Hitting the ground running as a new CIO:
An interview with Barclaycard’s Ian Buchanan
(co-authored with Paul Willmott)
In a career as CIO or COO spanning more than 20 years and five diverse financial institutions, Ian Buchanan has developed an approach for the first 100 days that has served him well regardless of the corporate environment.
Key takeaways
The learning curve was steep for Ian Buchanan when he stepped into the CIO role for the first time, but focusing on relation ships and credibility helped him in those crucial first 100 days.
He has since applied the lessons he learned at Nomura to other financial institutions where he’s served at the executive table; now COO of Barclaycard, Buchanan emphasizes the importance of making things happen quickly and formulating a compelling vision to establish yourself as a leader.
Preparing well, getting to the heart of key issues, and listening a lot early on, he says, are essential to making the transition — and these translate well across company cultures and different types of businesses.
It wasn’t always smooth sailing. After rising through the ranks at Nomura to become the investment bank’s CIO, Buchanan confesses that he didn’t realize he was stepping into a very different role “that was all about relationships and credibility” where execution didn’t really count. Buchanan eventually worked his way to a seat at Nomura’s high executive table, and won a reputation as a transformational leader. However, wizened by the experience, he took a more proactive tack when later walking through the door at Alliance & Leicester, Santander, Societe Generale CIB, and, last October, at Barclaycard, where he is the COO.
Below, Ian Buchanan reveals his key insights. Among them: Start before you start; listen, listen, listen, and get to the heart of the issues quickly.
It’s often said that the first 100 days are critical for a new CEO. Are they important for a new CIO as well?
Ian Buchanan: I think probably more so in a way because everybody knows the new CEO is coming. They expect him or her to come out with a great vision and demonstrate leadership. Everything is almost set up for that process. The new CIOs role is not always so apparent and the expectations vary depending on where you’re coming from and whose shoes you’re filling.
What was the situation when you got your first job as CIO, at Nomura?
Ian Buchanan: I was already employed by the firm and had been the director of IT application development. I had delivered a huge transformation of the company’s IT systems but I was stepping into the shoes of a very charismatic CIO. When he left to do something else it wasn’t obvious that senior executives wanted an internal candidate but they eventually gave me the job. There was a perception of me as a great executor behind the throne, but also doubts about whether I was the leader to take company IT to another level. This was a situation that in some ways was harder than joining a firm from scratch.
So I spent a lot of those first 100 days trying to reset relationships with the CEO and senior business leaders, with a very conscious mindset about having to be different and appear differently in order to build credibility as a person who deserves a seat at the executive table.
How did you go about changing this perception of you as an executor but maybe not a leader in the eyes of people who knew you well?
Ian Buchanan: This was my first and only experience of being a CIO without having a mentor around and when I look back on that period I realize that I didn’t have a clue on how to do it. I made mistakes and I felt rather lonely going through that process. At the end of the day I reverted to some core capabilities that I have, which are to be myself, do what I think is right, and to be transparent when I communicate with people. I also reverted to my execution skills and made sure to do projects well and deliver excellent service.
This seemed to work well. However, being the CIO is all about relationships and credibility, which is very different. I learned quickly in those 100 days that execution didn’t really count in terms of building that new perception of me deserving a seat at the senior executive table. Looking at myself from the outside at that time, I saw a person who hadn’t changed. I was still the one who was executing, not the one who was leading and driving things.
You mentioned that you made some mistakes — was the main mistake not realizing that you were stepping into a very different role?
Ian Buchanan: Exactly. I was thinking ‘oh, well, I can do this. It’s just natural progression’ but that clearly wasn’t the case. It was a brutal learning curve for me but would I have been offered a CIO role somewhere else at that time? Probably not. So you learn fast in that situation, and I got through it so it wasn’t a disaster. But had my thinking about the transition been more proactive, maybe the experience wouldn’t have been quite so painful. I know now that I should have stepped back, analyzed the context, and worked out a plan, but I didn’t do these things at all.
You must have made a stunning comeback though since you rose to also become Head of Operations & Technology. What happened?
Ian Buchanan: There were several factors. One was a period of huge market turbulence. We had to move very quickly to adjust our costs. Technology was on the front line and I was running a large amount of the cost base so there was an appetite for my ideas. To some extent it was a case of being in the right place at the right time. After I had built some credibility around delivery and demonstrated some thought leadership, I suddenly found myself part of an executive committee. People were asking for my opinion, not just my functional expertise; they were interested in my views on the business. It was fascinating how quickly I went from not being seen and understood to being respected around the table.
What lessons did you learn the hard way at Nomura about how to make the first 100 days as CIO a success?
Ian Buchanan: I do think that building credible, authentic relationships is at the very heart of being successful. It’s also about speed — making something happen quite quickly. In the first 100 days you have to make your mark. In that period, you also need to formulate a compelling vision because if you want to lead as opposed to executing the visions of others, you do need to come out quickly with a story that everybody can align around. This will also give you a very good narrative for conversations with stakeholders whose support you’ll need to get anything done. For me, a key learning from that period was also that you have to do a lot of listening even if you’re an internal hire and think you know the company. You discover things that you’ve assumed actually were not the case.
Your next job as CIO was at Alliance & Leicester (A & L), which was later acquired by Santander. How different were those first 100 days at A & L compared with your start at Nomura?
Ian Buchanan: One reason for making this move was that I felt I needed to prove to myself that I could do this somewhere else without the natural progression. This was a U.K. retail bank, an ex-building society. I didn’t know much about retail — only that the business and culture were very different from global investment banking. I’d never worked with anybody at A & L before so if I wanted to prove myself from scratch I’d come to the right place.
This company also happened to be, as I walked in the door, a huge burning platform. It was exposed to strong competitive forces, needed to bring down costs and was always at that time under threat of being taken over. After just four weeks on the job, I was asked to attend a board meeting and give my view on our strategy. So forget about the importance of the first 100 days; this was about the first 30 days.
How did you prepare for the job?
Ian Buchanan: I had learned my lesson at Nomura so this time I did some real due diligence. I talked with some of the consultancy firms that I’d been working with, and systems integrators that had been working with A&L, and asked them how they felt management had dealt with challenges in the past.
I was offered the role after four or five interviews, but I asked to speak to all the non-executive directors as well to get a better sense of the company. So when I accepted the job I could hit the ground running because I already had some interesting relationships, insights, and the intuitive makings of a hypothesis about what the company needed to do.
I continued to apply that process in my career, for example at Societe Generale CIB, which was a complex organization with multiple stakeholders at the group and divisional levels. If I was going to be a CIO asked to drive big change, I needed to understand the dynamics, the constraints, the bottlenecks. So for me the reason to invest early on is about working out where I’m going to put my energies in the first few months.
So in a sense you start before you start. What happened next at Alliance & Leicester?
Ian Buchanan: I listened. It was fascinating how quickly my hypotheses firmed up in those early conversations with senior business leaders and others around the firm. It became clear to me as I went from one person to the next, playing back the conversations in my head, that the answer was already in the company. All I had to do was listen. The organization knew roughly what it needed to do but did not have the self confidence to do it. There were tensions within the organization, of course. In my role as CIO I became a catalyst for building consensus and transmitting confidence, for example by going to the board and saying ‘ok, we will do these things’ rather than ‘we could do these things.’
What steps did you take in your first 100 days to understand this organization — its talent, IT platforms, technologies, providers?
Ian Buchanan: It was a learning process that quickly went beyond the IT function. I was hired as the CIO but in reality I came to lead a lot of the transformation of the operating model. This wasn’t in the job description but this was how I started to behave when it became clear that in order to re-platform IT you had to change much of the ways in which the business was set up. So I went out and spent time with managers and workers, sat in contact centers and listened to calls. I went out to branches and watched what went on with customers. I also reached out to other stakeholders, such as major consultancies, and system and banking platform vendors, to get their views.
Do you remember how you felt during these first few months?
Ian Buchanan: Unlike my previous 100-day period, at Nomura, I was feeling quite confident, partly because I was getting quick affirmations that I was on the right track. I certainly still felt a lot at sea and living on my intuition, probably more than the data. But unlike the early and lonely days as CIO at Nomura I made sure to find the right parties to check in with — peers, some external experts, some people I trusted that I’d worked with in the past. One of the things I started to develop toward the end of my tenure at Nomura was a CIO network. The CIO role is a lonely one. But many of the problems you face in a new CIO role are ones that other CIOs have been through before you, and you can learn from their experiences.
How important is it to understand the company’s culture?
Ian Buchanan: Part of my job is to tune in to frequencies that enable open communication with the specific senior leaders and others across the table. By finding the right frequency, they will be more likely to see me as a true partner, and open up in ways they wouldn’t otherwise have done. In those preliminary meetings it’s therefore important to hold back from saying, ‘I think’ because at that stage it’s all about listening and soaking up not only the data, but also the deep-seated cultural elements that are at the heart of how this firm’s people think and work. So by first learning about the culture I can later, when the time is ripe, put the case forward in a way that will resonate better.
In my view, how to put the case forward is probably far more important than what the case is. Making any decision is often better than making no decision. When you start moving forward, you can learn by your mistakes. Actually, another lesson I’ve learned about the first 100 days or first six months is that I usually had a lot of freedom to make some mistakes. Being willing to take a few risks early and then back up and adjust course is a luxury I never got after that initial period.
You later took on CIO or broader C-level roles at Societe Generale and Barclays. Did these experiences somehow change your model for your first 100 days?
Societe Generale was all about leveraging experiences from A & L, and joining Barclaycard as COO has been a refinement of my approach at Societe Generale. In fact, even though I had never run cards and payments before, and despite Barclaycard being a part of Barclays — a huge, complex, and very dynamic organization — it’s been the easiest of all my transitions so far. I joined Barclaycard last October and I don’t think I’ve learned anything radically new about the first 100 days. Maybe I’ve been lucky but what I have learned is that the core approach of doing the right due diligence, of quickly getting to the heart of the issues, and above all, really listening a lot early on, translate very effectively across company cultures, different types of businesses, and different nationalities.
Any final words of advice?
Ian Buchanan: You have to be thinking about your successor from day one on the job or even before day one. It takes a long time to grow a CIO or to get one in place. Most of us in the CIO role these days are there to drive change and only stay for three or four years until the mission is accomplished. If you’re going to be able to leave behind a sustainable legacy you need to be investing in building that continuity. Personally I’m not somebody who comes in, fixes it, and doesn’t care less about what happens when I’m gone.
The original version of this article was published on mckinsey.com — see there for further content on business technology
See also our companion article on the first 100 days of a CIO
