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Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, technology has been key to pivoting businesses and enabling them to thrive. So today, as the Official Recruitment Partner of Manchester City Football Club, we’re joined by Greg Swimer, Chief Technology Officer at City Football Group. Greg is here to share his expert insights on how the role of a CTO has evolved because of the pandemic and the key qualities required to succeed as a tech leader.

1. Before we begin, it would be great if you could please introduce yourself to our listeners and tell us a little bit more about your career journey to CTO.

(01:00) Yes, of course. So, I studied engineering and management quite a long time ago now. I graduated in 1994, which I suppose in IT terms is a very long time ago. I entered IT as a profession in 1997, so that was three years after graduating. And I entered IT straight into general IT management, what you might call general tech leadership. I was very fortunate to get a really great opportunity. I was the Country IT Manager for Unilever, the consumer goods company. That was me aged 27, back in 1997.

I would say technology then wasn’t really considered a very glamorous job; I daresay perhaps not even a very important job. We were dealing with technologies that some of the listeners might remember, Windows 3.11 and some of the early enterprise technology implementations, but it was absolutely incredible training ground, really, for me and I think for anyone that was around in tech in those days, the early days of the web and trying to bring technology to drive growth for companies.

I actually ended up spending 15 years with Unilever doing a variety of IT jobs, and the last job I had there before leaving was CTO, Chief Technology Officer, which was something that I had really only dreamt of when I joined Unilever back in 1997. But I decided that I’d spent a long time in one industry, it was time for a change, and from Unilever, I went to do something completely different which was in advertising, and I took a role as CTO again but this time for a company called Hogarth Worldwide, which was and is the world’s largest advertising production company and a big part of WPPs global operation.

I did that for three years, and then from there I came to City Football Group in 2017, again, as Chief Technology Officer. So, stepping back from that, I feel very fortunate that I took that decision way back when in ‘97 to go into IT. I’ve seen, been part of just incredible change and growth in the technology landscape over that time, and I’ve been very fortunate to have been able to work in three different industries: consumer goods, advertising, and now sports.

Thanks, Greg. Sounds like you’ve had an interesting career journey, working with some great organisations and big brands.

2. Now, to really kick off our conversation today, I wanted to begin by asking, have your key strategic priorities shifted due to COVID-19?

(03:45) Yes, that’s an interesting question. I think strategically, if we take a long-term lens, I think the same things are important now as we sit here in March 2021 as they were prior to all this kicking off twelve months ago. It’s the same things that will form the core of our business, that will make us successful and that we need to achieve in technological terms.

But saying that, in the short term, what you might call tactically, my priorities—everyone’s priorities I think—have just changed enormously, and actually, there’s never really been a twelve month period or even any period really quite like it in my career. I think looking at our business, as I say in Manchester City and City Football Group, there’s barely a single aspect of it that hasn’t been quite profoundly affected by the lockdowns and the change in awareness and regulations around public health and individual health.

The scale at which we operate both in Manchester, in the Premier League, and globally, technology’s woven into pretty much every single business process that we operate and because we’ve changed nearly every business process one way or another, that’s meant changes to the technology, to our service, to our offerings. It’s meant huge changes to the projects that we’re running, it’s meant changes to be aware of the way we run football matches, running them behind closed doors, dealing with our fans, trying to maintain connections, the way we run our offices—everything has changed. So, that has been the priority, really, for twelve months or more now.

I suppose, like everyone, there’s also been a big shift in personal priorities or at the very least the places that I’m spending time, obviously at home much more like everyone. That’s where I’m talking to you now. But the requirements of us, or myself as parents of three school-aged children, as children of my parents, and so an awful lot has changed in that regard as well but that must be balanced in. So yes, it has been an unusual twelve months, I think one that we’ll all remember for a very long time.

3. Now, in what ways do you think the pandemic has spurred on technological change and innovation and what impact is this having on teams and organisations?

(06:19) I clearly think the standout change, the one that just jumps out a mile, has been this replacement of physical presence with virtual and the almost complete elimination of travel beyond the various local journeys. You sit here now, and you step back from that, I think the remarkable thing about it, and again I think everyone can observe this from their own personal lives as well as their professional lives, is just how well it’s worked, basically. As a society, we’ve found virtual solutions to all sorts of things: schools, birthdays, family events, all that.

And a a business, we, like other businesses, have found solutions to all sorts of things that we hadn’t really had to do before but have found ways through. So, it would be fan walls to bring fans that can’t be at the game into the stadium, we’ve done player appearances, press conferences, we’ve launched our We’re Not Really Here show, which is an event around the get behind closed doors games streamed over the internet. We’ve even during the first lockdown ran some first team training sessions virtually, we’ve run thousands upon thousands of meetings, we’ve actually built and opened a brand new City Football Academy overseas in Montevideo, Uruguay without being able to go over there and actually participate in the commissioning process. So, there’s been this explosion of possibilities to do things virtually that previously one would only have thought was possible physically.

You ask about the effect on teams, or teams and organisations, I think that’s a little bit early to judge. You can make some observations about the way the teams are working through this. Again, we’ve all been part of teams that are working through it. So, I think one observation that I would make is that contrary to some people’s expectations, collaboration hasn’t stopped and by some measures, I think it hasn’t slowed down. In fact, it may even have speeded up. I think in some ways being virtual for things can be quite a big democratiser. I think physical meetings can sometimes end up quite imbalanced just because of where people are sitting or how people dominate space and time, and I think virtually can sometimes provide a more thoughtful and structured form of collaboration. I’ve personally been in lots and lots of probably smaller group meetings over virtual technologies and in some ways it’s quite easy to get hold of people because everyone’s at home and not charging around all the time.

So, we’ll have to see how it goes, because I think that in saying that’s all one thing, it must be balanced against other factors. I think it’s clearly difficult for people to be isolated as we have been for such a long period of time. People need a release from that. I think people are very tired, I think working this way is quite tiring. So, I would say I don’t think it’s for quite a while yet that we can see what the long-term impacts really look like and what that new normal is, people talk about that.

4. Looking back to the beginning of the pandemic, how did you ensure you were operating in an agile and flexible way when initially responding to the crisis?

(09:42) Yes, that’s a good question. I thought you might ask me that. I’ve had to try and cast my mind back twelve months or so to that period. I would say is that we had quite a good starting point, which is fortunate. It wasn’t an accident in a way because we worked hard to make sure that we had good conditions for technical stability and agility, but things like we have a large proportion of our services are software as a service, public cloud provisions, so we don’t have an extensive reliance on infrastructure that might be stuck behind an aging firewall or that. So, we are quite well-positioned from that point of view.

The other thing, perhaps we might talk about this a bit later, but we have a highly technical IT team and I’ve deliberately built it that way. So, I think those two and other things as well, it gave us a bit of agility and speed built in. But looking back over that time, almost the first thing we did was moving the entire of the IT organisation into a daily planning cycle. Which is familiar I suppose for all that development, agile framework thing, but that’d be less familiar for a more rigid, service-based, organisational, the service-based part of our organisation. So, we quickly got into that daily planning cycle.

One of the things we did was develop a set of assumptions that were quite cautious. I’d been following the news quite carefully. We have a football club in China (Sichuan Jiuniu), so professionally we have an interest in what’s going on out there as many people do, but also following the news quite carefully of what happened over the December, January timeframe. I was developing a set of assumptions that were deliberately cautious, like if we close the office, we will be closed for three months rather than say, “Well, we’ll close on a Wednesday, we’ll open again on Friday.” And that enabled everyone to start planning with some certainty ahead of those announcements, so in our planning we were probably two or three weeks ahead of where the country was.

We did move very quickly, but we tried to be quite organised and systematic about it. We’ve tried to hold this the whole way through the pandemic period, really. For example, in the very first days we were working out how to move hardware from the office to people’s homes; very quickly after that, we were trying to work out how to issue medical questionnaires, manage site access. But in all of those, we tried to do it systematically, as in develop systems, even if they were quite rough initially, but just to say, “Let’s capture all the information, let’s put things through proper approvals, let’s keep good records, let’s develop new IT systems if we need to.”

So, we appointed the development teams that were put a couple of weeks away from their tasks towards developing systems to manage COVID. I think that’s really stood us in quite good stead, and I think, at least I hope I’m right in saying that I think technology as a team within the company has strengthened our reputation through the pandemic. And I think we’ve had good support from our colleagues, and we’ve supported them well in helping manage things in a professional way.

5. And were there any other ways in which you have continued to adapt and continued to be adaptable to the changing demands throughout the last year or so?

(13:23) Yes, I think we’ve had to do that. Probably every few weeks, or maybe at least every three months or so, we’ve had to reset the methodology of how we’re working and how we’re approaching things, because I think there have been periods of rapid change. If we think back to March and April last year, things were changing every day.

Similarly, when we started to open back up again and started for the first-time doing things like staging matches behind closed doors, that was a tremendous learning experience. Then again with the second lockdown, there’ve been these periods of time where things have changed very rapidly. There’ve also been periods of times which have been a bit more stable. So, what I’ve tried to do is try and look every few weeks, heads up, where are we, how are we working?

There’s also been a very company-wide effort which has been very successful to really be very conscious always about what our key risks are, work through those, re-evaluate them. Those risks, obviously a lot of those are enterprise-level, club-level, but they’re also technology-level. So continually looking at, where are our risks now, which ones are likely to manifest themselves, have we got the right mitigations in place? That forces, I think, a continuous re-evaluation of what we’re doing and perhaps it sounds, I suppose, rather simplistic to say that’s what we’ve done but that is how we’ve worked, and so far, I think it’s stood us in quite good stead.

6. What do you think are the top tech challenges that will impact the future world of work and how can tech leaders and their teams work to overcome these?

(15:14) That is a great question. Knowing that I was coming on here, I asked my team that question. So, I internally sent out a little message to everyone in my team and said, “What do they think?” and I got a load of good answers back. There were three big themes that dominated in terms of these future challenges for technology. There was information security, InfoSec, cybersecurity, nd that whole area, the second one was integration and integrated world of work and integration within the company and beyond and then the third one was talent, which is probably a subject that is quite close to your heart at Hays.

So, just looking at each one of those things briefly, on InfoSec, every IT professional is basically now an information security professional to some extent or other. There isn’t anyone in my team or I’d argue in any IT organisation anywhere that doesn’t have a role to play in thinking about InfoSec. We see these new attack vectors all the time. There’s been a lot of news recently just in the last days before recording this about attacks on SolarWinds and other key infrastructure.

The pandemic, as we’ve discussed, it’s seen as temporary at least and stopped office space working, so the absolute end of the idea of a network point and a firewall that everyone’s working behind. So, securing accounts, securing devices, securing data, securing identities, operating security operations at large scale, I think that is a theme and a challenge that will culminate for a generation for sure, if not beyond.

I think the second one I mentioned was integration, so as departments and teams and organisations are working in this much more dispersed way, the demand for integration and integrated solutions is just increasing all the time. Then for tech leaders, getting the balance right between speed and agility and allowing things to move in perhaps a less integrated way, but also maintaining all those key integration points so that data can always flow in the right way that go back to security, things are secured properly, that business processes work properly. I think that’s a key balancing act for tech teams and for tech leaders. It also drives the need for really, top collaboration tools, top discipline around collaboration, good discipline around IT resource management, project management and all those things speak to the need to deliver integration for our colleagues.

Then the third one was talent. I probably ought to ask you about that as much as you could ask me, but there is a shortage of IT talent and there will continue to be. I think there are some priority pockets within that, particularly around cybersecurity, information security. So yes, there is obviously competition, or a ‘war for talent’ people call it. That’s one thing, but I think there is a wider need for the technology industry to promote talent, to promote technology education in schools and universities. My children have just been through A Levels and GCSEs. Getting more people studying computer science at that level, painting exciting pictures of this industry, expanding talent pools, working on diversity and inclusion across the industry because it’s still nowhere near where it needs to be, making these roles accessible. Yes, I think this is going to be, again, a generational challenge for the industry in the UK and beyond.

7. What have you learned about yourself both personally and professionally over the course of the crisis so far?

(19:20) That is a good question. I turned fifty a few weeks ago in lockdown, which was a very nice day although a bit different from what I probably had in mind for my 50th birthday. I suppose it’s a bit hard to detach how you feel about yourself growing older from how you feel about having been living through these last 12 months, and in particular, I suppose parenting through these last 12 months. I think more than anything, it’s drawn out how connected we all are to each other and I think as a leader or as a colleague or as a parent or as a brother or child, it’s driven that greater connection with people’s personal situations.

I spend a lot of time talking to people about how they’re coping and what they’re going through. There’s been this just horrendous sense of personal loss and tragedy for many people, both friends and colleagues. I think that is all good in a way. We need to understand each other, we need to talk to each other. I think it’s good that we connect with each other. I have always enjoyed doing that. As a colleague, it probably took me a little bit of time in my career as I grew older to realise that people— Obviously everyone has different views on that, but generally it’s welcomed from colleagues to pay an interest. I try and pay an interest in how my team are doing and how everyone’s doing. I try to be open and honest about how I’m doing and some of the difficulties that we’ve had with home schooling and some of the practical difficulties with that.

8. For those who have perhaps just started out in their first tech leadership role, how would you recommend they make a strong initial impact?

(21:50) The first part of my answer is a bit glib, but I think it is nonetheless true, which is, find problems to solve. There are almost always in technology a bunch of problems that people want help solving. There may be new problems, there may be old ones, but I think it is easy— And I do see this from time to time in technology. It’s easy to sometimes get a little bit lost in the abstraction of what we’re trying to achieve. I think first and foremost, we deploy technology in business to help the business and it’s our colleagues that know what they want to achieve, be those marketing challenges, finance challenges. In our context, challenges with how we want to entertain fans in our stadium, or keep people safe, or win football games.

The job of technologists first and foremost is to go and find those problems and help solve them and help deliver success. That’s the first part. I think the flip side of that is that if that’s all one does, then I think that’s not a very good long-term route to success, because it’s also important to take time to try and root out what the underlying causes are that prevented success in the first place if you like. So, what’s holding things back? What are the root causes of that? I think it’s important for tech leaders, whether they’re in their first role or a later role, to be able to stand back and articulate what the challenges are and gain support for changing those.

There’s one example of that. I came into a previous role where there were a very large number of developers working on a product, but very slow progress in product development. We were months behind where we wanted to be. The person I’d taken over from, the previous incumbent, had left saying, “We’re not there because we need to add another twenty or thirty developers.” Wanted to increase and that had been rejected as an idea, or at least was very sceptical about that. And once we took a position a bit more detached from the problem, looked at what the problems actually were, you could see that the root causes were not going to be addressed by adding more developers and the root causes lay in the way the product was being managed, the way that the release process was being run and many other more deeper technical factors. Once we addressed those, and we did take some time to address those, we got an awful lot more done with fewer developers.

So, I think tech leaders need to be courageous enough not to accept received wisdom on what the problem is because often it’s not what people think it necessarily is. That can be quite uncomfortable, but if you’ve got an opportunity to lead in technology, yes, go find problems and solve them and be known as that person that does that, but also be the person that looks for, how do we do things better and where do we need to challenge things that are perhaps long-held views, and actually change those in order to be more successful in the future?

9. What advice would you give to any tech professional who one day aspires to work at the CTO level?

(25:18) I’d give anyone the same advice. Just keep on doing it. I suppose, as you get more senior in any function, let’s say— Doesn’t necessarily have to be technology, it could be finance, it could be HR, it could be marketing, it could be general management, it doesn’t really matter. I think as you get more senior, I think there are a whole raft of things that grow in importance. You’re managing bigger teams, you’re managing bigger budgets, you’re a part of the leadership of the company. So, all sorts of things become important.

But in terms of the success in managing and running technology, I’d go back to the same things I talked about. Make sure you’re focused on success through technology, solving problems, not overly focused on rigidity of process but focused on, what does it take to be successful? But at the same time, just continually searching for, ferreting out and solving the blockers and the bottlenecks wherever they come. They’re sometimes technical but they’re sometimes attitudinal, and I think there’s no more important role for me as a tech leader than to try and make sure that the whole organisation can be successful with technology.

There’s no one path to doing that and I find my way of articulating those things, but I’m in contact with and learn from other CTOs right across this industry and others who do that brilliantly. So, make sure you’re solving problems but make sure you keep on looking at what it takes to be successful with tech.

10. Which soft and technical skills do you think IT teams will really need to thrive in the future?

(27:13) Well, again, IT has become such an enormous and diverse profession in any number of ways of thriving within it. There’s any number of niches, one can go one’s whole career being a specialist in a particular type of technology or a particular type of program language and never doing anything other than that, or one can perhaps plough up further a bit more like I have done, which is being a bit more of a generalist across all sorts of technology. I was more in the applications world at the beginning of my career, then moved more into the data and analytics, and latterly perhaps being more focused on infrastructure and information security.

I suppose a couple of general comments to make, I think organisations or IT organisations must be technical. I know that sounds slightly like a statement of the obvious, but I think there was a period of time maybe going back a decade or so and I still think I hear this talked about from time-to-time, that in-house IT can just run on service management, vendor selection, project management, and it’s all about finding the right vendors, managing them well and managing them to SLAs, and that’s how to deliver IT. I don’t believe that to be the case. I don’t think that delivers successful IT outcomes. I think in-house technical teams or IT teams at companies must be technical, must understand the technology that they’re dealing with, understand how to learn it, manage it, implement it, develop it. I think that’s important.

Then I think the second thing are that all the old received wisdoms about what’s important in management generally are just as important in IT, whether that’s ability to communicate, ability to lead, ability to be adaptable; IT teams need those skills. I think you’ve talked about them as soft skills, but they’re completely critical. It is possible for highly technical functions to get a bit detached from more nuanced side of business conversations sometimes because with the world that we’re dealing in technology, it can be quite binary. We have an application with a million lines of code, they all must be right because if one line in the million is wrong, the application may not work. That requires a certain mindset, but not everyone that we work with must come at it from the same mindset, it can come from the more creative side of things. We all must find ways of talking to each other and working with each other, and IT teams need those skills just as much if not more than other teams in the business.

I would say, just to finish up, I think some of the great deal in fact of the talent that’s coming through now at graduate level and beyond first job changes is just phenomenal. The range and breadth of the talent, people that have been dealing with high-end computing tasks since they were seven, eight, nine years old and learned through a series of facilities and opportunities that my generation never had is just amazing. So, I have no doubt that that generation is going to be just supremely successful in technology exportation and leadership.

11. What do you think are the three qualities that make a good leader and crucially, do you think these qualities have changed because of the pandemic?

(31:02) Well, I think the second question in some ways is easier than the first. I don’t think they’ve changed because of the pandemic. So, I’ll pick my three. I’m sure there were another thirty qualities that other people could have picked that would be just as good as the ones that I’ll pick, but I think leadership is quite timeless in a way. The three that I’ve picked are authenticity, communication, and tolerance.

So, authenticity, because I think there are many ways to be a leader, but there’s only one way of being you. Quite some time ago now, back at Unilever, I did a fair bit of management development around the concept of authentic leadership and True North, and I found that to be a very good way of thinking about leadership.

The second one, communication. So, leadership always involves explaining ideas and often explaining them again and again and taking on board feedback and nuances and then recycling those ideas into other conversations. I think the ability to listen and understand and then explain ideas is just an absolutely critical part of being a leader because it’s just the ideas and the currency of what we deal in, and being able to explain that and carry people with you and listen to what you’re being told is absolutely critical.

Then tolerance, maybe that does in a way link a little bit into the pandemic. I think teams are necessarily, particularly when you get to enterprise level, large and complex things made up of human beings and we are all as human beings’ complex people. Organisations are made up of large numbers of teams, so they are exponentially complex. So, these are places that to survive and thrive in larger organisations, you have to have a degree of tolerance for different outcomes, different ways of doing things, you have to be able to learn from all of that. I think if you’re too rigid about the way in which you think things must happen, it inhibits success in larger organisations. So, I think people look for tolerance in their leaders and they look for people that can flex when they need to. I think good leaders do that whilst sticking true to values, and that goes back to the authenticity point. Value-based leadership is phenomenally important, but nonetheless, you have to be able to listen and adapt and go with quite a different range of circumstances in order to achieve success and to be seen as a good leader, I would say.

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