Describe the opportunities to learn from more senior employees?

The culture of the Treasury department in particular, is highly focused towards collaboration and inclusion. The Senior Leaders always have time for questions and welcome knowledge sharing. Being included at meetings, where appropriate, helps with on the job training and gives an opportunity to learn about Treasury projects and most importantly understand the how and why. Phoenix have virtual town hall meetings and various meet the leader sessions, which is a great opportunity to learn more about all areas of the business, direct from Senior Leaders themselves. In addition, Senior Leaders promote development opportunities for their employees. We have an internal and external process for training which is reviewed on a periodic basis by leadership. There are mentoring programs which gives great opportunity to be assigned to employees where added value can be achieved. Overall, the culture of our leadership is to nurture and grow talent.

Getting exposure to more senior employees / senior management gives opportunity for stakeholder management development but also to learn what's important to people making key decisions. It helps prioritise and structure work as well as developing skills to write governance papers or slides. How does each senior stakeholder work? What can you do to make their life easier? How do they provide constructive feedback? These are things you can improve on but also pass onto others so they can develop too. How do they strike a work/life balance? What can you learn from them or prefer to do differently? There's plenty to draw from more senior employees.

There are an array of opportunities for this type of learning at Phoenix. In my experience I have engaged with formalised mentoring schemes where you are paired with a senior member of staff from outside of your department. This was incredibly helpful given this mentor had no vested interest in encouraging me in areas that were only beneficial to their outputs. I feel I learned so much from this mentor about how to have difficult conversations, how to manage my workloads and in what avenues to explore to build my career. Outside of these formal mentoring schemes I have found most senior staff are willing and more than capable to support in learning opportunities, my team for example, offer a buddying program where new starters are given a buddy from a different line of management (within the same team but not in their immediate management line). Heads of department often organise for training sessions from various areas of the business to support learning and development across a broader spectrum of the business also.