Voice of Experience: Jan Floyd-Douglass

By Elizabeth Harrin (London)

“I’ve always been a cold contactor,” says Jan Floyd-Douglass, when I ask her how she landed her top city jobs at Zurich and Barclays. “I find it’s much better to circumnavigate all the job ads.”

Jan started out with two job offers on the table: Lloyds and Citicorp and back in the ’70s took the lower paid role because Citi created “a hum” inside of her. It turned out to be a good choice. Over her fourteen years with Citi, she had seven different roles, ultimately ending up as Resident Vice President for mortgage sales.

The instinct for choosing a good job was still with her as she took a leap to join the first securitisied lending operation in the UK. “I loved the idea of recycling money,” she says. First Mortgage Securities headhunted Jan to join them and she saw her role as Head of Distribution and Channels as a chance to be a pioneer (and FMS didn’t do sub-prime).

Flexing Her Skill Set

Jan lost her job in the last recession and then found herself completely priced out of the market—something many veterans of the ’90s downturn can sympathise with. Setting up your own business when the economy is pear-shaped is a brave move, but Jan realised that she needed to use her existing abilities to cope with the changing times. “Build a skill set and flex it in different ways,” she advises.

Jan set up her own consultancy practice, working with financial services organisations and others to create and deliver effective growth and business development strategies, effectively helping companies come to terms with the whirlwind economy and pick themselves up again. It also provided her with the opportunity to work  more flexibly, which was important with a young family. 

When her daughter turned  seven, she returned to the corporate world.  She took a position with an HR services provider, but was soon headhunted again – this time to become the Global Sales Director for Barclays Private Bank. “It made me realise I love the big corporate canvas,” she says. “You can do things faster and with greater resources.”

The Barclays team was made up of people who had come up through the ranks and people fresh out of Oxbridge. Jan brought her considerable HR experience to the table. “It was a great lesson in team unification,” she says. “The key to managing people who don’t get on is to give them projects. The goal sublimates the relationship.” She had to find out what the blockers and barriers were, then work out how to overcome them. “You have to find ways to keep the team going,” she adds.

A six-month contract turned into two years and an increase in assets under management of 46%. Then Barclays presented another challenge. How would she like to manage the merger of the international and private banking divisions of Barclays Wealth?

Jan says that her boss thought it “irrelevant” that she had never managed a merger before. He knew that she was someone who delivered results, and that was the key thing. “I spent that Sunday in bed with a two thousand line project plan,” she says. “I identified everything it had to cover and then I prioritised them.”

One of the hardest parts of any merger is the fact that when you remove overlap you also remove jobs. “If you are the one left behind you’re thinking, ‘great, more work’,” Jan says. She tackled this by giving the consolidated team things to do to stop the worrying. They started to think about how they would run the organisation if they could start from nothing. As a group, they identified what things could go, and a lot of meetings suddenly became redundant. That freed up people’s time, so they were no longer concerned about all the extra work – it slotted in to where those meetings used to be. No one was overworked and everyone felt bought in to the new structure.

Advice for Women Aiming for the Top

At Barclays, Jan won four awards for women’s initiatives and her equality and diversity work. “There’s an element of me that likes altruism,” Jan says. “It’s really important to me to give something back.”

Jan’s latest role was as head of corporate pensions at Zurich, a job she nabbed by working out where she wanted to be and what she had to offer. She identified a gap at Zurich with their distribution channels, and approached them offering her skills. “Make sure that you are seen and heard – obviously for the right reasons,” she advises, adding “I was.”

She has some other words of wisdom for women aiming for the top. Although it might seem obvious, many women fail to do it: be a high performer and make sure that people are aware of your successes. “You’ve got to get a qualification – get a degree,” Jan adds, “and stay with quality.”