 Thank you for being with us. So François Xavier is a principal at Erdic and Strugell. He's an executive search consultant and member of the financial services practices in France and in Belgium. And I think on a personal note, François Xavier, you're a fan of Stade Tous-Lousins and Bourgogne wines. So I'm pretty sure that you will find some people in the audience to discuss during the break. And Hervé started his career as Golden Emerald Miner in Asia, Africa, and South America. But after a couple of years, he decided to focus on talents instead of stones. So he became a chair advisor in many large organizations such as Vivendi, LVMA, Sherbus, and so on. And he has joined the exact search seven years ago as a leader of the consulting practice. So he spent most of his time with CEOs, coaching them, and discussing leadership progress. And I think on a more personal tone, you also do not like only stones on people, but also flowers and nature. So you like gardening near the Dordogne River. So maybe also some people in the audience will be happy to discuss that during the break. Thank you very much. And I will head to the floor. Thank you, Noemi. And a special thank you to Claire Kalmajan for inviting us. We are very honored to be with you this morning. I will stand up and walk. I'm more comfortable walking than sitting if you don't mind. Yeah, so indeed, I have three passions in life. Rugby, Bogundi, and leadership, and especially leadership in financial services. LVNI have spent quite some time together to work on the future of leadership in the financial industry. And this is what we want to talk with you about this morning. And we will be very interested to have your input and your action in the Q&A. LVNI, what are you? Yeah, well, the idea is really to have a dialogue with you because I think it's always more interesting to listen to you also and to share what you experience every day in terms of what is easy or what is not easy in terms of you as leaders, how do you bring your teams together, and how do you prepare for tomorrow, which is, of course, what we all aspire to do. So basically, we will make some presentation of data. We assess, we recruit thousands of leaders every year. So we have an amount of data, which is enormous. For us, it's how to create value and how to create trends out of this data, which is very important. And of course, it's to dialogue with you and to see whether you see that as well. And how can you get better prepared to face that? So like you said, we recruit and we assess people. So in our métier, it's our daily job to give feedback to individuals. And the purpose of this presentation is not to give feedback to individuals in this room or feedback to Société Générale. Now, the purpose of this presentation is to offer a collective mirror about leadership in the entire industry. The second point in our introduction is that there are no conclusions in this presentation. These are more trends and food for thought, food for debate. So let's start. Understood. So what we've done is look at more than 10,000 assessments at CEO and C-Level. We've done this early last year. And we looked at the three previous years. We looked across all industries, segmented in five segments. And we looked at two natures of data. One is the self-assessment, so how the leader sees herself and we looked at the 360 feedback, so how the colleagues in the executive committee sees the leader. So in our findings, we will highlight where the two sources of data confirm the same idea. And at the end, we found points of contradiction, so difference between how the leader sees herself and for himself and how the colleagues see the leader. So this is what FS leaders do well and particularly well compared with other industries. So the way to look at this for energizers, which are in blue in this document, the higher the score, the better. The left column in light blue is the financial services score. The column in the middle, which is dark blue, is the best-in-class industry. The right column is the worst-performing industry. So if we start on the left, we see that FS leaders are particularly good at looking at underlying root cause, the analytical. Moving forward, they have a good attention span. Focus. They're good at identifying opportunities and threats facing the business, strategic skills. And they are good at balancing long-term and short-term priorities, planning skills. And you see that even in the last dimension, FS is in the middle, so FS is best-in-class. Sorry for that. We'll get there. Awesome. Thank you. I love this screen. Excellent. So then we talk about what FS leaders could do better. So there are four dimensions. The first one is about transforming. So the way to look at the railers on the left side in orange is the other ray around than the energizers. So the lower the score, the better it is. So if you look on the left, FS leaders, not all of them, 12%, according to the study. And that figure is not the self-assessment. We have put only the numbers for the 360 as an average. So according to the 360, 12% of FS leaders have a tendency to become stuck in a mindset of, this is how we have always done things, seems familiar. Have a tendency to operate as though they have nothing more to learn. Invest little time in learning about the world around them. Struggle to fully understand the impact of new technologies. Being disorganized, poor art project management. And you see that in the first, the third, and the fifth dimension in the railers, FS is on the right, worse performing. If we look at the energizers in blue, FS leaders create less possibilities from new thinking. Invest less in new ideas compared with other industries leaders. The next dimension is putting customer first. So that one speaks for itself. At least the definition, FS leaders have a tendency to neglect the customer. Great news, the worst performing is not FS, it's industry. On the right energizers, FS leaders create or have a tendency to create less distinctive value for customers compared to other factors. And you start to see that very often, industry in the middle, which is best in class, is life sciences. Could be one of the questions for the Q&A. Third dimension, it's about engaging. So FS leaders have a tendency to create relationships that are more transactional. It's not relational, it's more transactional, task driven. Let's do this. Have a tendency to make it difficult for others to provide feedback. So we need to be transparent and fair. This is applicable to all industries. So in all industries, you find this derailer as a pretty high score. And we found it struggling. And it doesn't help. If you combine this with all the other derailers we're talking about, it doesn't help the case. Last dimension in the derailers is listening skills. But here, I like the granularity of how it is formulated. It's not only listening. It is listening to understand others, much more powerful. If we go to the energizers, FS leaders have a tendency to less create meaning and purpose, have a tendency to less develop leaders, less collaborate across boundaries, than leaders from other industries. Last dimension is about the self-awareness. So that's the dimension where we find discrepancy between the self-assessment and the feedback from the peers in the executive committee. So I will read this slide from left to right in one sentence. You can attach your seatbelt. Be ready. So FS leaders think they're open-minded, creative, empathetic, self-aware, influential. But their peers in the executive committee think, well, yeah, but not that much. So to be honest with you, and we need to be fair, all the scores across all industries drop. I don't have good eyes, but the empathetic in the middle for life sciences is 77%. On the left, self-assessment. And if you go on the right, empathetic, LS, 73%. So the score drops for all industries. But what is striking is that it's in FS that the scores drop to the lowest level. And you see there was performing in all categories. And consumer as well. Consumer as well for the last one. So to conclude, I will come back on that one. We've been presenting this a couple of times. And typically the first reaction is, what does it come from? Why are we like this? And our view is that the financial industry is an industry of knowledge. It's an industry of expertise. You have a lot of focus and DNA around actuary underwriting, credit risk underwriting, liquidity ratios. And the way people are promoted and selected from single contributor to team leader, manager, director of C-Level, have a strong element, a strong component in the profile around these expertise, this knowledge. And you see here, this leader are analytical, focused, strategic, good planning skills. So you find here a very strong intellectual horsepower that influences the way they lead people. So where we go to with this style is know it all leaders. If they're less engaging, I'm on top down. So what does it mean? It's a massive opportunity. We just arrived, Claire, when you were finishing your presentation, you were referring to leadership, vision and execution, and culture shift, mindset shift, mindset shift. We're there, it's exactly that. A massive opportunity is for you, for your institution, and for the whole industry. Because if you switch from know it all leaders who want to master everything, we find CEOs who know the files on the table from finance risks and writing, as well even better than people of their teams. I mean, it's crazy, it's very impressive. But with all the complexity of the world and the pace of change we're referring to, you know, Amy, you can't master it only more. You need to trust and power delegate. And that's a transition from 20th century leadership style towards a human-centered leadership that will be engaging, that will create followership. And the business case for you, because I hear you are digital leaders and many of you lead transformation. Well, if you have a leadership style which is engaging, you will accelerate your transformation. If you ask your people to learn a new job, re-skill, upskill, in Belgium, when they did the reorganization, they asked the entire bank five, six years ago to reapply for the new job, the entire bank, when they moved it to Agile. So it's a big ask that the financial industry is doing to the workforce, right? But so if you ask the workforce to change their job, to change the way they work, their work, to self-destruct themselves, breaking silos, working in partnership with third parties, et cetera. Whereas your leadership at the top continues with the old habits, the transformation will not happen or will be very slow. So it's a huge opportunity for the financial industry. So how do you react to that? What were your surprises? Any surprise? I saw a lot of people resonating to the data. Thank you very much for the presentation. One question is about, I would say, the generation effect, multi-generation effect. So is it a correlation between the fact that on one side the financial services are perhaps slower compared to the industry? Due to the fact that the generation as well is probably more on the boomer side in terms of leader compared to the new industry that can be more younger, for instance. And should we think as well to, you know, having more diversity in the way we want to manage those kind of, I mean, those industries? Or is it the old generation? No, I think it's old generation. So we have ways to look at the data from also an age perspective. And when we slice into age generations, we don't see significant change in terms of data. So what we observe there will be true tomorrow as well until you decide to do something different, in reality. The good news is that the organizations which have decided to change have succeeded to change this data. And the way they focus on what really matters. So we heard some words like agility, simplicity. This is easy to implement once there is a focus there in terms of leadership to get in that direction. Easy. At least you can deliberately decide to do things. And it produce results. Nothing is easy. Yeah, it's for you. I was wondering if it has something to do with the fact that we are really a very regulated industry. And there is low appetite for failure and try and risk. But if I look at life sciences, some of them are really regulated too. You have the answer to your question. This is my surprise. Now, indeed, I will let you answer later. But life science is a good example of a very highly regulated business, which has been disrupted much faster than the financial services. So the ones who are there are the ones who have survived. And it gives lessons in terms of how to adapt to this new world, which is highly regulated and disturbed at the same time, disrupted at the same time. So life science is an example of what happens when, let's say, the organizations have been able to adapt and to cope with the changes. Exactly. It's a good question. A typical reaction we hear. So you're right. Regulations is not an excuse. I can't develop, but I think there were other questions. Thanks for the presentation. I have a question regarding what you call financial services, as it covers a lot of different businesses, actually. And I was wondering if there was any specificity of these results towards the different businesses in financial industries. I mean, if you look at the retail banking or wealth management or market activities, I mean, are the results the same or anything different? No, thank you for the question. Great question. We didn't get into that granularity of data yet. We want to use an effect of time to add more data. And we'll have more data. It becomes more relevant. And then we'll get into that granularity. Thank you. Hi. You mentioned that some of our friends, competitors, have engaged into changing that. How did they do that? Did they have to change? We've seen, in some comics or excos, people coming in and changing 80% of the comics. Or did they really manage to keep some of the same people and change them? Yeah, there is always a dilemma between changing the management or managing the change. And probably you have to do both at some time, but the solution is not to consider that the grass is greener outside, in fact. So the companies who have been able to deal with these topics have not decided to change all the management, as if the management were the blocker, but to educate the management and to share a joint journey to get in certain directions. And what we can observe, basically, so everything starts, and it's a bit frustrating to say it like that, but everything starts by the top. We are all the top of something anyway. So everything starts by the top by creating a shared vision. And that's always OK. So if you don't have a compelling project, a purpose or a vision which will become the north star of the team and beyond the team, the organization, it's very hard to go together in one specific direction, even more when everything else is blur, disrupted, volatile, et cetera. So it starts by a vision. It starts also by a personal change. So moving from data-driven mindset to emotional-driven people. So listening to emotions more than to reasoning. Thank you. Again, so letting emotions go and becoming more authentic as leaders is also always what you observe. When we want to have a deep, sustainable change, it requires from the leaders to embrace the change themselves, to bring the right dynamic at the top team level, because that's where you can create trust. And from there, you can cascade down and you can then have your systems of deployment be them to champions, through change agents, through whatever, but that's the start. I have one question. If it comes from the top, it means that it has to come. Pierre, so if it comes from the top, it has to come from the administrators in some way. And in the current stages with dividends and all of that, it means that the mindset with the long term has to be more focused, or we can initiate that part. You are right. The board is extremely committed now. We see that ESG has become very high in the agendas of the boards everywhere. And yes, of course, there are questions of short term results, but also sustainability has become very high on the agenda of the board. So we see more and more board members who are asking questions regarding the values, regarding the mindset, regarding how to shape a different culture. And that's part of the agendas of the board. So we do a lot of board assessment, and that's something we have observed for the last years. The shift really from, let's say, short term return to short, of course, and long term return. And the point is that it starts to be very effective when you stop choosing between short and long term, because in reality, you have to do both at the same time. So each time you say either or, you lose, anyway. In this world, you have to do end, end as much as you can. Maybe to be complete, at Société Générale, in case you don't know it, but we have three people that are highly skilled at the board in digital and IT. So we have Lubomir HaRochet, who used to be the CEO of L'Oréal for seven years. She brought, she completely built from scratch, the B2C distribution of L'Oréal. So when she took the job, there was absolutely no B2C distribution channel in L'Oréal. And she went up, L'Oréal is a fantastic story with a share price of $2,000 to $2,000 to $2,000.00. It didn't look last time. But she came and she made the presentation on the importance of digital to actually raise the share price and to be part of this story. I see Lubomir HaRochet probably once a month to make points on where we are. And she have also very specific question and she always challenge the board. We are welcoming a new board member, Beatrice Cossin, that I saw actually yesterday morning to facilitate our onboarding. So she used to work at BNP, but then she built a second career. And she became CEO of BlaBlaCar with French companies that organize car sharing. And now she's CEO of Belief, which I may know because we've done the IPO of Belief in France, which is a music company. And she will bring a lot of strengths in terms of operating model, technology, strategy, how is it. And we also have Nique Jérôme Contamin, who used to be the CFO at Sanofi, was in charge of the IT team and the transformation. So we have three reference out of the 12th number probably with Frederic, I mean, we celebrate tomorrow. And I think over the first three years where I took the job, we went, in average, seven time to the board between trainings and presenting strategies. And as we're growing and it's better understood also by your board what we are doing and what are the levers. Obviously, now our touch point are between probably three to four time here, even if it's a bit higher. If I look at training, we're still very present in terms of crypto, data and AI and everything. So just sorry, I wanted to give you the data. It took a little bit of time, but the board definitely is the one that pushed at the beginning for the creation of my job. And I've been very present at each step of the transformation and is very demanding to the executive committee in terms of what we need to deliver and how do we deliver it. And again, Frederic was very pushy around the commitment of the CEOs on this area. We've built a strong journey to date. And I think it will continue to go on very strongly under the leadership of Slavo Mer. Maybe another question. Thank you very much, Arnaud. You said regulation is not an excuse. You said mindset, change mindset is a major trigger. Have you identified maybe three main levers to accelerate transformation by the leaders? Can I walk? Yeah. Thank you. Great question. So I've been wondering for the last few years how we could create the bank or the insurance company of the future, which would be innovative, designing new customer journeys, and dare to try new things. Whereas at the same time, we are in a knowledge industry. And also, we are in a regulated industry. Your question? Very regulated industry. So it's not fine to make mistake in the financial industry. It's not part of the DNA. So the idea we are developing at Hydric, we call these the freedom in the frame. So it starts with two pillars. You have, in all financial institutions, typically bank and insurance, you have risk, finance. And they define the frame, which is in a frame where the PNL managers, the digital leaders, the CEO, can focus on clients and innovation, and actually have fun, innovate, have freedom. And the mindset shift is about just considering that you have a frame, this frame is a play field to have fun. So that's the mindset shift. The other consideration is that if you push this concept to implementation, you need to consider it's up to the board. You need to consider that the profile of the CEO and the agenda of the PNL leader, it's not anymore about technical requirements and regulatory requirements, just like you carve out this from the CEO agenda and from the CEO profile so that you delegate these to the risk and control functions, risk and finance. So it's about trust and employment, making sure the board appoints the right people, defines the right risk appetite. And then you can start to play. It means that within this play field, you can focus on clients, innovations, employees. Here, CEOs, again, they know so much about technical topic. It's very impressive. But if you carve out this from the agenda, they really will start focusing on clients and their employees. So it means that you can shift to a culture of no-it-all leadership who master all the details of all the technical files to a culture of engaging, creating followership, authenticity, vulnerability. Vulnerability means admitting mistakes. How often do you see a leader in financial services admitting mistakes, saying, hey, Pierre, sorry for yesterday. That is something wrong. Do you see that happening? What I hear is not much. But if you change that, you create proximity with the people and you release discretionary energy. There are many data which tells us that the only and most important factor to create what you describe is what we call psychological safety. And the leaders who are able to create psychological safety within their teams are the ones who are really able to shape the agenda. So it's not easy. But that's something which can be done. So how can you create psychological safety in your teams by sharing knowledge, by being able to give feedback, instant feedback, positive and developmental feedback, helping others to succeed, being more team minded to cross collaborate, et cetera, et cetera. That's really the essence. I have a question, please. Because when you were mentioning collective, I really believe that our managers, they believe that for collective action, we need to be collective. But I don't think they believe in collective intelligence. Because most of the time, our leaders are very intelligent, you are telling it. And I really believe they think they're more intelligent than the sum of all the intelligence around them. And don't you think we should choose a CEO that is maybe a bit less intelligent so that he would have to rely on the right persons and then he would have to rely on his intuition, on his emotions to cope with these things that can be missing. Because all in all, I don't see the issue. It's always the same scheme, the same things happening. And we need something to change. And I really believe we need the CEO to change first. And I really like the word vulnerability. I think that's something that is missing. So if I rephrase what you say, it's better to select CEOs through their EQ, so emotional quotient of intelligence than the IQ, which is the classical quotient intellectual, as we say. And indeed, what you describe is also intelligence, but it's collective intelligence. So instead of having people who are, it's not either or again. It's and and. You can be very IQ IQ and IQ as well. So when we start with IQ, our job is to develop EQ with them, so to make them more emotional in order to grow this muscle of emotions. When we start with EQ great leaders, we also need to reinforce their IQ, so to create also data-driven leaders, because they need both. Again, it's not either or. You need to grow at the same time, EQ and IQ. One dimension to keep in mind is that the ECB will not accept that we're points for the CEO of a major bank or major insurance company, someone who doesn't come from the industry. So there's a dimension of knowledge. I know an exception. It's a fantastic exception of someone who came from payment, didn't come from insurance, and became CEO in insurance. And the regulator said, last time. And he had to do nine months' strategy in between in a role below to demonstrate he knew about insurance and kind of interviewing, testing, et cetera. So between having no experience and being a super expert, there's something in the middle. You can have experience in banking and insurance without being statisticians, mathematicians, actuary, or underwriters. Now, a lot of other profiles with strong EQ, strong leadership skills, the ability to create purpose, vision, strategy, and design a compelling strategy for all the workforce to follow. That's the future looking forward. There was a question. Yeah. Philippe from Global Markets, a quick question. Just before we were talking about failure, before failing, we need to take the risk of failing or succeed. And after taking this risk, the question is the rewards. So what's your view on the level of rewards, especially in banking industry and, I would say, standard banks? This not be our view or my view. This would be the view of the board to define a risk appetite. I'm talking about the reward. You know you are taking a risk. If you lose, you fail. If you succeed, what do you get? Exactly. Is that something we need to make it clear? From my experience, that's the role of the board to define a risk appetite. In front of the risk, there's a reward. That's a risk appetite. The risk appetite is applicable to credit risk, to markets, to data. There are some banks who don't want to play with data. I don't touch it. There are banks, they are playing with data, and they go 300 kilometers playing with data. That's the role of the board. Sorry, I can't say more. Now in terms of mindset, the mindset of becoming more agile implies to be able to test and learn permanently. And when you launch 50 projects, you can expect that 40 may fail, and 10 may be successful, more or less. So failure is not a mistake. It's a way of learning. And that's, of course, well, you know all the famous quotes on that, which mean that it's not about black and white when it comes to reward. Failing fast can be rewarded. Sometimes it's more important to fail fast and to learn from the failure than to have a quick, small wins and incremental project or project which are on the at stake for many, many years and no one dares to decommission them. So it's, again, it's more a question of mindset, and then you can define the border, the rules extra. But the idea is really, in these new ways of working, the more you fail fast, the better. And if you don't fail, it means that you have not tried enough because the world is full of opportunity. So if you just do what you know, maybe you will win, but you will win small. If you want to become the leader, you need to fail often, fast, and to get ready for that. So to think in terms of scenario, which is also a new shift in terms of mindset. So stopping one scenario, which is the scenario, but having multiple scenarios and being ready to move fast on one scenario to the other, trying to anticipate and to go faster than the competition. Hi, I'm Claude from Global Markets. I have two questions, actually. One is regarding to your access to data. I mean, we're all struggling to have access to data. You're showing us 10,000 assessments. How did you get access to that? Second point is that you show quite low level of performance or results for financial industries. Is there any correlation with the performance of the financial service industry compared to industry, live services, consumer goods? I can start by the data. So just one here. So in Paris, my team, which is a small team in Idric, we made 1,000 assessments in 2022. So we have many data. A lot of data, which come from our own tools, like 360, like other tools that we have designed, including AI-based assessment tools, by the way. And we have also other data coming from other sources of data. So we have a lot of data. And in fact, we could do much more in terms of studies because we could extract function by function, country by country, basically, what are the key success factors to be successful today and observe how it moves year after year, which is an outstanding observatory of how to be successful leaders. Now, we're getting the correlation between these data and the financial performance of the organizations. Can you ask the question again? I will recall bad scoring for financial services compared to other parts of the survey. Now, is there any correlation in your mind with the performance of the sector? I mean, if we improve the scoring in your survey, will this in your mind improve the performance of the financial services sector? Yeah, so the model we use, like the different drivers and the railers that are there come from studies we have made precisely to identify what are the key success factors of successful organizations. So there is a high correlation between how much you perform on this data with regard to how do you perform as an organization. And yes, we can say that the value creation of organizations is very correlated with the power of leadership. We published research last year which looked at the list of the most performing companies globally, financially, and we looked at their corporate culture threats. And what were the differentiator between these and the lower performing firms were a human centered culture. You can find exceptions. I mean, I'm debating with people in the market with you have an institution which is super well performing, but look at the leadership. Yes, there are exceptions, but I think that on the longterm, there's the risk to lose good people at every level from entry level to the top because they don't feel aligned with their own purpose, the meaning, what is the meaning of what I'm doing and they're gone. So we can replace them but what new generation leaders and the new generation which is coming in the market is expecting today, it's not this. So this institution are taking a risk on the longterm and the other risk they're taking is that a one man show with no trust in delegation, with lack of employment, the day that person is gone, what happens? Yeah, and maybe just to say when we look at performance, what do we look for? We look for long-term performance, so not only next year, but the next five years basically. We look for organic growth more than acquiring organizations and we look with not state-owned organizations so which are financed by the private sector. And on these companies, there is a high correlation between these drivers and the performance. Thank you very much. Thank you very much to both of you. Very interesting session. Thank you very much. Thank you also to the audience because we wanted this session to be interactive so I think it's a success also from this point of view.