(gentle music)
Dave, thank you for joining us today.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
It's great to be back.
Thanks for inviting me.
You inherited a very high-performing organization.
What were the priorities you set?
How did you deliberately step into taking this organization
to the next level?
First I had to reposition our core assets.
We had some great assets.
We had some outstanding assets.
But we were under-invested in the United States.
We didn't have enough of a growth mindset.
We didn't have a growth platform, so we repositioned
some assets out and we made a large acquisition
in the United States.
I think that provided a growth platform-
into US wealth management that we are very excited about.
The second one, I called it Vision 2025,
was we had to reimagine what it was gonna be
to be a mass consumer and commercial bank in the future
with the platform effects coming in,
with the disruptive nature, with a digital consumer
that you need to connect to.
And the third core piece of what I thought I needed
to focus on was a cultural transformation.
-: So, Dave, let's go back three years from today,
to fall of 2016.
You took the decision to take on
a major company cultural transformation.
Can you talk a little bit about what was behind that,
and that approach?
It was a period of time where we were very successful.
When you examine all the reasons we were successful,
my concern was, I wasn't sure it was sustainable.
The drivers that had been our success in the past,
I didn't think were the same drivers that we needed
to be successful in the future.
I felt we needed more ambition, we need urgency,
and we needed vision to take on more and therefore went
through a change in the organization to liberate capacity,
to bring in new leaders with a different mindset.
We needed new hard skills.
Now, three years later, what's been the lasting impact?
We've unlocked a new group of leaders in the organization.
We've introduced a new leadership model where we ask leaders
in clear language to set more ambitious goals,
to lead in a more ambitious way, to articulate,
to be even more fallible, to say we're not gonna get it
all right, and allow the space to fail.
What I'm maybe most proud of, is we used this opportunity
to do a complete reset on diversity and inclusion
in the organization.
And of the senior roles that we replaced,
50% or more went to females.
And for us, it was a tangible demonstration of a reset
on diversity and inclusion.
When you look at our TSR, you look at our client
satisfaction results have never been better,
record client satisfaction results, all our core metrics
have benefited from the result of going
through this transformation.
How were you able to cross that gap between knowing
culture's important and actually doing something about it?
I think part of the success factor was,
you shock the organization when you stop it and say
we're gonna go through a change that involves 800 employees
potentially leaving, and employees do stop and listen.
Whoa, this is not the same day to day noise.
This is a fundamental transformation.
Why are we doing this?
What's the purpose?
If we had tried to do this by just talking about leadership
models and everybody's running as hard as they can
to make customer plans, serve customers, build technology,
all the things we do, it gets lost in the noise.
-: What advice would you give other CEOs that know
culture's something they need to deal with, yet day to day,
the operational and strategic just seem to crowd out
dealing with it?
You have to be able to write it down on half a piece
of paper, then have someone read it, and you can explain it
to someone who doesn't know your company.
I think that's part of it, right?
The magic of the leadership model was,
you could read three columns of information and knew exactly
what we wanted from you.
It was simple, it was brilliant in its design,
and was easy to communicate.
That's that plain language, that design.
It made a massive difference 'cause someone could take it
on their own in a train or at home or read it at their desk,
and they knew what we wanted.
If it's so complex that it takes management to explain it
over and over again, then you're not gonna get traction.
Evidently, the context for banks globally is changing.
There are a lot of headwinds.
The environment is getting tougher.
How do you look at these forces?
What are the major forces that you think you need
to particularly prepare for?
Our role as an intermediary is changing in senior markets,
so we have a whole set of challenges there that
we're dealing with and we have a very creative team
on both the markets and investment banking side that's
repositioning our business.
You go to the other end of the scale,
you look at the challenges that the retail, consumer,
commercial bank are facing, and they're just as fundamental,
but it's the platform challenge.
It's a model that relied on us being an intermediary
around moving cash in society, distributing cash,
and having branches on every corner and having vaults
in branches so we could store and move cash,
ATMs and the telephone banking,
and then digital banking.
And all that revolved around us being at the center
of a customer's life.
We're moving from a world where we had dominion
over client needs and we had the centricity of building
the rails to the economy to a world where the customers
broadcast to the world, living in very different platforms,
and our challenge as an industry, and for us
idiosyncratically is to connect in a relevant way
to a new digital customer living in a very different world.
What do you have to get absolutely right as the head
of RBC over the years to come?
One of the challenges every CEO has in leading in this
environment is balancing the short term and the long term.
We call it the CEO's dilemma.
How much performance do you give the market in the short term
and how much do you use to build and transform
your organization to be here for the next 100 years.
I always say, you attract the investors you ask for
in how you communicate with the marketplace,
and I think it's really incumbent on CEOs to be very clear
on how they plan to make that balance, and be very open
about where the journey's going.
Dave, thanks for coming.
It's great to see you again.
Well, it's great to catch up,
and thanks for your partnership and support
through this exciting journey we've had.