I recently left the Financial Ombudsman Service where I spent 6 very interesting years.

After a career almost exclusively in the legal sector I got to see inside the financial services industry and learnt a lot, especially about the world of insurance. Seeing what affects consumers on an individual level is an excellent way to learn about the workings of what, otherwise, can appear to be huge and complex machines of the industry and parts of our economy and way of life that we might otherwise take for granted. As an ombudsman you get to follow the paths walked by consumers and understand the systems and methodology of the service provider - and how they affect real people. As a Senior Ombudsman I was able to follow through to take the lessons learned by my teams to promote change in industry through key stakeholders.

Because when things go wrong in finance, whether on a sytemic or purely individual basis, lives can be affected.

But I found that there was often an accidental detatchment between policy and decision making. I'd often, for example, see decisions at an individual level between insurer and policy holder, that senior people within the company wouldn't recognise. Perhaps a contract wording being applied in a way that the leadership hadn't forseen, or simply didn't agree with. But without a complaint being raised, being rejected, and only then coming to the Ombudsman the consumer would have suffered a detriment that nobody within the business would be aware of, or take note of. So the same problem would recur for other customers until something changed

I remember very early in my leadership career setting up a new unit for handling complaints. I'd just written the organisation's first complaints handling procedures and guidelines. We brought a consultant in to introduce the ethos of complaints handling and customer care to a group of our team leaders. And early on in the first presentation a phrase appeared on a slide that at the time I though was a bit trite. "A complaint is a gift" it said.

But I find that the phrase has stuck with me all of my career. The thing you learn that's really important is that it's only a gift if someone wants it. To some it's a curse! I've known organisations to talk about continuous improvement and the qualities of openness and honesty, yet to actively avoid asking the right questions internally to help understand whether it's actually achieving what it promotes.

In the short term it's easy to see complaints as a nuisance. They slow down the business, and crucially they can look bad on stats for leaders, boards and shareholders. So it really depends what one's motivations are.

What I think of as truly authentic leadership, is wanting to know everything that's not right with your organisation, rather than wanting to be told, and to retell, what's going well. 

That requires a couple of key things. Firstly, a lack of fear of what you might find when you turn over the stones. Simple to summarise but very difficult to achieve. Because it requires a level of self confidence that comes not only from personal strength and experience but also demands an environment in which others will allow you to do so. Few can create the space to find and fix problems if they're being judged on different data by others who don't share their values. And crucially it needs balance. Good leaders are curious about how to improve but know how to celebrate what's good, so seek also to "catch" people doing the right things.

And, secondly, it requires structure. Yes, good old fashioned procedures and disciplines that share the vision and lay out the methodology for capturing key information and acting upon it. That means people know the purpose of the work, what their own role in it is, what they need to do to achieve it, and how they should communicate their experiences. It means also reviewing the data, understanding and assessing risk, identifying learning and delivering activity to improve. 

So, the balance of structure AND culture is absolutely key to success. It's easy for an organisation to value one more than the other and to not make the most of its gifts.

John Withington