Using Psychology Processes For Better Team Collaboration

Cheryl Kennedy at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/OFc7AGXOpfY

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

A small-business mindset inside a big bank

[00:00:06] Thank you for the opportunity of speaking to you guys today. I'm going to go through a presentation which is talking a little bit about, I'm not going to go on about the psychological terms, but essentially weaving the theme of thinking about people and psychology, in terms of what I've done within Barclaycard and my experiences and learnings doing UX in a big corporation. Hopefully some of it will resonate, hopefully there'll be some useful bits. If not, thank you for listening.

[00:00:39] So the first thing, a little bit about me. You may have seen it on LinkedIn, you'll see that I've been in the bank, like I said, many years. I've done lots of different roles in the organization. But what isn't on there, and I was thinking about just adding this in because it defines a little bit about how I've approached building a team and sorting out my function within the bank, my background is actually largely in small businesses. I was put around all the family businesses when I was younger. When I was 14 I set up a little cleaning business and ran that for about five, six years before I started university. And also I was involved in the family consultancy for many years until we kind of closed that down, which was focused on building teams, it was doing board development, et cetera. I think that's basically shaped how I've worked in my organization, very much sometimes with a very small business mindset within a large organization.

[00:01:42] Another thing about me: I'm like a new parent. I've just come out of, I'm actually in the 11th week of adoption leave, so I'm fairly terrified because I feel like my business brain has gone, and this is the first time I've got on stage in front of people for some time. And humor me for a second, just talking about my son a little bit, because a lot of what I talk about here I think is common sense. The whole adoption process was about a year and a half, and I basically had a new user coming into my home. So a new user of the home, a new user of maternal services. And through the year process I didn't get to meet that little man until a week, I met him for the first time a week before he came home.

[00:02:27] So I did research. I spoke to his previous foster carers, I spoke to the social workers, I read online, toddlers, he's two and a half, et cetera, et cetera. And to me that was just, like I said, it's just natural to want to know as much as possible from a wide variety of different sources, data points, even before I could actually ask him. And for me, in business that's also, it's common sense for me that we understand as much as possible when we are designing products and services about our customers.

The team, the business and the complexity we live in

[00:03:02] So my team, within design and data. A bit of context, and I'll talk about this in a second: I sit in operations and technology. Again, if you want to talk about where design sits in the organization, I could go on about that until the cows come home, but it certainly changes things, where your function doing design sits in the organization. And I'm going to use the word design to encompass my entire team, by the way.

[00:03:36] So Barclaycard is very complicated. It's a big business. I serve the Barclaycard arm, that is six different businesses. By the way, I don't have my notes on me, and I memorize my data. But basically we're the number one issuing card in the UK, we are the second largest acquirer in Europe, we are in the US, we are the fifth largest co-branded card firm. We do payments and credit cards. We're B2B and B2C, it's global. My team personally is based in India, US, Germany and the UK.

[00:04:26] And our business is incredibly complicated. Everything's always changing: stakeholders changing, how we do things, strategies. The broad strategies remain the same, but the team strategies change. When I picked up the design team, which came and joined my data team, they had already been sitting there for two and a half years with five different bosses. I actively chased that team, because I wanted to sit with data, because I'm passionate about data and design, and I also wanted to nurture and settle that team, give them some priorities and really fulfill the potential I saw in the UX space.

[00:05:15] So that's the complexity we live in within our business. And within the team I've got UI design, UX design, set up new UX research and test. That was the first in-house we had in the bank. We used external providers prior to that. UX copy: I call it UX copy because copy was hidden right the way down in things, and copy is very important. And again, when you start getting into the science of copy, psychology and the research, it's phenomenal. I mean, what you can change in terms of your results is amazing with copy. It's not just your grammar and spelling, so I raised that right up there.

[00:06:00] Data development, delivery and analysis. So again, in my team I also do data requirements, because with the data piece we're looking at the existing information and getting data right, really important. I mean, I'm a huge fan of data, because, not what this presentation is about. And then another piece, which is process management and improvement. What's that? That kind of sits more on the operations side. So my team, they do that. Particularly the team do a lot of governance, they see through audits, they do a lot of hygiene factors, they understand business rules. And just remember that when I start talking a little bit about pulling all those people together, because there's some quite different skill sets within that.

[00:06:47] So, a few key challenges for design and data in our organization. One, they don't get what we do. How many times, they don't get what we do, they don't get design and really understand what our function can provide. Another one is being utilized at all levels. So the first one is being involved right up front in terms of the strategic space, so being involved in the strategic definition of things up front, thinking pre-inception, but also sometimes just being involved in a project. You know, sometimes I think I don't need it, and that's crazy. And then the third challenge is red tape, process, how we do things, navigating the organization in terms of the organization itself.

Getting your own house in order

[00:07:45] So some of the things that I did, and we did: we started with the team getting together. So the first thing, can you all see, you can't see that one, that's supposed to be funny. Why do we exist? Because it's going back to basics. You know, who, what, why and how. Why are you here? What are we really here to do? Because if you don't get that clear within yourself, how can you really build a successful team? And it seems like basics, but it's really going back to those basics to discuss as a group how you do things.

[00:08:16] And also, as a team, when we kind of went through it, it started becoming apparent that people didn't even understand what our own, I sit within the digital organization, a broad digital team, hold all the development, the tech teams, and people didn't really understand what everybody else did. And even within my own team, I do random questions and they couldn't answer them. So the first thing is almost this one: get your own house in order. Really start questioning and debating what are our guiding principles as well.

[00:08:53] And I'm hesitant about saying, you know, we branded ourselves, we said this is how we operate, this is our kind of buzzwords in terms of our vision. But we did go through some of that. It was more around getting an ethos within the team around what is our modus operandi and how do we also operate. And some of those things are curiosity, asking the question, getting out there, and prioritizing. Talking to the entire team: what are your big issues, what are the problems we need to put on the table and use our own skills to start solving, in terms of how we actually function in our own team.

[00:09:34] And a lot of this was also about just bringing people together to just keep talking, hammering it through. And there is a point where it will get boring, because it's like there's a lot of talking, but you have to put that time in in order for the team to bond. Because bringing the team together, this is where again you'll start thinking about some of the psychological pieces, especially when I started listening to the data guys, pure analytical guys, talking to the design guys. It can sometimes be like watching left brain, right brain, and I had conflict. They want to make us do the process, they don't get design, or they don't get data.

[00:10:13] And actually when they started getting beyond that, they started seeing the similarities between them, how they could help one another, and also focusing on, like I said, what are our shared goals, what are our big problems. And you started to see a shift in how we operated as a team and how we collaborated as a team. I did a few things around, rather than doing full Myers-Briggs and colors and having the desk to say, well, I'm a blue and a yellow, what it did instead was just factoring little things in as just reminders, so you're constantly sort of prodding everybody's thoughts, rather reminders around, you are different. Like doing a Myers-Briggs Simpsons thing[?], making sure that we do things where we are, and notice, these guys don't work well together, I'm giving them a mini project over there, which is part of developing our team.

[00:11:10] Looking at how we bring up prominence of each kind of people within the team, in terms of again mini projects, listening to their ideas around what they want to come through. So revamping the intranet site. This then set the foundation, the absolute foundation, of spending that time getting a gelled team, because unless we know how to communicate and sort out between us, how can we communicate to the wider organization?

What we actually offer, and getting into the process

[00:11:42] And the other part of this was also looking, after we had that discussion of what, why, where and who, at what we actually offer. So some of the things we started doing was really, yes, we're design language there, but it wasn't being upfront and it wasn't being factored into all our different delivery processes. Looking at the processes that, you know, the governance process, it's red tape, so how do we then talk to different parts of the organization to make sure that we're in the checklists?

[00:12:11] And people in our team, like the operations side of things, they knew people that other people didn't know, so they can go and have a chat with them, building relationships with legal, or getting them up front into our process, putting copy into design language, making sure that we did a kind of whole look at all of our tooling, doing a tooling assessment. Again, hygiene factors, but these are all the things that really kind of got us to where we started saying, we know what we do, we know how we do it, and then we start acting it out. Because this was the big problem.

[00:12:47] Okay, so that was all getting the house in order, et cetera, et cetera. But the first thing is, sorry, and just previous to this, the other bit about this, and this is again where around psychology, is when you look at your customers, when you look at...

[00:13:03] Host: Five minutes left.

[00:13:08] Wow. When you look at your customers, the one thing you do know about your customers is they're humans. Okay? So even if you can't do any testing or anything else, you can look at the principles of how you actually work with those customers and what you apply. So you know, you can look at reciprocation theory, you can look at how you do research without actually having to touch the customer. You have some basics.

Applying the same skills to internal stakeholders

[00:13:29] We applied this as well in terms of also how we went to our stakeholders. Because one of the things they weren't doing, and I've probably taken too long for the introduction, is they weren't applying their skills to our internal customers. They didn't know who the stakeholders were. They're your users of your service. So again it was giving away some things for free, it was building some relationships, inviting them in. It was looking at different communication styles, so you don't go, this is my one presentation. Some people prefer to have things visually, some prefer to have the detail. It was about being practical around how you actually broke down what your problems were and how you got the stakeholders to really understand what you offered and how you offered it.

[00:14:12] We built this up through doing collaboration, but not just, oh, we're just all in collaboration, proving ourselves. We got advocates, we built advocacy. Like you talk about NPS externally, how about your NPS internally? You think about how you apply what you do to the organization. And also there was a lot of business development, in terms of, a lot of my team didn't understand commercial skills. They needed to relearn some commercial skills, the priority of the business. They needed to understand what the business priorities were. So when they were saying our business don't get design, sometimes it's because the business was saying we don't want the full-fat delivery where you do everything perfectly, actually we're happy with just good enough for now. And there was conflict around listening to that and actually listening to the needs of the customer.

[00:15:00] So a lot of things we did, that was again how we communicated, and we did a lot of battling this as well, because this is the HiPPO, the highly important person's opinion. This can be from a product owner to an exec. And the thing with this is that you've also got to look at, rather than just saying they're wrong, how do you now use what you understand to say, okay fine, let's have what you have, let's take it and let's do it better, guerrilla testing, let's work on how we actually talk with you to communicate and break this down.

[00:15:33] Also sometimes it is the right person. So product owners, for instance, we have a whole issue around booting out UX, product owners and BAs doing the requirements. And when I went over to, and sorry, I'm talking to everybody about this, I had designers who were saying, I'm not having my name to it, I will never compromise my standards. But on the business side they were saying, we're getting pressure from exec, we're going to lose our funding unless we get this out, and what we've got at the moment is so rubbish even a 20% improvement would be good. And my guys were saying, but why settle for 20%? And this is where it's again about the battle versus the war. So it was getting it across that you can choose your battles wisely and then you'll win the war.

In summary: look beyond design

[00:16:23] Running through now, so in summary, this was highly successful. I've had a 20% kind of increase in the team, we've got a lot more collaboration[?], we're leading on a lot of initiatives in terms of strategically. We've brought teams across the organization through using our skills that we have in design and data, our ability to provide information, our ability to do design thinking to our own problems, to solve how we actually succeed as an organization and solve those problems that we talked about.

[00:16:56] And when I talked about my son Anthony and looking at that user and preparing for that user in my home, what I wasn't looking at, and what I would say my team weren't looking at, was also looking at the other elements. I could make life perfect for him, but I'm missing out the social workers. If I mess them up, they're going to say no, they'll take him away while he's still in the probation. If I mess up with the stakeholders I have in terms of my friends, family, then again I'm going to not have that support.

[00:17:26] Therefore you have to really look beyond, and that's my really big thing: beyond design, understand the broader business, be prepared to rip up your own rule books. Because you need to be able to define what you do to the business, but also keep adapting. And in our business what worked for one person won't work for another, so do your research on your internal stakeholders in order to influence, to get where you want. That's my summary on that. Thank you.