“My entire career has been motivated by answering exam questions that I’m passionate about,” says Julia Hoggett. “I’ve had the privilege of being able to answer them in each of the seats that I’ve been in, and I’ve learned to trust that those questions and opportunities will manifest over time.”

When the Glass Hammer first spoke with Hoggett in 2012 when she was the Head of Covered Bonds and FIG Flow Financing at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, she was already thinking about her career in exactly these terms. Now, as chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, Julia Hoggett sits at the center of UK capital markets, having also held senior roles across banking, regulation and market oversight. She frames her path as a succession of problems worth solving, each transition driven by curiosity and the conviction that the next challenge would reveal itself when the time was right.

Following the Exam Questions

Hoggett trained as a sociologist specializing in sub-Saharan East Africa and originally entered the City to answer what she calls her first big exam question: “How does Malawi operate in the global economy?” She expected to stay in finance for two years and then return to postgraduate research. Instead, the pursuit of one question led to another, and after seven years advising clients on multi-billion dollar bond issues, DEPFA offered her the opportunity to run a bank funding program – the exam question there was that she had talked the talk for those 7 years, could she walk the walk?

Thereafter, Bank of America Merrill Lynch offered Hoggett the opportunity to advise on bank liquidity structures after the GFC, and she thought: “That’s a good exam question.” From there she held senior roles at the Financial Conduct Authority, including designing the supervision of investment-bank conduct in the aftermath of major market scandals, and steering oversight of the UK securities markets through Brexit and MiFID II.

Then came a moment in the summer of 2020 that changed everything. Apple’s market capitalization exceeded the entire FTSE 100 for the first time. Hoggett, then Director of Market Oversight, sat down that evening and wrote out everything she thought she could influence from a policy perspective. The next afternoon, the phone rang.

“It was a headhunter and the first words out of her mouth were, Julia, why haven’t you applied for the LSE job?” she recalls. “And I knew the next exam question.”

Today Hoggett is working on two exam questions simultaneously: “It’s not just how we create the best possible environment in the UK for great companies to start, grow, scale, and stay here,” she explains. “But also, how we reshape our capital markets over the next decade to make the best use of tokenization and digitization.”

The Risk of a Plan

Hoggett’s philosophy of following fascination over something like five-year plans is something she absorbed without quite knowing it until the day she heard her mother articulate it in a speech when she was Deputy President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. When a female lawyer in the audience asked her mother how she had planned her way there, her answer was: ‘do what you’re doing to the utter best of your ability, trust that opportunities will come from that and don’t close yourself off to those opportunities however different they are from the path you’re on’.

“I almost started laughing,” Hoggett recalls. “I’d been asked a version of the same question the week before and given almost word for word the same answer. But my mother and I had never talked about it.”

When her mother graduated, there were six women and 94 men in her law cohort, one female judge, no female Law Lords, and the Supreme Court didn’t yet exist. Had she aimed at a visible target, she would have aimed too low.

“The risk of setting a plan is that what you think you’re capable of at the time is not what time proves you’re capable of,” Hoggett says.

Start With Where You Want to End Up

If Hoggett resists personal micro styled career planning, she is unambiguous about strategic direction. Her mantra is simply start with where you want to end up and work backwards.

“Don’t start with where you are and work forwards,” she says, “because the minute you do, you’ll be constrained by the first obstacle you hit. If you start with your vision and work backwards, you won’t constrain your ambition, and you’ll maximize the chance that you get there.”

Running an institution that has existed for over 300 years changes your relationship with time horizons. “Your job is not to be a day trader,” she says. “It’s to be there as this immutable piece of capability that others build their technology, their legal frameworks and their ambition to.”

Setbacks Are Data

Having navigated the Asian crisis, the Russian crisis, the global financial crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, the conduct crisis, Brexit, COVID and Ukraine, Hoggett treats each challenge as data whilst not underestimating the deeply human impact of so many of those crises.

“I assume I’m going to have one of those learning moments every day,” she says. “And usually you do.”

Her approach is twofold: brutal honesty about where things actually stand, combined with absolute confidence that with the right people in the room you can find a way through.

“Think of it like pushing off from the blocks as a sprinter. You need those blocks to be completely anchored into the ground, you need that solid foundation to push off from.
But you also have to create the space and the culture for that honesty to feel safe, rewarded and listened to.”

The Cloak of Post-It Notes

One of the most distinctive pieces of advice Hoggett shares came not from a mentor or a sponsor but from her ex-wife, a counselling psychologist.

Early in her banking career, Hoggett would write a to-do list on a Post-It note, scratch off items through the day, and then throw it in the bin when she left. Her ex-wife listened, then said: “Metaphorically, you’re throwing away all of your achievements at the end of every day.”

Hoggett started keeping a record instead, “thinking of each thing I struck off as one of life’s little victories, an accumulation of skills that I hadn’t necessarily had before I learned how to do it by doing that job. And then I started to think of it as a cloak made up of these metaphorical post-it notes. It was armor to take into the next thing that I did.”

The mental shift matters for navigating imposter syndrome, which she does not dismiss but reframes. “I think a certain amount of imposter syndrome is incredibly valuable. I get to do things in a day that most people don’t get to do. I’d never want to not recognize that that’s what they are.”

Mentors, Sponsors and Being Three-Up

Hoggett distinguishes between mentorship and sponsorship and emphasizes gathering the former from an unusually wide field.

“I don’t think of a mentor as having to have a particular shape,” she says. “Every day I am watching and observing all the people I work with whether they are male, female, more senior to me, more junior to me. I’m constantly observing how they do things and going, I like the way they did that, I would like to try and do it that way too.”

On sponsorship, she reflects on a colleague who moved teams and then approached her about a role elsewhere in the bank.

“She was three-to-‘more-than-one’ up on me. She knew me as an observer of the work I did. She knew the role she was sponsoring me into better than I did. And she knew the degree to which she was prepared to put her reputation on the line to sponsor me into that role.”

For Hoggett, the realization was when a sponsor approaches you, to recognise that they are operating with significantly more information than you are and to trust their willingness to place a step in your career in their hands.

Purpose Is Not a Buzzword

When asked about her why, Hoggett returns to where she started: an African development sociologist trying to understand how capital moves in the world.

“The capital markets are not there to make investment banks deal fees and league table position,” she says. “They are there as a convener, to bring together those who have capital, those who need capital, in service of an objective. Investment banks making deal fees is a byproduct of the purpose. It is not the object.”

That sense of fundamental purpose, Hoggett argues, is what allows strategy to flow and what allows thousands of people who may never be in the same room as a leader to feel connected to the work they do.

She has made repetition into a deliberate tool of culture, using phrases like 300-year-old fintech and convener of capital over and over again until they belong to everyone.

“The joke is it’s become Julia Bingo,” she says. “But there’s a pride in the fact that we all have that language, because that’s our shared articulation of our purpose. It’s not mine, it’s ours.”

It is, in the end, the same logic she applies to everything: not ownership, but direction. Not a plan, but a question worth answering, held lightly enough to let it evolve.

“I know that I am trying to do the thing I am doing right now to the utter best of my ability,” she says, “and I love it. What the next exam question is, and therefore what I do next, I don’t know yet and I don’t need to. I’ve learned to trust that the next exam question will manifest at some point, usually at the right moment.”

By Nicki Gilmour, founder and CEO of theglasshammer.com and Evolved People Coaching