
The fact that the new regime at Barclays came back for her speaks volumes. Scoulars immediate boss, Gary Dibb, Barclays group chief administrative officer who came with Barrett from Canada, says he looked at 50 different possible candidates for the HR role. What appealed about Valerie was the customer service background she had. So many HR directors work solely in HR. Having an HR director with that kind of customer service orientation and who knows how line managers see the world and what language they speak, is very important.
Some of the early work on reshaping HR at Barclays had already been done by Dibb, who had encountered first-hand the institutions resistance to change. Bank bosses dont realise that many of their staff are now suffering from change fatigue, says Jim Lowe, national secretary of Unify, the employees main union, because of all the changes imposed in the past decade.
Into this steps Scoular, whose experience of dealing with unions at BA has, according to Lowe, stood her in good stead. Relations between bank and union, he adds, are now a world apart from their confrontational nadir in the mid-1990s, when technology and competition were driving redundancies. Re-energising a bludgeoned, frightened workforce has been one of Scoulars key tasks.
Did I say frightened? Ill deal with your use of that adjective later, she scolds, before describing the biggest obstacle she found on coming in as not conservatism but the surprising lack of central control at Barclays.
The infamous fiefdoms that have dogged many a Barclays boss? No, she says, other companies would say they have fiefdoms, but here it is not so much about fiefdoms, as the mind-set being local. Hence when I came in there were 121 different HR systems, 97 different leadership programmes, 67 different performance development systems... Its good to have choice, but there needs to be a clear idea of the value sense of the organisation and the principles behind it. You have to have principles against which you can build robust performance development systems and good leadership programmes, and while you dont want to debilitate the organisation with central control you certainly dont need 97 different varieties of these programmes.
She runs through the feedback policies she is introducing, and the controversial initiatives to link staff pay to bank performance and individual performance. Her staff surveys, she says, show that the emotional commitment to the organisation among employees is coming back quickly. There are still concerns over staffing levels, job pressure and bureaucracy, but she is seeing a double figure improvement in positive responses made to the question of whether you would recommend Barclays to a friend.
And I wouldnt want you to think that our staff are frightened, she says. I think the same market characteristics exist in other sectors too look at what has happened with airlines.
And is 360 feedback available at all levels? No, but it will be. Its part of the people strategy thats been introduced, weve started it at the top and its going to work its way down. I like it, its a personal view of mine. I like to know how a person thinks.
And did her staff, aside from finding her focused, committed, etcetera, find any faults? Well, they did say I do need to recognise some of the pressures I put on HR people, and to listen to how many priorities they can manage, to listen a bit harder...
Others point out that, as Scoular is married but without children, she has had to learn to understand the needs of employees with young families. Not having children, she acknowledges, has made forging a career easier for her. But it was never a conscious decision it just must be easier as you are not juggling so many balls in the air. Work, she freely admits, is everything to her. She has been married to Stephen, a civil engineer-turned-property developer, since her early BA days and lists her hobbies as travel and music. She adds entertaining at home in Cobham, when I push her, and the fortnightly visits north to look after her mum. And thats it.
She has always been a hard driver, both of herself and others. Born an only child to a Scottish engineer father who worked at BP, and a Midlands mum who worked with the war-blinded, she was brought up in a small village midway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. She says she matured quickly like many only children she had strong bonds to her parents but was simultaneously more independent, more self-determined than other kids and also, out of necessity, good at getting out and making friends. She ticks off the other characteristics she inherited: determined, active, serious. My dad was quite serious... It was a strong, Scottish, Calvinistic upbringing, with a hardworking ethic, high standards.
I was close to my dad, she adds. Its odd, I remark, how many high-achieving daughters are close to their fathers and high-achieving sons to their mums. Theres another article for you, she smiles, rather curtly. Introspection, perhaps, is not something Scoulars going to get snagged by.
She went to Edinburgh University, staying close to her parents, and then joined BA on the milkround. She was also offered graduate traineeships at John Lewis and Marks & Spencer among others, proving that even in her early 20s, her serious, determined outlook encouraged many admirers.
But she loved BA, then just limbering up for privatisation, as it offered her a range of opportunities, and she proceeded to switch between functions almost continually throughout her career. Early HR roles in operations, cargo, engineering, marketing, sales and industrial relations gave her wide experience. She then moved into line management becoming, aged just 33, general manager, Heathrow, for BA, before shifting back as group HR director. By then the company was a vigorous plc. Scoular, in her last job before she left, became customer service operations director.
Did she not find it difficult shifting in and out of HR? No, she says, each experience informed the other. I feel passionately that HR functions can develop leaders capabilities for them, and the capability of people generally is dependent on the capability of the HR function, and it has to be really aligned with the business need...
What else could HR be? Well, she says, at many firms it can be more about administration, rather than strategically influencing the direction of the company. At BA, though, HR was a key function, it was not second-class. You walked tall and proud in it. You werent second-best or administrative or subservient. Not all HR functions are like that, she adds.
Such as at Barclays? Certainly HR had a higher reputation at BA than here. There was much more interchangeability between that and the line. There is a high correlation between how the customer perceives service, she adds, and how employees perceive their employer, and ultimately the profitability of the company and the shareholders interests are better served in the long term when that is recognised.
Will she stay in HR? For now, she says. She spent four years working in Whitehall, advising Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants on the delivery of the Governments 3.2 billion welfare to work programme, and you can tell she is pleased to be back in the big company environment. Her next ambition, she says, is to move into line management at the bank others who know the company tip her as a good bet to join the handful of women who have reached the group executive committee at Barclays. Or be a boss somewhere else? She says no, she is probably too old now. Anyway, I am not hellbent on being a CEO somewhere, I like my job too much. She did have a non-executive position at the pub chain Slug & Lettuce, until that was sold. She is also a governor at the Henley Management College, and is open to offers for more. Given the shortage of women on British boards, it is pretty extraordinary she hasnt been asked.
But thats traditional British business for you. She tells me that 10% of succession candidates at Barclays are women. Is that enough? No, but they are not going to put women in senior positions by mandate, only by capability. We are a 300 year-old company with a rich heritage. In its time its executives have been very male, very Caucasian and rather elderly, she says. We are moving away from that. Do we have enough women in top positions? No. Is it something we are taking seriously? Yes. Is it something we will crack quickly? No.
Dibb believes the solution is to first stock the feeder pools so that the right candidates will emerge. Scoular says her gut feeling is that women at Barclays need more mentoring and greater flexibility of working arrangements. When that is sorted, they will have difficulty holding back the flow. We will wait to see. Her own progress may be the best indicator to note.
