I recently interviewed Man Group CEO Robyn Grew on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today is the leader of one of the largest hedge funds in the world. Robyn Grew is the CEO of Man Group, the largest publicly traded hedge fund in the world. with nearly $170 billion in assets under management. Robyn, thank you for joining us.
Robyn: Thank you for having me.
Adam: You grew up in London and aspired to be a criminal defense lawyer.
Robyn: I did. That was my start in life. I will be a lawyer because I knew what that was. And I’m a long way away from that right now.
Adam: Sitting here together in Beverly Hills, recording from the Milken Conference. Can you take listeners back to those days, those early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Robyn: For sure. Listen, this is one of those moments where you have to be a bit honest as well about how you found yourself in finance. Many, many people today who I have the pleasure of meeting, my young people have this singular goal to be part of finance. They’ve done many, many internships and They’ve run books and they’ve made this, that and the other. And I’m not that story. So let me take you back some time, and it is some time. So I am the child of public servants. My mum was a state school teacher. My dad was a general practitioner in the UK. Both of them therefore worked for public services in many ways. So as a kid, I didn’t really know anybody in this space, but I did know I wasn’t going to be a doctor. My mom was a science teacher, so I wasn’t going to do science. So obviously, the next answer was to become a lawyer. So I went through college, I did a law degree, I then went to the bar, which is very funny when you say it to people in America, of course, because they don’t know what the bar is. So in the UK there are two forms of lawyers effectively, solicitors and barristers. And when I was doing this, there were many thousands of dinosaurs roaming the earth. So your advocates in court, the rights of audience as it’s referred to, were attached to the barristers. They’re the people with the wigs and their gowns. They’re the people you see on TV. in age dramas. Anyway, so I went to the bar and I worked for a criminal law practice effectively or a common law practice. I did a bunch of criminal defense work and I was pretty young. And so I found myself thinking that crime didn’t pay and it didn’t pay on any number of different fronts, but it didn’t pay the lawyers anywhere as much as it didn’t pay the people who were in the crosshairs of the courts. And so I thought to myself, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do this thing called commerce. And then I’m going to go back and become a commercial barrister. That has and was my only career plan. And I sit here today slightly chagrined by the fact that I clearly didn’t do that. So I went into this thing called financial services. I applied for a job. with Fidelity and I got that job. I learned about financial services. I learned about what it was to be in a brokerage house at that time. I learned what it was to think about funds and then I was called by a recruiter who wanted somebody who was legally qualified, who knew a piece of legislation called the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to operate a market investigations team in life. The Financial Futures and Options Chases, open outcry market where people from all intents and purposes got in this sort of circle thing and shouted at one another all day to buy and sell commodities and financial futures instruments. I mean at that time it wasn’t commodities; we did that later. And I took that job. I went for an interview and the interview went something like this. How much do you know about financials, futures and options? And I said, well, you know, a postage stamp, I said, and very large writing. I said that a lot. But I can learn and I did and they offered me the job and I ran that unit and then I helped them with market regulation more broadly and I helped them with the Chicago World of Trade and we bought the Commodities Exchange and I got a phone call from this brilliant place called Lehman Brothers. And Lehman was looking for something called a compliance officer. And I was like, okay, I have no idea what that is. Great. And they offered me a job and I took that job and I joined that firm and I managed fixed income compliance stuff until Russia collapsed the first time around. And I ran around on that. And then Lehman asked me to do something which was really interesting. So we had an office in Japan in the late 90s. The office in Japan was raided by regulators. And I went backwards and forwards, maybe, I don’t know, eight, nine times that year. And Lehman then asked me to go and live in Japan. That was an extraordinary experience.
Robyn: If ever people get an opportunity to go live somewhere, work somewhere, which takes them completely out of their comfort zone, my advice is do it because it’s fab. You are horribly uncomfortable. I mean, literally, I have a story about not speaking Japanese and having to buy washing powder, which turned into washing starch. And that was uncomfortable for a couple of weeks, let me tell you. But it was phenomenal. And then I was asked to move to New York, which I did. And then eventually Barclays Capital asked me to go and join them. And I moved back to London. And then I was called by this hedge fund called GLG. And how did GLG know about me? Because GLG, when it first started, was incubated at Lehman Brothers. And so that management team knew who I was and said, well, I joined them. And then GLG was bought by Man Group, and 15, 16 years on, you find me sitting here today, not having gone back to the bar, but now running Man Group. That’s the potted history.
Adam: I love it. And Robyn, you shared so many great lessons there. I love your story. Your career path isn’t a script that you can follow. It’s serendipity.
Robyn: Yeah, I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a hunger and a thirst for experiences. I don’t know whether this is the right way to talk about it, but if you’re given an opportunity to do something that’s different and new, my philosophy, perhaps aggrandizing that statement, but philosophically, I have loved the different opportunities and the stuff I didn’t know. There was something that you didn’t know. I ran towards that as a place rather than running away from it. And I perhaps didn’t have that career plan that might have served me better, I don’t know. There’s something fabulous about what we do in financial services. We do probably a very bad job of really explaining what we do to Main Street. I think Wall Street has a tendency of thinking that everybody understands us. But I’m not sure that’s right. It is a privilege to work in a space where we have front row seats on what goes on in the whole world. And there’s not been an opportunity which has come across my desk, which I haven’t wanted to sort of grasp and run with. It’s just a little bit who I have been through my career.
Adam: I love that. And I love the words that you shared. hunger and thirst for experiences, running toward what you didn’t know. A key lesson that you shared, the importance of not only being willing, but being eager to push your comfort zone. The focus around developing new skills. You don’t know exactly how the skills that you’re going to develop are ultimately going to be able to be applied in your career, but if you develop expertise and you do really good work, that’s ultimately going to pay off. And then the last piece, which I love, is the power of relationships. Developing those relationships early on in your career, which ultimately paid off in a way that you never could have imagined.
Robyn: I think that’s right. We are in a place where everybody can provide you with guidance and value and make you better at what you do. Some of those lessons are a little harder to take than others, perhaps, but there is not one part of my career where I haven’t gotten somebody who’s along with me still on the ride. There are bosses I’ve had back in life days or Barclays days, Lehman days, who are incredibly important to me. Before there were proper words around this, I basically sought out sponsors and mentors. I looked for help and guidance. I was never really frightened about saying, I don’t really understand this. I was always willing to sit in the room and say, what you’ve just said sounds brilliant. No idea what it means. Can somebody help? And so that has helped me enormously, both in growing my own knowledge set but growing myself as a person and I love working with people. I think the team that you have around you, the people that you can learn from laterally, those people who report to you, those people who work above you, those people who are in the broader industry or in adjacent industries, every single person that you can connect with can make you better. It’s what we do today with our clients. It’s what we do with academia. It’s what we do within the organization. There’s really no limit to the people you can connect into to make you better and to make the firm better and to make what you do better.
Adam: Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. You shared that something that defines you, a love of people. In the keynotes that I give, I share the key characteristics that I’ve picked up from my conversations with hundreds of the most successful leaders. Right on that list, love of people. In your experience, what are the key characteristics of the most successful leaders and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Robyn: Interesting, I think there are a number of things I do and that I observe and have learned from. One, I think you’ve got to be authentic. I think you have to be you. I think you have to be willing to be vulnerable. I think you have to be smart in knowing your own limitations. There is nothing more empowering than hiring incredibly smart people around you and tapping into that, having the confidence to do that. The amount of times that I have to counsel managers that they can’t move up unless they’re willing to hire really great people around them so that they can succeed and have succession planning. It’s remarkable, I have that conversation a lot. I think you have to listen to people around you. I think you have to stop sometimes, take a breath, and listen. I’m in an extraordinary role as the CEO of MAN. I have just a mind-blowingly brilliant team around me. They are all different. They approach problems and challenges differently. That difference is a superpower. I want to hear them. And sometimes listening is hard because you think you have the answer. There’s nothing. We all do it. But listening is incredibly important. It’s also being brave, being a little bit courageous. As a leader, you need to stand up and be counted. You need to lean into the things that matter to you. You need to set a vision. You need to bring people on the journey with you. That takes effort. and you need to make tough decisions occasionally. But how do you want to be known? Your teams and the people around you to think that you are fair, to know what you do, to be valued, to know that we’re putting the organization to work to make you and to invest in you to be the very best person you can be, so that ultimately, we can deliver for our end clients. It’s about that and embracing that every single day. I also love empowering people. I love seeing people just be brilliant around me. And that is my style. It’s such that I could describe it as that. I love hiring brilliant teams, giving them the platform, the capability to deliver, to invest in them and then take and make the organization better tomorrow than it is today and better the day after than that, than it is tomorrow.
Adam: I love that and so much of your success at Man Group is your team, the ability to hire the best people. What do you look for in the people who you hire and what are your best tips on the topic of hiring?
Robyn: Hiring has to be the most important thing. Of all of that big number that you mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, the assets of land groups, the ones that go up and down in the lift or the elevator every day, they are the most important investment you make. And so never do a shortcut on that. always take your time to hire smart people. Hire people that can add different capabilities to your organization and that can be a skill set. It can be a new team of fundamental or discretionary managers who can do something different than that that we have today. But it’s also about bringing expertise and excellence into the organization. You want to see energy. You want people to turn up and know a little bit about Mind Group. You want people to, or whoever you are working with, you want people to be engaged. They don’t have to know everything, especially at the junior end of hiring. You’re not looking for people who are going to be 30-year veterans. You’re looking for something else. You’re looking for spark and intelligence and difference and courage and excitement and energy. And of course, we have this, the subject matter expertise, predefine you to get to that spot. But when you come into the room, when you meet with hiring managers, be you. Enjoy it. Show you. very, very important. And by the way, it’s the same with senior lateral hires. When I interview people, and I’ve done this for a long time now, and I’ve had the privilege of managing. I mean, I’d hate to think about it now for the entirety of my career, but it’s lots and lots of people. I spend a lot of time not asking them about the core competencies of a role. That’s happened. I ask them about them. I’m interested in what motivates them, why they’re there, what it is they want out of the role. How does this align with their values? How are they going to make me and the firm better at what we do? I’m interested in that. So whether you’re junior, whether you’re mid-level, whether you’re senior, for me that authenticity is incredibly important. But apply for roles or have discussions with corporates or hiring firms that align with what you want and who you are. Don’t shortchange that, because there’s a reason, we have an extraordinarily high retention rate of individuals at MAN. We care about our people. We invest in them. We move them laterally all over the organization. We’re about providing opportunities for those people who want it to do different and more within the firm. And it’s a fast-moving organization. We do a lot of things. We’re all over the world and we want people who match that energy and to want to take advantage of that. We’re an organization which isn’t going to be, and there’s nothing wrong with this by the way, in a very structured civil servant type organization. Two years you’re called X and two years after that you’ve got a different D3 or something. We’re not that. So we want self-starters. We want people who are energized. We need that because that’s how fast we run all day.
Adam: I love that. And the key word that you shared a couple of times so far, as I think about everything, you’re sharing is authenticity. Essential to success as a leader, essential to being able to break through in an interview, be yourself, be you. And as a leader, when you’re trying to create a culture that is going to attract and retain top talent, create a culture that encourages and empowers people to show up as their authentic selves every day.
Robyn: That’s absolutely right. Listen, when you do that, you also provide people with more than a job. It’s a career. It’s a learning experience. It’s an opportunity. It’s something you should want to enjoy. I’m not saying when people come to work every day, it’s not that you’re swinging from a chandelier. I’m trying to be realistic within the boundaries of this. At the same time, there are so many things to take advantage of in the space we’re in. There are so many things to learn. There are so many times you can throw your hat into the ring. There are so many times you can do your homework and come up with an idea. There is so much that we don’t know. The wonderful and brilliant and fascinating and fabulous thing about financial markets is they never stay still. They just don’t. And the more globalized we have become, the more that we are a front seat vision of what is the world responding to. That’s amazing. Our clients don’t come from one demographic or one country. Our people don’t come from one demographic or one country. We want to represent our clients and we want to represent their underlying savers and pensioners. So there is so much opportunity here. And if you are interested in financial services, it is a privilege to sit where we do and see what we see.
Adam: A lot of people interested in financial services have a certain idea as to what the world of finance is like, a macho world. And Robyn, you break that stereotype. I hope so. In a number of different ways. Take that in whatever way you want to take it.
Robyn: Let me go bonkers with this one, shall we? So, number one, I think we don’t do a good enough job of actually joining up the dots here. So let’s start with the basics. I come to work every day to put the entire resources of Man Group to work to serve pensioners and savers. That’s what I do. I can’t cure cancer. I mean, I wish I could. I mean, wouldn’t that be phenomenal? And I’m always blown away by the extraordinary scientific advancements we are making at the moment. I can’t do that but what I can do is I can be part of providing financial security and stability for people in their lives and in their retirement. And that is a really, really important thing to do. It’s the roof over your head. It’s the payment of bills. It’s looking after your kids. It’s the ability to enjoy and reap the benefits of long, hard-served careers, which don’t pay sometimes the amount of money that some of us enjoy as we sit in Milken, for example, or in these conferences. And that responsibility I take enormously seriously. And it’s a very real impact in a very real world all over the world. And I don’t think we’ve probably explained that well enough. If you want to do social good, come join the asset management space because that’s what we do every single day. Come to work every day to work for public servants, teachers in Texas, metal workers in Holland, evidence drivers in Japan. That’s what we do. We employ the most advanced tools for our industry. I have a chunk of my firm, which is quantitative. It’s systematic trading. I literally have rocket scientists, astrophysicists, I have PhD mathematicians. I have had the pleasure of sitting in the middle of both of those qualified people types and have excused myself to go and get water when they started to talk about string theory. We’ve been using AI and machine learning for 10, 15 years. When people talk to me about generative AI, we’re excited by it. 70% of the firm right now is using some version of generative AI. I mean, that’s what we do. These tools are at the cutting edge of how we deliver what we deliver. And alongside that, I have traditional discretionary managers who are there doing bottom-up analysis, issuer analysis, who use some of our tech tools because they’re really good. And we put that to work to just make us better. So we’re at the cutting edge of technology. We access the brightest minds that exist in banking or in public service to make us better at what we do. Who doesn’t want to be part of something that is right at the cutting edge? We have to be creative. We have to find new sources of outperformance and alpha. We have to use the most cutting-edge tools. We have to use the most forward-thinking academic results and academic research. We leverage every major bank in the world and we have access to the greatest minds from policy and government. Who doesn’t want to be in that melting pot of fabulousness?
Adam: You’re selling everyone to come and join the parties. Yes. But how do you join the party? What are the key skills that anyone listening needs to develop to get there?
Robyn: So I talked about the astrophysicists and the math and the computer science and the STEM stuff that you normally have. No doubt there’s a bias in that. I have liberal arts graduates and we have linguists and we have multiple different parts of Mann Group. We have people who invest and we have people who code and we have people who are lawyers, even me, but not so much anymore. We have people who focus on making sure that the millions of trades that we do every day are settled and rightly so. We have people in human resources and looking after our people, hugely important, possibly the most important. You heard it here first. So we have media, we have comms, we have a bunch of different spaces. You can be part of financial services in many, many different skill sets. How do you get there? Be really good at what you do. Re-enjoy it. Explore it. Talk to people. There are huge resources now, resources that the internet didn’t really exist. I shouldn’t say that out loud, should I, when I’m talking to you right now? Just gloss over that quickly. But the resources that you have available at your fingertips, the education you can have at your fingertips outside of even your university or your college major, online there are like 70,000 different courses where you can go google and find courses that will be taught to you to find out more about what we do and who we are. Be passionate about it. That’s the thing, right? Be excited about it and know that this is a great story and I’m going to mangle it, but I truly believe it’s valuable. There’s not one single person at my firm who isn’t valuable, who doesn’t add value every single day to do what we do ultimately, which is returning value back to our clients, those people I’ve talked about. There’s this great story, isn’t there, where some very important dignitary of some sort went to Disneyland. Of course, the park was shut and they met a janitor who was looking after the park. This dignitary said to the person they met, And what is it that you do? And this individual said back, I’m here to make children’s dreams come true. Now, it sounds a bit hokey, doesn’t it? When I said like that, and I said, I’ve probably mangled that story. So somebody look it up and you’ll find the real one. But it’s a version of that. And there’s something about that. Everybody has a role to play. If you’re part of what we do, that is what we ultimately deliver. And I couldn’t do it without the extraordinary team that has to be excellent at every part of the organization I run.
Adam: Robyn, I love that story and I’ve heard a couple of different versions of that story. I’ve heard a story from General Gus Perna, retired four-star general, about John F. Kennedy when he was visiting NASA and he asked the janitor, what do you do? And he said, I’m helping put a man on the moon. An ambassador told me a similar story about a janitor who was working on the streets of New York saying that I’m turning New York into the number one tourist destination in the world. Whatever it is that you do, be great at it.
Robyn: Look at me. I’m not your conventional career path to CEO. At one point a couple of years ago, we transferred more people out of our operations functions into the rest of the organization to do product-related work or front office style work or whatever it might be, sales, marketing, than we recruited in. Get into an organization. Find out, a bit like when you go to college in America, right? Lots and lots of people don’t really know what their major’s going to be. It’s not like we had, where we had to choose at 18, what’s your single subject to go for there? I think the American system is so much better from that perspective. You can do that. These new generations do not have to say, I want to be that thing. Go experience it. Be the best you can be. Knock people’s socks off. Opportunities will come about. Make it known. Know that you want opportunities. Know that you want to grow. Know that you’ll throw your hat in the ring to do anything, to be part of something. Those are the attributes that we all look for.
Adam: You’re making tons of decisions as a leader. The people who work for you are continually making decisions. Decision-making essential to success in your line of work, in just about every line of work. How do you approach making difficult decisions and what is your best advice on decision-making?
Robyn: Get as much information as you can. If it’s a really tricky decision, put people around you to explore what the options are and don’t not make a decision. It’s really important that you make decisions. Very early story of mine, I was working in one of those investment banks in a very early part of my career. In this particular instance, I was being a lawyer again, and I had a crisis about something. I can’t actually even remember what the specifics of it were at the time. I went and saw the European General Counsel, and I walked into their office. Shoulders were a bit down, and I was saddened myself. And I, promptly, it’s only I, I think back now and I think, goodness, what were you thinking? But I went to the news office and I said to them, listen, I’m just really not, I’ve had this information, and I spoke to this person, and I spoke to this person, and then I spoke to another person, and then I did some more work, and then I spoke to another person, and then I made this decision. And I don’t think it was the right decision in retrospect. Right, this was a few months on. And they said to me, you know what? You will always learn if you make a decision, even if it’s wrong. Better to make a decision, Robyn, than not to. It was a really important lesson I’ve had with me since those early days. Sometimes, and the more senior you get, by the way, the decisions don’t get easier. By the time they get to me, it’s a tough decision. So your skill at that point is to lean on, call on, and make sure you have the best data that you have. But if you’re looking for perfection, you’re not going to find it. So make the call. In the alternative, though, once you’ve made a decision, if in the future it becomes clear it was not the right decision, own it. That’s okay, too. Part and parcel of what we do is we do the best we can do. and this is the sort of thing your grandmother says to you, right? Somebody hasn’t died. You’re kind of okay. There’s a point at which perspective matters. The challenge I would have to anybody is if they make a decision in a vacuum. That’s not cool. You don’t have to. There is no reason to do that. But as you get more senior, places you can go for information, can narrow somewhat. But it is the difference of you making a decision and the more decisions you make the better you get at it. It’s never perfect.
Adam: Where do you go for the right information as a leader? We hear all the time that it’s lonely at the top. How as a leader of one of the largest organizations in the financial services industry do you solve that problem?
Robyn: It’s the subject around decisions. It can be lonely, but only in a narrow set of circumstances. Absent that, I’ve got an extraordinarily strong executive team. I will never compromise on the quality of that team. That quality of that team helps me run the organization. It helps me be better at what I do. I will never not pick up the phone to mentors that I still have, those people I talked to you about, that are still in my mix. And they don’t have to know the facts and circumstances specifically, but I can get very good guidance. I’ll take legal advice if I need to. I will seek out that advice, but I won’t spend tons and tons and tons of time on things. Once you’ve got the data set, you’ve got to make a call. That sort of, are you lonely at the top bit? You can be, and it’s just the nature of it. If you put that down to, I don’t know, let’s say 10%, maybe 20%, whatever it is, maybe it’s 5%, the vast majority of decisions you can make with great people around you. And you should, because they’re also the people who will be your successors. So my other job, right, is to make sure that I have people around me who can take my job and do it better than I’m doing it today.
Adam: I love that. And so much of your job is leading an organization that has to be nimble, has to be agile. You’re pivoting and moving on the fly every single day. What are the keys to leading an agile organization successfully?
Robyn: So staying calm, over-communicating. It’s a continuous feedback loop that we all have. You can never over-communicate. You think you might. You think you can. You can’t. I reach out to the organization on average, this isn’t perfect, but once a week. And I do a report card a little bit to the firm. Nobody knows what a CEO does, it seems to me sometimes. And so I thought it was quite important to share that. So sometimes it’s about markets. Sometimes it’s about my thoughts. Sometimes it’s about what’s going on in the world. And I’ve noticed that people like photos. That’s the other thing. And if it’s a photo of a squirrel, which I’ll talk about in a minute, even better. So I think over-communicate is important. Set a vision for the organization. Be honest about that vision. Be clear about what that vision looks like in reality. Okay, if we want to be X, how do we get there? Mark out the journey. It’s an imperfect science. Bring people with you. Over-communicate. Squirrel story, just briefly. So what I’ve noticed is I also do a long short on this cadence, that sort of nine every week. It’s never about an investment. So I’m never long, choose a stock and short, choose another stock. That’s not what I do. I do long things I found out that I think are good and short things that I don’t like. How cold it is in LA at the moment would be a good short. That was not what I was told was going to happen.
Adam: Do you have traders who trade the weather who could tell you that?
Robyn: We have climate scientists who have done some incredible analysis about weather patterns. Another story, another time. They did not this time and that’ll be a problem for them when I get home. This also now happens to me is that I get sent some really fun things. One of which was this. When squirrels fall out of trees, which it seems they do, or they fall off of bird feeders, they land a little like Spider-Man. That was my lull that I’d learnt that week, and I’d put a little picture of a squirrel doing exactly that. And we also have the ability to DM also emojis. Who knew there were so many squirrel emojis? That’s what I’m saying. But communicating, being human in this, connecting with the organization, showing the vision, showing the steps there, and being willing to say, listen, we may fail on a couple of these steps. We might go slower. We might go faster. We might say, you know what, we’re two years into this and we’re not sure it’s going to yield what we need to yield. Be willing to be vulnerable in that because you’re leading an organization. You are part of it. And by the way, the executive team is with me on that journey. So that constant communication, that constant capability to be willing to be right and to be wrong and then you garner feedback and then you have a village and an army behind you to achieve what you want to achieve.
Adam: Robyn, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Robyn: I’m going to go back to something I said really earlier, which is to know yourself. Know what makes you happy. Know what makes you alive. Enjoy this. Life is here to be enjoyed. You can be brilliant and you don’t have to be in financial services, although I’d implore you to give it a shot. You can be true to what really makes you happy. If you are brilliant at something, largely you find people who are brilliant at something really love what they’re doing. There’s an interesting correlation between those two things. And if you don’t like doing something, change. Don’t be stuck. Lean into life. Lean into experiences. Lean into opportunities. Make the best of yourself. Make sure that people are investing around you. Get help. Make sure that you are making the very best of the opportunities that’s in front of you. And I would go as far as to say, if you maximize those opportunities, if you keep on taking new opportunities, get smarter, get brighter, get more wisdom, get more knowledge, feel it, know it, the opportunities will come to you and just keep on going.
Adam: Robyn, thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Robyn: It’s an utter pleasure. Thank you for having me.
