Having a high-performance culture is the number one capability any company should have.
Like strategy comes and goes, but if you don't have a high-performance culture, to get the
day-to-day right on behalf of your customers and your shareholders and to execute on strategy
is sort of meaningless.
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review, and welcome
to 15 Minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything in between
and along the way, we're aiming to get some great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Scott Hartley, the chief executive of Insignia Financial.
Hi, Scott, are you well?
Thanks for coming in.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Now, Scott, you're the chief executive of Insignia Financial, a financial services company
that directly employs more than 200 financial advisors and manages or administers $300 billion
on behalf of clients, including through superannuation, and you have more than 4,000 employees.
Scott, how long have you been at Insignia for, and do you like the job?
So I've been with Insignia now for nine months, and yeah, I do like the job.
I love the challenge of transforming the company from where it is, the collection of three
companies, MLC, ANZ Wealth Management, and IAAF, and actually transforming that into
a single company that's focused on customer outcomes.
That sounds like quite a task, quite a challenge.
Hopefully we'll get into that a bit more.
We haven't got very much time.
The clock starts now.
My first question is, what does your morning routine look like?
What time do you get up?
I'd like to try to get up around 6.30, but sometimes I wake up at 4.30 in the morning.
If I'm stressed about something and there's something that's big going on and I really
need to think it through, I find I think best when I first wake up.
If I'm in that sort of mode, I simply get out of bed and go into the study and think
stuff through and make notes and maybe send myself a few emails, because I don't like
sending emails to people too early in the morning.
Or if I do, I put those on time delay.
I feel far more energised about dealing with the day if I've done that well.
Does that happen very often?
No, not very often.
Typically, I'm up at 6.30.
I like to go for a walk with my wife.
We live near the Botanical Gardens and we walk around the harbour and Botanical Gardens,
which is fabulous.
Or we'll do some gym together, occasionally yoga, which I need to do in my old age, stretch
a little more and should do more of.
There are about the three options for us in the mornings and we try to do something every
Breakfast, no breakfast?
I just function better and it helps me manage my weight better.
I find, I think more clearly if I don't have breakfast, I get to lunchtime and then I'll
eat lunch and I'll eat dinner and that's two meals a day.
My next question is about a pivotal moment in your career.
Was there a promotion that you had or a project that you worked on that changed the course
of what you were doing?
I think I was like 49.
I was made redundant from NAB.
It was quite a shock at the time.
I sort of paused and thought about it.
Do I stay and do something different or do I take the money and run, so to speak?
And after a few phone calls, because I wanted to make sure I wasn't suffering hubris because
I thought, hey, they're giving me a redundancy at the peak of my powers and my career.
Maybe I should take this and go out in the wild world.
So when you made the phone calls, who did you call?
Like headhunters?
I think I did call a headhunter and just talk to them as well.
But yeah, mainly board members.
I think in these corporate jobs, you get into a grind in a company and you can get stuck
there and sometimes you need an event to trigger you to step out and do something different.
So what did you do?
I forced myself to have a break for at least four months and didn't travel, just hung around,
and then started to have a look around what was available.
And I think the key thing is when those things happen to you is not to be overly stressed
that you're not going to get another job.
You will find another job.
In fact, you're likely to find an even better job and a different career direction that
you might not have found before.
Quite hard to do, though, I imagine, to force yourself not to get too stressed about it.
Back in those days, I used to meditate a lot so I calmed myself and calmed my mind
and yeah, I was really able just to step back at the time and really enjoy the break.
And how long then did it take you to find the job you wanted, which I guess was Sun
Super, the chief executive of Sun Super?
Yeah, pretty quick.
It came up fairly early on in my search.
I wasn't sure about it and I spoke to a few people about it and went and met with the
board of course and had numerous conversations with them and I got really comfortable that
this was a great opportunity to be a CEO of what was a mid-sized industry fund at
the time, but actually make it a great business in the future.
And that's what we did, which was fun.
So in fact, you turned that redundancy into a whole great new job as being a CEO.
So I was able to grow, I was able to exercise my leadership in a way that I hadn't been
able to before as the CEO of a company.
And I'm very passionate about creating high-performance cultures.
I had done that in my previous role at NAB in a somewhat protected environment inside
of a big group and we'd managed to actually create a really strong high-performance business,
particularly from financial services, but across the division it was high-performing.
And I thought this is a great opportunity to really take what I've learned and implement
that and it proved to me that having a high-performance culture is the number one capability any
company should have.
Strategy comes and goes, but if you don't have a high-performance culture, to get the
day-to-day right on behalf of your customers and your shareholders and to execute on strategy
is sort of meaningless.
My next question is, what is the best piece of career advice you've ever been given?
I would say firstly, get yourself outside your comfort zone because you learn from that.
You do jobs where you have no technical expertise and you have to learn to lead a business or
a team or a function, wherever it might be.
So early in your career, what did you do around that?
Can you point to an example?
Yeah, so probably when I was at MLC, after about I think two years, I was asked to lead
a financial planning business.
I wasn't a financial planner.
I had no expertise in financial planning or much knowledge of it for that matter.
I mean, I knew conceptually what it did, but I didn't understand the technical side.
And I had to transform this financial planning business from being quite a transactional
financial planning business into what we call a strategic planning business, which is very
customer-focused, life journey, that type of thing.
And that was quite the challenge because the technicians wouldn't listen to me.
I mean, I didn't know what I was talking about.
So I had to use my leadership, what I'd learnt from at that point about leadership to lead
that business and transform that business.
On that note, Scott, we're going to take a short break.
But don't go away.
When we come back, we're going to open our gorgeous Chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 Minutes with the Boss.
I am here with Scott Hartley, the chief executive of Insinia Financial.
Now, Scott, this is our section, as warned, called the Chatterbox.
In front of you is a lovely, brown, shiny Chatterbox, inside which today are about,
I'd say, 20 questions.
I am now going to ask you to have a fish in the box, pick some out, and we will start.
What are your favourite interview questions when hiring someone and why?
For me, it's really trying to understand their leadership.
So I ask questions around how they lead, what others would say about their leadership.
Because for people I would be recruiting in my role, having good leaders is number one.
You know, I don't have a list necessarily of questions I would ask, but I will question
around leadership.
And depending on the answers and responses I get, I will take different directions on
that questioning.
Is there a particular type of leader that you're looking for?
Can you describe what type of leader that would be?
People who lead without authority, people who lead with influence, people who build
teams that feel safe to challenge, challenge them.
People that are comfortable enough with their leadership and their capability to be able
to get the best out of their people, to let them be the best they can possibly be.
And that's what leadership is all about.
It's not about management.
It's not about managing an outcome.
It's about surrounding yourself with people, ideally, who are better than you as leaders
and technically better than you in different areas, but leaders who you can then set direction
with them and with the board for the company and let them go.
And leaders who are really collaborative and good team players.
That's super important.
Collaboration is not about kumbaya and just nodding and agreeing and smiling and being
nice to each other.
It's actually about being able to have robust debates, respectful debates, getting to the
best decision and supporting that decision regardless of whether they agree with it or
So leaders who are really comfortable in their own skin and who are prepared, I'm guessing,
not to be the smartest person in the room.
And leaders who don't take themselves too seriously.
Leaders who are happy to sit and open plan with their teams, who don't need a designated
These sorts of leaders are the sort of leaders that I think make the best leaders.
Oh, that's interesting.
OK, Scott, let's have another question.
Have a fish in the box.
So what skill has helped you most in your career?
Understanding people, I think.
Understanding people from different dimensions, understanding their motivators, understanding
their derailers, understanding their strengths and understanding people is sort of, I think,
fairly intuitive for me, but it's something that I've learned over time and I find that's
critically important.
So I find I'm a pretty good read of people, but I'm always cautious also not to form
an early opinion on someone and test my opinion carefully.
Is that something that comes naturally to you as well, or is that something that you
actually have to consciously say, no, stop, this person may not be what they appear?
Yeah, I don't judge people on first impressions at all.
To understand people deeply, you can't simply go on first impressions.
You need numerous conversations.
You need numerous perspectives and lenses around that person.
But understanding people, I think, is critically important in a CO role.
And does that then enable you to get the most out of that person, because you know what
It allows you to influence them better.
Are there many different types of people in that sense, or do they basically fall into
a couple of buckets in terms of what motivates them?
I think there are quite a few different motivators with people.
It's not necessarily financial.
It's not necessarily power.
I mean, it could be financial.
It could be power.
It could be something to do with their family history.
It could be something to do with their upbringing.
It could be that they love a challenge and that they really thrive on a challenge.
I think there are many different motivators for people.
It could be their ego, and that's something to watch, which is more around the power and
wanting to get to a position for the sake of the position.
So I think there are many different motivators.
What's interesting there is that you clearly have to dig quite deep in order to get to
Yeah, interesting.
Have another fish.
Let's see what happens.
How do you build a positive culture?
That's a really good question, Sally.
There's many aspects to building what I call a high-performance culture.
It is the most important capability an organisation should have.
What is it exactly?
High performance?
High performance is actually the results of a high-performance culture are evident in the
results of the company, but it's evidence also in the attitude of the employees and
the employees coming together.
So for a high-performance culture, there are a number of things that I think are foundational
that you must have.
Firstly, you need to be a purpose-led company, have a clear purpose and values.
The behaviours that we want to see exhibited across our people, values that talk to building
trust with each other, talk to accountability, talk to candour and collaboration, and those
things are really important.
And getting those embedded in an organisation, so just not creative words on a page, but
actually embedding those in an organisation is so important.
But purpose and values define who you are as a company, but it doesn't tell you anything
about where you're going.
People like to know who they are as the organisation they're working for, but they also need direction.
So you need to have a vision for where you want the company to be in five years' time.
And then the strategies are what drives you to that vision.
Operating model is really important.
How decisions are made, in what forums, delegations, clear accountabilities and roles.
So structure is really important.
Having roles with really clear accountability, so your accountabilities aren't fuzzy, so
you know what your job is.
That's incredibly important for motivation.
It's nothing worse than not knowing what your job is when you go to work each day.
Leadership is really important, so consistent leadership.
Leadership varies or isn't consistent for two reasons.
One is there's no clear expectation of leaders.
People don't know what they're shooting for, so they make it up themselves.
The other is actual their performance against whatever that expectation is.
Finally, rewarding performance, setting stretch goals, performance and rewards, really important
performance management, really important, and celebrating momentum.
When the culture is really firing, stuff is happening at all levels of the organisation.
People are leading at the front line.
They're actually leading themselves.
And that gives me the biggest thrill that I have as a leader in an organisation when
I see stuff like that just organically out of teams that are solving problems for customers
and creating such innovation and improvement in the process.
Wow, that's great.
That gets me excited.
On that note, Scott, you have passed with flying colours the chatterbox section.
I now have one last question, which we ask all our guests, and that is if we gave you
12 months off, you were unencumbered, but you could come back to your job afterwards.
What would you do?
A year is very generous.
Thank you, Sally.
Usually, I would buy a really big kick-ass camera because I love photography.
I would practise my photography and I would travel in the process.
The first place I'd probably travel is Bhutan, the country that doesn't have GDP, so they
measure happiness.
Beautiful people, beautiful country, so spiritual, and hike.
There's some great hiking in Bhutan.
I would ski for a couple of months because I needed to improve my skiing because I'm
I would spend time because all my kids are growing up.
They're adult kids living all over Australia and one's moving to London today, actually,
I would spend time visiting the kids and spending time in their own environment.
They're probably the main things I'd do.
Scott, thank you so much for spending some time with us today.
It's been so interesting to hear how you create a high-performance culture and the way in which
you look for leaders who are collaborative.
They lead through influence, not title, and you are happy not to be the smartest people
And I like the fact that you don't judge people by their first impression.
You really wait and dig further and find out what motivates them and what derails them.
So Scott, thank you so much again for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
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This podcast was hosted by me, Sally Patten, produced by Lapfan and Martin Peralta.
Our theme is by Alex Gao and our executive producer is Fiona Bufini.
The Australian Financial Review.